Heeding Anscombe on just war doctrine

Elizabeth Anscombe’s “War and Murder” is a magnificent essay, an intellectually rigorous and morally serious defense of traditional Christian and natural law teaching against pacifists on the one side and, on the other, those who attempt to rationalize the unjust killing of civilians.  As she argues, both errors feed off of one another.  The essay is perhaps even more relevant today than it was at the time she wrote it.

Here is a summary of her position.  The pacifist holds that all killing is immoral, even when necessary to protect citizens against criminal evildoers within a nation, or foreign adversaries without.  This position is contrary to the basic precondition of any social order, which is the right to protect itself against attempts to destroy it.  It also has no warrant in the orthodox Christian tradition.  A less extreme but related error is the thesis that violence can never justly be initiated, but at most can only ever be justified in response to those who have initiated it.  In fact, Anscombe argues, what matters is not who strikes the first blow, but who is in the right.  For example, it was in her judgment right for the British to initiate violence in order to suppress chattel slavery.

That is one set of errors.  But another and opposite extreme error is to abuse the principle that war can sometimes be justifiable, in order to try to rationalize violence that is in fact unjust.  Indeed, this opposite extreme is, in Anscombe’s view, the more common error.  And it is more common in war than in police activity, because war affords more occasions for the evil of killing the innocent, and civilians in particular.  The principle of double effect is too often misapplied in attempts to rationalize such killing.

Having given a general description of these two sorts of error, Anscombe then goes on to examine each in more detail.  She suggests that in the early twentieth century, some were drawn to pacifism in part as an overreaction to universal conscription (which she regards as an evil).  But her main focus is on the theme that pacifism derives from a distortion of Christianity.  In part this has to do with a hostility to the ethos of the Old Testament, which she argues is widely misunderstood and widely and wrongly thought to be at odds with the New Testament.  But the New Testament too has been badly misunderstood.  For example, counsels to which only some are called (such as giving away one’s worldly goods) are sometimes misrepresented as precepts binding on all. 

“The truth about Christianity,” Anscombe says, “is that it is a severe and practicable religion, not a beautifully ideal but impracticable one” (p. 48).  But the distortions she describes have made Christianity seem to be an ideal but impracticable one.  And the attraction some Christians have for pacifism is an example.  Many Christians and non-Christians alike believe the falsehood that Christ calls us all to pacifism.  And because no society could survive if it practiced pacifism, many thus conclude that Christian morality is simply not practical.

Here, as Anscombe argues, is where pacifism inadvertently paves the way for those who rationalize the murder of the innocent.  Falsely supposing that all violence is evil and also noting that violence is necessary to preserve a society against evildoers, they take the short step to the conclusion that “committed to ‘compromise with evil,’ one must go the whole hog and wage war à outrance” (p. 48).  In other words, once we are convinced that we’re going to have to do evil anyway in order to protect society, there’s no limit to the evil we will rationalize as necessary to achieve this good end.  Unrealistic moralizing has as its sequel an amoral realpolitik, falsely presenting itself as the only alternative.

With Catholics, Anscombe says, this amorality masquerades as an application of the principle of double effect.  True, this principle can indeed in some cases justify actions that foreseeably risk harm to civilians, when that harm is not intended and when it is not out of proportion to the good to be achieved.  (For example, it can be justifiable to bomb an enemy military base even if one foresees, while not intending, that some civilians nearby could be killed as a result.)

The trouble, Anscombe says, is that people often play fast and loose with the notion of “intention” in order to abuse the principle of double effect.  For example, it would be sheer sophistry for an employee to say that when he helped his boss embezzle from the company, his “intention” was not really to assist in embezzlement, but only to avoid getting fired, so that the action could be justified by double effect.  Similarly, Anscombe argues, it is sophistry to pretend that the obliteration bombing of cities does not involve any intentional killing of civilians, but only the intention to end a war earlier.  Another sophistry involves interpreting what counts as a “combatant” very broadly, so as to try to justify attacks on the civilian population in general.  Anscombe also responds to various other attempts to rationalize violations of just war criteria.

That, again, is the argument in outline.  Here are some ways it is relevant today.  We have, on the one hand, some Catholics who appear at least to flirt with pacifism.  Pope Francis said things that implied that war could never be just and that traditional teaching on this matter needed to be rethought, though he also said things that pointed in the other direction.  As with other topics, his teaching on this matter was simply muddled rather than a clear departure from tradition.  But it was muddled in a way that gives aid and comfort to the first, pacifistic erroneous extreme identified by Anscombe.

On the other hand, we also have many who go to the opposite extreme criticized by Anscombe, of trying to rationalize unjust harm to civilian populations by abuse of the principle of double effect and related sophistries.  For example, this is the case with much of the commentary on Israel’s war in Gaza.  Israel certainly had the right and indeed the duty to retaliate for the diabolical Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, which killed almost 1,200 people.  But many seem to think that this gives Israel a blank check to do whatever it likes in Gaza, or at least whatever it likes short of deliberately targeting civilians. 

That is not the case.  Yes, traditional just war doctrine holds that it is always immoral deliberately to kill civilians.  But that is by no means all that it says on the matter.  It also holds that it is immoral deliberately to destroy civilian property and infrastructure, and thereby to make normal civilian life impossible.  To be sure, it holds too that it can, by the principle of double effect, sometimes be permissible to carry out military actions that put civilian lives and property at risk, where such risk is not intended but simply foreseen.  But it also holds that this harm must not be out of proportion to the good that one hopes to secure by way of such military action.

Throughout Gaza, however, civilian property and infrastructure have been largely destroyed, and ordinary life made impossible.  The resulting humanitarian crisis has been steadily worsening.  Casualty numbers in Gaza are hotly disputed, but they are undeniably high.  According to a recent report:

Almost 84,000 people died in Gaza between October 2023 and early January 2025 as a result of the Hamas-Israel war, estimates the first independent survey of deaths.  More than half of the people killed were women aged 18-64, children or people over 65, reports the study.

Suppose for the sake of argument that the true number is half of that, or even just one third of that.  That would still be extremely high.  Such loss of life, destruction of basic infrastructure, and making of ordinary civilian life impossible are out of proportion to the evil Israel is retaliating against.  And this is putting aside the awful conditions under which Gazans have been living for years, and the allegations of cases where civilians have been deliberately targeted during the current war.  These too are hotly disputed matters, but the point is that even if we don’t factor them in, Israeli action in Gaza seems clearly disproportionate and thus not justifiable by the principle of double effect. 

There is also the sophistry some commit of pretending that if a civilian sympathizes with Hamas, he is morally on a par with a combatant and may be treated as such.  And then there is the proposal some have made to dispossess the Gazans altogether, which would only add a further, massive layer of injustice.

None of this can facilitate a long-term solution to the Israel-Palestine problem, but will inevitably greatly inflame further already high hostility against Israel.  A commitment to preserving the basic preconditions of ordinary civilian life for Israelis and Palestinians alike is both morally required by just war criteria, and a precondition to any workable modus vivendi.