Welcome back to the Fourth Wave podcast. This is going to be our conclusion of our Just War series, with the incoherence of Just War. And I actually have no script in front of me whatsoever right now, so I don't know exactly where this is gonna go, which could be a good thing or a bad thing. But I thought that it might be helpful for me to just off the cuff summarize and and bring together some of the major ideas that we we had here. So in summary, you have two guys, Augustine and Aquinas, who are largely responsible with advancing the idea of just war.

And even though they advanced ideas of just war, both of these guys had some significant reservations about how how certain violences were to be conducted. Augustine thought that violence could only be conducted by the state or or deemed appropriate by the state, and he did not think that it was possible for a Christian to actually do have self defense without going to war for the state. And this is because for Augustine, our passions, right, we our passions controlled us if we're defending our family or our own lives. And that couldn't be right because Jesus said that we always have to love even our enemies. And so to Augustine, he thought that that we could do violence in the capacity of the state, for the state, with love in our hearts, but not in self defense or defense of our possessions or loved ones because then we would not have love in our hearts.

And Aquinas kind of continued this idea but he justified the use of violence in self defense so long as our intent was not to kill somebody. And it seems hard for me to understand how on Augustine's point, we can still have love for somebody when we're trying to kill them and when our lives are in danger, even even, as an arm of the state. And for Aquinas, how we can still be shooting somebody or hacking somebody with, love in our hearts and not intending to hurt them. And that I I don't think that follows. We've talked about the double effect and some of the the faulty reasoning, faulty examples of double effect, and I think Aquinas fails to show how our means aren't problematic here, and don't fail the double effect test.

My favorite example to use comes from the Bible itself. You know, it seems like Aquinas' double effect is problematic in a similar way that is problematic in, I believe, first Kings 22. And there we see that that you've got two mothers who come before the king, and the one mother said, hey, look, we we killed and ate my son yesterday because we're both starving. And my neighbor said that today we'd kill her son and eat him, but now she's hiding him, and that's unjust. And you ask, well, if they kill a kid to save two families, that seems like, you're saving lots of lives.

Right? They don't really the mother doesn't really want to kill her kid but she needs to in order to save the most amount of lives. And so isn't that a good thing? And the double effect doesn't work there because even though the intent might be to save lives and the mother doesn't want to kill her child, the death of the child is an evil means used to accomplish something that would otherwise be good, the saving of many lives. Then I think when when Aquinas deals with the double effect in terms of hurting or killing an aggressor, I don't think your intent matters when the means are unloving towards the individual to whom you're you're using those means.

So after we dealt with the history of of Just War and looking at some of its major problems, we looked at all of the different the different tenets of just war theory that Aquinas and Augustine had as well as some of the the more recent additions. And we talked first, we looked at just cause because for Christians today, conservative Christians, this is the first point because what makes something right is whether or not we have a right cause. And we have to put this one first because if we don't then it's harder to excuse self defense and it's also harder to excuse things that we love and hold so dearly like our Revolutionary War. And the reason that or what Aquinas and Augustine had first would have been legitimate authority. If you don't have a legitimate authority, you cannot act in violence.

And if you do that, we lose some of our our abilities, especially with Augustine, our ability for self defense or defense of our families, and we lose the ability to call the Revolutionary War a just war and a good thing. And it makes July 4 a little bit more awkward. But we looked at problems with with just cause. We also looked at problems with legitimate authority. We took took a look at problems with right intention, having limitations in our violence and warfare.

And in those in those three things, some of the the big takeaways were that a lot of people use the violence of the Old Testament to justify things, to justify violence, but then they have a hard time explaining away how we don't carry over these other attributes that we see in the Old Testament that are regulated and allowed and even commanded, like the killing of women and children, innocent civilians, the rape or the the taking of virgins for wives from other countries, slavery, etcetera. And one of the things that was most problematic for me also is how do we how do we not legitimate things like torture? And if we legitimate torture, how do we not legitimate legitimize things like rape, using rape as a psychological tool? There's there's a very slippery slope, it doesn't seem more like a slope, it seems like a precipice where, when you take a step off, you go down and you go down fast and you go down all the way. And, the only way you avoid falling is if you you, remove the the law of gravity, which is what it seems like just where adherents like to do.

They they go into the realm of they leave the realm of reality and kind of make up their own universal laws so that they can keep the the things that they like about Just War Theory and make it sound good without going down the rabbit hole of where it actually leads. We continued from there and talked more about civilian safety. We we we talked about the problem of defining who a noncombatant is since everybody essentially participates in war at actions like blockades and dropping atomic bombs. Just all of these things that that are so problematic and how we end up having non combatants killed in far greater numbers than combatants in most of the wars that we have. Maybe even all of them.

I don't know the statistics on all of them. But at least all the ones that I've seen, non combatants, at least in the recent past, in the twentieth and twenty first century, non combatants usually have more deaths than combatants. We looked at the idea of Reasonable Success and how that's impossible in a nuclear era because if I'm unwilling to kill civilians indiscriminately, but I'm also unwilling to and which means I'm unwilling to use a nuclear weapon. Should I face nuclear aggressor, I have no chance of reasonable success because they'd be willing to use nuclear weapons while I wouldn't. Game over.

Reasonable success goes out the window for The United States with with most of the other powers that would be fighting. And and not not only that, but this is a consequentialist ethic. The ends justify the means. We lose the possibility of honor. We show double standard when we love war movies where people take last stands, where we talk about protecting your family, even though you know that that, the odds are are not in your favor, and how we love those those honorable sorts of things, but then we fail to employ them in just war, where we we refuse to help countries in need based on our chances of reasonable success but more on self interest.

And we just lose the ability to to call honorable things honorable and to to maintain this idea of self sacrifice that the Bible emphasizes so much. We talked about just peace as well. Or we talked about last resort and how it seems like Christ's last resort was loving self sacrifice. And when we have violence as a last resort, quote, a last resort, really isn't a last resort, but it's it stifles creativity. And finally, we looked at just peace and discovered that violence perpetuates violence and almost never do we end war with just peace.

I hope you found this series helpful. So that's all for now. Peace. And because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.