The Benefits of A Just War, Justly Fought

The Church's Audacious Moral Catechesis of Caesar

Jun 02, 2025

Ukraine Strikes Back at Russia

Based on media reports, Ukraine’s recent drone attacks on military bases in Russia were a military success. Ukraine did a great deal of damage to Russia's ability to continue its unjust invasion of Ukraine. The Wall Street Journal reports that “Ukraine’s unprecedented drone strikes on Russian air force bases weaken Moscow’s ability to wage war on its smaller neighbor.” It also undermined Russia’s “capacity to threaten more distant rivals such as the U.S.—a shift with potentially far-reaching geostrategic implications.” Whether this means a safer world or not remains to be seen. It does, however, bolster the argument that (as in our personal lives) nations that do good can also do well.

Ukraine’s attack also illustrates for us the two principles of Christian and secular just war doctrines. Moreover, it illustrates the catholic nature of virtue. We will first examine what it means to fight a just war before going on to discuss virtue more generally. This, in turn, will help us understand the just war tradition not as a positive justification for war but as a limitation on the State’s exercise of power outside and so inside its borders.

A Just War, Justly Fought

Jus ad bellum (the right to go to war). There are several requirements for a just war: just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, last resort, reasonable chance of success, and proportionality. Meeting these standards allows a nation to go to war, but does not require that they do so. In other words, even when the conditions are met, peace is still preferable.

Jus in bello (right conduct during war). While a war might be just, this does not give a nation the right to wage war without moral limits. A just war must be fought justly. Thus, when a state goes to war, it must discriminate between combatants and non-combatants, proportionally use force, and avoid inflicting unnecessary suffering either directly or indirectly.1

The Virtuous Nation and the Common Good

Doing well by doing good means taking seriously the demands of the former. As the care and planning that went into Ukraine’s strike illustrate, doing good requires effort. Rarely is it sufficient to do the first good thing that comes to mind. Acting in a manner that is not only personally virtuous but morally fruitful for others requires intellectual effort.

The broader geopolitical implications of Ukraine’s attack on Russia also bring to our attention that adhering to the demands of the moral law (“doing good”) can bring benefits (“doing well”) to Ukraine and the common good. Again, while it is still early days, an economically and now militarily weakened revanchist Russia is a good thing for Ukraine, Europe, the US, and the rest of the world. A just response brings benefits beyond (e.g., peace and security) those gained by the nation defending itself.

Put slightly differently, not every morally good thing I can do is necessarily for the common good. Indeed, as the late Greek Orthodox ethicist Christos Yannaras argues, the pursuit of individual virtue can—and often does—undermine the common good. Writing on the ecclesial nature asceticism, he says that

Christian asceticism is ... an ecclesial and not an individual matter. It is the changing of our nature’s individual mode of existence into a personal communion and relationship, a dynamic entry into the community of the life of the body of the Church. The aim of asceticism is to transfigure our impersonal natural desires and needs into manifestations of the free personal will which brings into being the true life of love.

For example, our “instinctive need for food” can simply serve “the greed for the individual’s independent self-preservation.” Fasting transfigures this instinct by submitting it " to the common practice of the Church” and “turning it into an act of relationship and communion.”

Ascetical Limitations on Casaer

…the just war tradition is an act of asceticism. What is transfigured—or at least curtailed—is not any “shared will” of the nation but the personal will and ambitions of political leaders.

Asceticism does nor seek "to subjugate matter to the spirit.” Nor does it divide life “into ‘clean’ and ‘unclean.’” Rather by our asceticism we work to make life no more a series of disjointed, “autonomous act[s].” Instead we strive by grace and our own freedom to live in “obedience to the common will and common practice of the Church, ... subjugat[ing] ... individual preferences to the Church.” Such “obedience freely given always presupposes love: it is always an act of communion.”2

Likewise, the just war tradition is an act of asceticism. What is transfigured—or at least curtailed—is not any “shared will” of the nation but the personal will and ambitions of political leaders. The demands of the just war tradition have as their object the transformation of Caesar from an individual to a person who acts “on behalf of all and for all,” even in the face of the enemies of the nation. It is through Casaer’s personal asceticism—or better, self-emptying (kenosis) — that the regime in the person of the nation is brought into greater conformity to the Gospel.

In a fallen world, Casaer can pursue his greedy desires under the cover of serving the nation. Anthropologically, the Christian moral tradition embraces (at least implicitly) the conditions for a just war, justly fought, in the service not of preventing war as such but to impose limits on the Casaer’s desire to exploit his people. Making war is only the most dramatic of which he can bend the nation to the service of his greed or pride. Less dramatically, it can also be laws that unjustly curtail any of a range of political, economic, or religious freedoms.

To put the matter bluntly, a nation that abandons its adherence to the notion of a just war, justly fought, does so at the expense of freeing Caesar to do as he pleases. This may or may not include engaging in unjust wars. But it certainly will include Casaer seeing himself not as the servant of his people but them as his. With evangelical audacity and confidence in the Gospel of her Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ, the Church proposes moral limits on the Casaer’s power to make war not because war is evil (though it is) but because a prince who know no limits is a very bad thing for the nation and the whole of humanity.

A Just War, Justly Fought

A State that refuses to meet its obligations to defend its people from unjust foreign aggression will inevitably turn against them. Likewise, a government that does not acknowledge any moral limits on how it treats other nations, will not accept any on how it treats the men, women, and children who live within its borders and who are subject to its laws.

What I am getting at is this.

The just war tradition is part of a larger tapestry of moral teaching on the nature and limits of civil authority. Though often highly technical, this conversation is an essential part of the evangelical mission of the Church. In both its positive and negative modes (that is, what must be done and what may not be done), the Church engages in a moral catechesis of the limits and obligations of both civil and ecclesiastical government. At the same time, it is instructing both its own faithful and its neighbors what it means to be a member of the Church and a virtuous citizen of the nation.

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