Autonomous weapons are changing 1500 years of Catholic thinking on war
In the world of drone warfare, is ‘just’ even possible anymore?
The idea of a soldier sitting safely in a trailer in Nevada firing a $70K Hellfire missile from a drone at a Yemeni who fits a disposition matrix — and killing a few kids in the process—is morally problematic. But why? Well, disproportionate attacks that cause “collateral damage” are wrong. But how do we know?
The answer is the set of criteria we know as “just war” theory. The thinking is over 1500 years old and largely an invention of the Roman Catholic Church. For better or worse, it really hasn’t been radically modified since late antiquity. But that may be changing.
A recent conference at the Vatican might be shifting Church teaching from a sort of box-checking criteria used to differentiate “good” wars from “bad” ones to a radical framework that considers every war an ethical failure.
Obviously just war theory hasn’t always prevented unjust wars. And that’s actually a concern of the Vatican conference, officially called the conference for “Nonviolence and Just Peace.” What’s missing in just war theory, they argue, is a passionate attempt at peaceful resolutions to conflict. But the changing nature of war itself is just as important a reason for the conference.
Emerging technologies complicate traditional notions of wartime right and wrong. Autonomous Weapons Systems, for instance, are weapons currently in development that hunt and kill humans completely of their own accord. In that case, who is responsible when an algorithm-powered gun kills the wrong person? Who bears the moral weight? The manufacturer, the programmer or the government (or private contractor) employing the weapon? That’s a question that just war theory as it exists can’t answer.
The idea of just war is old, much older than Christianity. That seems obvious enough, considering both “war” and “justice” existed before Jesus Christ did as an historical figure. The things that we consider vital aspects of contemporary just war — just cause, just means, proportionality — are discussed in detail in the 8th century BCE Indian epic the Mahabharata. In the West, figures like the Roman statesman Cicero laid out sophisticated concepts of just war. In his collection of essays On Obligations, Cicero wrote, “…there are certain duties that we owe even to those who have wronged us. For there is a limit to retribution and to punishment.”
But the form of just war theory passed down to America and Europe was filtered through Christianity, specifically the Roman Catholic Church. St. Augustine of Hippo, a foundational Christian theologian, was the first to sketch out a Christian take. In fact, he was the first to coin the term “just war” in his book City of God. Implicit in the notion is that some wars are in fact justified, and that Christians are sometimes justified in waging them. Augustine writes, “They who have waged war in obedience to the divine command, or in conformity with His laws, have represented in their persons the public justice or the wisdom of government, and in this capacity have put to death wicked men; such persons have by no means violated the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’.”
It wouldn’t be until 900 years down the road that Thomas Aquinas, another major theologian, would explicitly lay out the criteria that constitute a just war. According to him:
1) wars can only be waged by a legitimate authority
2) wars should only be conducted for a good purpose, not for gain or as a show of power
3) even during the fighting, no matter how bad it gets, achieving peace should always be the central goal.
If these seem obvious to us now, that’s because the criteria have been transmitted to us down through the centuries as part of the cultural heritage of the West.
OK, so there’s this deep tradition of defining just war and there have been criteria set in place for a long, long time. Why would the Church want to change it now? The simple answer is because of how it’s been abused in the past and the ways that emerging technology will antiquate it in the near future.
Last week the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and Pax Christi International sponsored a conference at the Vatican to discuss a complete overhaul of the Church’s teaching on just war theory. In fact, they don’t even want it to be called “just war” anymore, but “just peace” instead. According to Terrence Ryne, the reason is that “[i]n recent decades…church leadership has realized that the just war theory is truncated and minimalist. It does not go far enough. Its focus is war, not peace. Even what it sets out to do — discriminate justified from unjustified wars — has been rendered null and void by the massive, indiscriminate violence of modern wars.”
In other words, it’s more often used as a cover for waging wars than as a tool to prevent them. Instead of a complex set of moral considerations, the idea as passed down from Aquinas has become an exercise in box-checking by those in power. It doesn’t promote peace, but gives leaders moral cover to perpetuate violence.
Ryne also says that modern wars — their scale and lethality — make a joke out of proportionality. This is a reference to so-called “collateral damage”, of course, but not only. The interconnectedness of people, groups and economies means that it’s harder and harder to isolate acts of violence.
It also means that it’s now possible, as the United States is doing, to maintain a sort of permanent wartime, in which a militarized posture is maintained globally at all times. War has become not a series of decisions made by individuals, but a complex systemic aspect of contemporary life.
And Autonomous Weapons Systems are a part of this new network of permanent war. Humans have always been engaged in a race to kill each other from greater and greater distance, but it was always a human letting the arrow slip, pulling the trigger or pressing the bomb release switch. Autonomous weapons would kill, and go on killing for possibly decades, without anything but the initial human input.
As Archbishop Ivan Jurkovič recently said before the United Nations Informal Expert Meeting on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems in Geneva, “Besides the fact that it leaves to a machine the decision of life or death of a human being, one of the dangers is that these weapons could lead to strategies diluting or concealing true responsibilities, inducing a total lack of accountability. Instead of contributing to the defense of peace, they are turning into a progressive incitement to war.”
The Vatican council on Nonviolence and Just Peace wants to upend conventional notions of good and bad wars with a vision of “just peace”, which would require developing “tools and capacities for nonviolent transformation of conflict.” And the first step towards that is the declaration that “…the Word of God…should never be used to justify violence, injustice or war.”
To reiterate, that’s huge. It flies in the face of the Catholic Church’s teachings about war going back to the time of the Roman Empire. Pope Francis supported the council, and in an approved statement the council called on the Pope to “share with the world an encyclical on nonviolence and Just Peace.” And he just might.
Sure, the Catholic Church changing the way it teaches theories of war isn’t going to, you know, end war. But without a complete rehauling of ethical responses to war, it’s possible that the reality of contemporary war gets so far ahead of us we lose a vocabulary to even criticize it. It’s fitting that the Catholic Church should take on a project of this scope, since it is after all an organization of 1.2 billion, with the reach and resources to influence not just policy, but culture itself.
