Elizabeth Anscombe helped to refine Catholic thinking about just war, arguing that a ‘just cause’ is not always enough to justify taking up arms. What would she say about Ukraine’s defensive war against Russia?
Pope Francis, in his encyclical Fratelli tutti, lamented that “war can easily be chosen by invoking all sorts of allegedly humanitarian, defensive or precautionary excuses, and even resorting to the manipulation of information. In recent decades, every single war has been ostensibly ‘justified’.” He argued that in the light of “the development of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and the enormous and growing possibilities offered by new technologies … it is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war’”.
This is not a new argument. Writing in 1961, the Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe considered the objection that the “old ‘conditions of a just war’ are irrelevant to the conditions of modern warfare”. In response, she pointed out that, even if the objection were relevant to a major war between the Great Powers, both of which possess weapons of mass destruction, these are not the only wars. In her essay “War and Murder” she asked: “Why is Finland so far free? At least in part because of the ‘posture of military preparedness’ which, considering the character of the country, would have made subjugating the Finns a difficult and unrewarding task”.
