Welcome back to the Fourth Wave podcast. Today, we are continuing our discussion of just war theory, taking a look at whether it is coherent or not. What issues are there? What inconsistencies can we see? And is Just War Theory really just some ultra idealistic, position to hold much like those who adhere to Just War theory often accuse the pacifist or Christian nonviolence position of being idealistic.

Before we we get into today's episode, I just want to note that this episode and the next few are being done outside of the normal conditions without the the microphone and sound backing that I normally have. So it might sound a little bit off. Please excuse the the sound quality if it's a little bit messed up. That being said, normal studio conditions for me is usually an Xbox headset and a stack of pillows and blankets to to give me good sound. So, you know, just using my regular iPhone mic and in a in a regular room might not really sound that much worse.

We'll see. Alright. So let's get into today's topic, which is going to be the third point of Just War Theory which is the idea of right intention or some might call it proportionality. Now in my mind, this issue bleeds together somewhat with our first issue which was that of just cause because in in right intention or proportionality, we have this idea that there are going to be clear objectives for for moving forward into into war. And and that to me sounds quite a bit similar to this idea of just cause.

So most of what I'm gonna focus on as we look at proportionality is going to be the the limitations of what we do in war. Before we do get into into our emphasis on limitations though, let me bring up what I think is the my main issue with proportionality in the in the sense of having clear objectives or right intention in the sense of having clear objectives. And this echoes from one of our previous episodes where we we talked about an issue being that it seems like people go to war not out of right intentions or out of solely right intentions but largely or at least half or partially out of self interest. And so while we might not really help out with troops in a Rwandan genocide, we'll help out in other countries like, let's say Iraq, if we think that there are some oil reserves there, or Syria if we're using Syria as a as a sort of proxy location for a proxy war with Russia or or other individuals that other nations that we are butting up against but don't want to face directly. So it seems like on this idea of right intention, what we see in war is almost always that there's never a war that is waged with with clear objectives from full right intention, but are always compromised by this idea of self interest because it's not really justice we care about, and we never care about justice alone, but only justice so far as it also helps us.

While I hear a lot of Christians saying, you know, was great we went to World War II because Japan bombed us or after nine eleven it was great that we went and fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, now those the the objectives there were largely vengeance or revenge, and okay, you could argue in in some cases that we were kind of preventing future attacks on our soil, although it seems like defensiveness is a lot different, like building up our defenses and and that sort of thing is quite a lot different than going and occupying countries like Afghanistan, and especially considering that that in those countries we may have been the cause of of their violence towards us in the first place and because we were in Afghanistan way before two thousands, we were there when we were using Afghanistan as a proxy ground for for fighting with Russia. So it seems like our objectives are often self interested and or at least there is a significant portion of of the objectives which are self interested even if it's not fully self interest and in our wars we tend to objectify other groups like in Afghanistan using their soldiers and their deaths for our advantage and in Syria and other places.

Alright. So let's let's move on into the limitations, the the issues that deal more with with the limitations of what we do in war. So one of my biggest issues with Just War Theory is that it's hard for me to recognize how it would prevent the idea of torture and that might not really be an issue for a lot of a lot of conservative Christians. You might think that torture is justified because if you're a consequentialist and you think that the ends justify the means even though you wouldn't say you do, then you would say what is is harming somebody, you know, what's the big deal about that if by harming somebody you can figure out where a bomb is and save a thousand lives, right? That's justified.

And in fact it seems like it's even more justified than killing somebody. So if I can save somebody's life by, you know, slicing them up, castrating them, searing them with a hot iron, poking their eyes out, cutting out their tongue, you know, anything short of death, It seems like taking a life is is the worst thing that you can do to somebody, so if I can torture somebody and get what I need from them to save lives, then that's even better than killing them. So it seems like torture, if you're gonna say that that murder or killing is fine in war and justified because you're trying to save lives and do a greatest good, then it seems like torture is certainly justified and I don't know how that's that's really avoidable on just war theory. But maybe you disagree with me, maybe you or maybe you say, yeah, sure, torture is justified but I don't see what the big deal is about that. Okay.

But I'm pretty sure you're gonna have a big issue with where that leads to if you accept torture because if you say that, well, torture is normally wrong but in a just where it's okay to save lives, killing is normally wrong but in a just war it's okay to save lives, then you're gonna have a hard time answering me how rape against males or females, by males or females, in war is not also justified. If you recognize how horrendous torture and killing are to God, but you say God's okay with those things as long as we're using them to save lives, then okay, you might recognize that marriage and sex are are intended to be between a male and a female who are married to each other, but you know, just as torture and killing are are gross and horrible in the normal world, but not in war, they're justified because there's a greater good involved, then why like in Abu Ghraib when when we had prisoners get in sexual positions with each other, and I'm sure throughout history we've had prisoners rape each other or we've had guards rape prisoners. Why is that a problem if it leads to a greater good, if you can save lives by doing that?

You know, the Christian retort might be like, well, if I was a Christian guard, I couldn't rape somebody because, you know, me getting pleasure out of, you know, and let's say there's there's a female combatant or whatever, me getting pleasure out of something would be a sin for me. Okay, but you could still have you could still have prisoners rape each other. That way you wouldn't be getting any pleasure out of it, but you'd have the the prisoners get pleasure out of it. And not to mention that getting pleasure out of out of something is also possible in the killing and torturing process. You have many, many accounts of soldiers who say that there's this euphoria that they felt after their first kill or even after subsequent kills, there's a euphoria that they get.

So even if you're gonna argue that you couldn't do something because you feel like you'd get pleasure out of it, then number one, you have to argue that there are a lot of people who shouldn't be killing in war and number two, you can't say that this discounts the use of rape at all just because you would get pleasure out of it. In that case, it's simply wrong for you and you need to avoid doing that. So if killing is justified, and especially then if torture is justified, I don't understand the moral rationale to argue that really there are any limits or many limits at all to the immorality we can do in warfare so long as it brings about some some greater good. If you can castrate somebody and waterboard somebody and put hot iron pokers on somebody and cut out somebody's tongue, then why not rape them? There's there's your moral line has disintegrated and you've you've excused violence and and it's gonna be hard for you to explain how you come up with an arbitrary line after that.

And that brings us into to something that we've discussed a couple times so far. That is if your justification for going to war is based on God's permissiveness towards war in the Old Testament, then why do you cast off the permissiveness of extreme societal judgment in this day and age? So if God allowed essentially young virgins to be taken as plunder by the Israelites, and if God commanded people to kill men, women, and children, and animals, and and all of that terrible stuff that went on, then if the Old Testament violence justifies your current use of violence because you say, well, God did this in the Old Testament, then how do you not bring on this idea of rape and massacre of of innocence and torture and and just gratuitous violence by sticking heads on pikes and all that kind of stuff? I know most Christians are are not gonna be okay. They would most conservative Christians will probably be okay with torture, but they would not be okay with rape.

Yet and they wouldn't be okay with mutilating bodies and flaunting them. They're disgusted when ISIS does that sort of thing. Yet, they they kind of cut in half their justification of warfare as they pull it from the Old Testament because they're willing to take some part of it but not others, and they recognize the abhorrence of these other ideas. And I just don't know how you can logically or biblically justify splitting splitting your your argument, your reasoning for being able to kill. Another issue I have with this idea of right intention or proportionality is that it seems like such such an idea rather than limit the violence done would actually encourage this idea of shock and awe of just extreme force because such extreme force and destruction can actually shorten the war and prevent future violence and reprisals.

If you decimate a country or the capital of a country, maybe not the whole country, take a look at the atomic bombs in World War two, if you just decimate with extreme force, it disheartens the population and it can end war. While you might kill a lot of people in a few days, in the long run, the argument goes, that you save many, many, many lives and isn't the greatest good what we're after? So shock and awe and extreme destruction and extreme force just seem like they should be justified. Yet a lot of times, Christians aren't for that. We recognize that that that's a problem and that undermines this step of proportionality and right intention.

The final issue that that I'm going to touch on here, Stanley Howarwas touches on it to a certain extent in some of his articles about the sacrifices of war, but it seems like this idea of right intention makes withdrawing troops extremely difficult because take a war like Vietnam where you had tens of thousands of soldiers and many many civilians who were basically invested into the war, right? Lives were lost, lives were paid in that war on both sides and lots of money that could have been spent towards other other wonderful things to help people were invested into the war and as the years went on, the investment grew and grew and grew. So in a sense, if you have a good cause, a right intention, a clear objective to go into the war in the first place, that objective, unless the other country changes positions, so long as each side still has the the same basic actions, the same basic policies and all that, the the investment in the war doesn't get any less, it actually grows with the lives spent and the money spent. And so if you're right to go into war, you're even more right ten years down the line with all of the investments that you have in there.

And that seems like withdraw is not a feasible option for Christians on just War Theory. In the end, I think this idea of right intention or proportionality falls just like the the other two points we mentioned so far, just cause and just authority, fall. It it doesn't hold up, it doesn't make sense, and at at most, it's idealistic and never attainable. But I think it's even worse than that. And when you're able to justify things like torture and rape and you're having to, to undermine your own Old Testament argument by being dismissive of of half of what it justifies, then you've got an incoherent position.

You've got an untenable, inconsistent position. I look forward to talking some more about the the next tenets of just war. We've got, I believe, two or three more to go. So looking forward to it, but peace for now. And because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.