When Is War Justified? A Catholic Perspective | Prof. Joseph Capizzi

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 8 June 2022

⏱️ 46 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on March 22, 2022 at the University of Arizona. The slides for this talk can be found at https://tinyurl.com/2t8ptvdk. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Joseph E. Capizzi is Ordinary Professor of Moral Theology at the Catholic University of America. He teaches in the areas of social and political theology, with special interests in issues in peace and war, citizenship, political authority, and Augustinian theology. He has written, lectured, and published widely on just war theory, bioethics, the history of moral theology, and political liberalism. Dr. Capizzi is the Executive Director of the Institute for Human Ecology at Catholic University. He received his B.A. from the University of Virginia, his Masters in Theological Studies from Emory University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Notre Dame. He lives in Maryland with his wife and six children.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute.
0:03.4	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:11.6	So I'm just going to show some slides.
0:15.4	They're going to have some long quotes in some cases just to give you a taste of the Catholic tradition
0:20.8	on the question of the justification
0:23.4	of war. And I'm really just going to kind of talk rather casually about this and hope that we're
0:32.1	able to have a conversation. There are at least two ways to begin to approach thinking about what the just war account of
0:42.4	the use of force, the moral use of force is. And one of those ways is the one that perhaps
0:51.0	we're almost more familiar with. And that's to think of it in terms of a theory.
0:54.6	I'm going to resist that a little bit. Are you against thinking of it as a theory? And argue
1:02.1	instead that it's really a kind of way of thinking about politics. And that's how I'm going to
1:06.4	begin this talk. And then I'm going to focus towards the end of it a little bit on the more
1:10.9	casuistical question, like the question of like sort of more particular morality about,
1:16.3	is it okay sometimes to choose to kill people? Because that seems to be the question that war
1:21.5	is somewhat invested in and show you and discuss with you how the tradition has thought through that question.
1:29.9	Okay. All right. So this is what most of us think of as the just war thing, right? The just war theory. And
1:39.2	there's countless books on it at this point. There's nothing particularly Catholic about it. There are
1:47.7	plenty of people who write about it who have no interest in Catholicism or their interest in
1:53.8	Catholicism is in fact quite hostile to it. They are instead interested in this moral account of thinking through international
2:04.3	politics, international law questions, and a kind of action analysis with regard to the activity
2:15.2	that occurs in war. There is, for instance, a whole analytic philosophical
2:21.7	school of just war theory now under a guy named Jeff McMahon, who was a student of Peter Singer.
	...

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