This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.

For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.

I approach the question when it's more justified from a kind of different perspective than maybe is typical,

although what I'll be teaching you is certainly the Catholic view,

in my judgment at least. My approach to this is to begin by talking about questions of,

broader questions of governance, because I think too often the question about war and the Catholic

perspective focuses on a very narrow conception of the dust war approach as a kind of theory,

which I think actually turns out to be quite misleading. We all are aware of the theory. I'm sure all

of you are familiar with these categories. You've read them, we've read about them before,

you've heard about them. The first category, sometimes called the right to go to war, the Yus ad bellum, has these three criteria associated with the right authority, right intentionality or right intention and just cause.

And then there's a second category, the category of the Yusin Bello or the way that you should be fighting in the context of war. And that has two criteria of its own discrimination or called the principle of distinction in international law and proportionality. And the standard approach to these things, think of this as a kind of checklist.

You know, you go up and down the list, making sure that everything falls into accord with it and maybe do a kind of after the fact judgment of a conflict or, you know, a war.

Or you do a prior evaluation of a conflict or the war and make a determination about this.

But this is, I think, again, a kind of misleading way of understanding things.

And even the language, which I put in quotation marks, of just war or just war theory,

are themselves misleading. Just war can sometimes lead people to think,

there's a kind of convergence of the term with holy war,

right, that this is now a righteous war.

In a language of yos, which is the language from which

we get notions of right in the Christian tradition

suggests, you know, can suggest that notion of a kind of righteous

war. But again, I think this is misleading. I think the most important way to think about these things

...