In this paper, I explore how Christian moral teaching properly shapes deliberation and decision-making in the very interstices of war—the face-to-face violence between small units in the context of urban combat. I will focus throughout on one junior officer in one combat setting in one war—on how a young Marine lieutenant aspired to comply with the requirement that, as Nigel Biggar says, love of neighbor must “qualify” the way combatants use military violence. In so doing, I support one of Biggar’s more controversial claims, viz., that Christian love, robustly understood, can “walk the battlefield”—although love need not tread exactly as Biggar recommends. I will thereafter briefly reflect on the role that religious faith properly plays in the professional decisions of officers who serve in the military of a liberal democracy. I conclude by noting some implications of my discussion for how we best think about the relation between religion and war more generally.

John Rawls’s articulation of what makes for justice in war includes one of his most interesting, yet least discussed, assessments of religion and state coercion. Rawls claims that “the duties of the statesman in political liberalism” are incompatible with adherence to “the Catholic doctrine of double effect” when that doctrine precludes the deliberate targeting of innocent and harmless human beings in a “supreme emergency.” I explicate Rawls’s argument in favor of that claim, articulate various theological objections, and assess some proposed restrictions on the justificatory role of religious reasons in the light of that disagreement.

The public culture of liberal democracies like the United States include a number of ‘platitudes’ about the proper political role of religion. One of those platitudes has to do with the relation between religion and war, viz., that ‘mixing’ religion and war leads to moral horror. When combatants are motivated to fight by their religious faith, when political communities construe violent military conflict in religious terms, when ‘religion’ intrudes upon ‘war,’ we can expect only moral atrocity. Hence the familiar parade of horribles: the Crusades, the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, 9/11. I am skeptical: the religious is internally complex; war is as well; we should not expect the proper relations between religion and war to be regulated by simplistic claims decrying any influence of religion on war; nor should we expect the truth about religion and war to be accurately characterized by a narrative depicting a series of religiously motivated atrocities. My skepticism in this respect is grounded on a whole host of historical, philosophical, sociological, and theological considerations. Articulating those considerations would take a tome. In lieu of that more substantial treatment, I want to provide initial grounds for skepticism by reflecting on a particular case, one that I lay out in some detail. I think that reflection on that one case indicates just how subtly, and yet consequentially, the religious can relate to the martial. I hope that it also provides some indication – though hardly a demonstration! – that we have excellent reason to abandon familiar prejudicial platitudes about religion and war. We should at least be far more careful in our formulations than many are.

The last several decades have witnessed a vibrant discussion about the proper political role of religion in pluralistic liberal democracies. An important part of that discussion has been a dispute about the role that religious and secular reasons properly play in the justification of state coercion. As I understand it, the standard view advocated by the members of that pantheon, and by many others as well, includes the following two claims, namely, that religious reasons cannot play a decisive role in justifying state coercion and that citizens and public officials in a liberal polity should not endorse state coercion that requires decisive religious support. I am skeptical about the standard view's restrictions on religious reasons as a class - restrictions that apply to any and all religious considerations, to religious reasons as such. My main aim in this paper is to motivate skepticism regarding the standard view. I will try to achieve this aim by reflecting on what I take to be the paradigmatic case of state coercion, namely, the use of military violence in war.

One of the most difficult holdings of the Just War Tradition is the claim that a polity can have a fully sufficient just cause to wage war and yet be morally forbidden to do so. The Just War Tradition's ad bellum proportionality requirement is supposed to capture that fundamental, difficult truth. According to that proportionality requirement, a community may wage war in response to a violation that satisfies the just cause requirement only if the relevant goods achieved by so responding are proportionate to the relevant evils caused thereby. My main aim in this paper is to engage recent work by Thomas Hurka regarding what makes certain goods and evils relevant to a proportionality assessment. A secondary aim is to specify the place of ad bellum proportionality assessments in the Just War Tradition's overall justificatory architecture. As it turns out, an adequate understanding of the justificatory role of ad bellum proportionality assessments helps to delimit what makes certain goods and evils relevant to such assessments.

Recent debates in political theory have seen political liberals advocate and defend a doctrine of restraint, according to which citizens may not rely solely on religious reasons when supporting their favored public policies. This debate notwithstanding, very rarely have social scientists assessed the extent to which citizens actually violate this doctrine. This article evaluates the “political decision-making” model of political liberalism. Data from a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults are used to test this model for legalization of same-sex marriage. Our analyses show that while only a very small percentage of U.S. support this policy solely on the basis of their religious convictions, roughly a quarter oppose it for religious reasons alone. Furthermore, we find that higher levels of religious service attendance and importance of religious faith as well as affiliation with evangelical and black Protestantism significantly increase the likelihood of same-sex marriage opposition entirely on religious grounds.

In this article, I intend to explore the normative relation(s) between “God” and “war.” A bit more precisely, I intend to explore the normative relevance of theistic conviction to the proper employment of military violence. Even more precisely, I intend to explore the relevance of theistic conviction to the proper employment of military violence as judged by the so-called Just War Tradition (JWT). Properly interpreted, I take the JWT to provide the best available account of the morality of war. The JWT is not perfect and is bedeviled by serious problems, but it is the best available nonetheless. So, when I reflect on the morality of war, and thus on the normative relation(s) between religion and war, I do so from the perspective of the JWT.Now this might seem to portend a very brief discussion. As we will see in detail, contemporary adherents typically construe the JWT in resolutely secular terms. Perhaps in order to compensate for its religious prehistory, most insist that the JWT has outgrown its religious provenance and may not be used to legitimate a crusade, ajihad, a holy war, or anything of the sort. In so doing, they align the JWT with the commonplace, endemic to contemporary liberal democracies, that religious wars and religious justifications for war lay far, far beyond the moral pale.

My aim in this paper is to reflect on a very narrow question: under what conditions might a cyber-attack provide a just cause for war? I begin by articulating what makes for a just cause, briefly address the problem of attribution, and then discuss three broad categories of cyber-attack: those that clearly do not satisfy the just cause requirement, those that clearly do satisfy the just cause requirement, and three ambiguous cases – the destruction of property, the emplacement of logic bombs, and the failure to prevent cyber-attacks. My conclusions are exploratory and suggestive rather than definitive, partly by virtue of the extreme paucity of literature on the moral assessment of cyberwar. Keywords: Cyberwarjust causejust war traditionattributionlogic bombJoel BrennerRichard Clarke Notes 1. This is a question that Bradley Strawser (Citation2012) most ably addressed in a paper recently given at the 2012 McCain Conference on the ethics of cyberwar. 2. I provide a much fuller account in an unpublished manuscript, God and War: An Exploration. I should note that implicit in my understanding of the just cause requirement is a conception of justice that has been worked out in considerable detail by Wolterstorff (Citation2010). 3. Many of its most prominent contemporary advocates take such a presumption to be an essential constituent of the JWT. Included in this number are particular theorists – James Childress, Rowan Williams, Robert B. Miller, and C. A. J. Coady – as well as institutional agents – most prominently, the US National Conference of Catholic Bishops. Some adherents of the JWT, notably James Turner Johnson (Citation2009: 250), have decried its inclusion into the JWT as ‘grievously wrong,’ practically misguided, and unfaithful to tradition. 4. … The Internet is one big masquerade ball. You can hide behind aliases, you can hide behind proxy servers, and you can surreptitiously enslave other computers to do your dirty work. This is a cruel irony: If you want to shield your identity as you go about your business, it's extremely difficult. But if you want to hide your identity in order to attack a person or institution, it's unnervingly easy. (Brenner Citation2011: 32) On the problem of attribution generally, see Dipert (Citation2010). 5. In a recent address, Secretary of State Leon Panetta (2012) informs us that the US government has ‘made significant investments in forensics to address th[e] problem of attribution’ and that ‘[p]otential aggressors should be aware that the United States has the capacity to locate them and to hold them accountable for their actions that may try to harm America’. 6. Of course, there is always the possibility that the perpetrator of an otherwise unattributable cyber-attack admits to having done so, as the US government has admitted to having attacked Iran with the Stuxnet virus (Stunext Was Work of US and Israeli Experts, Officials Say, Washington Post, 1 June 2012). So long as that claim of responsibility is credible, the problem of attribution effectively evaporates. 7. Distributed denial of service “attacks,” extraction or modification of information, website vandalism, as well as insertion of malicious code designed to damage, or destroy, data and systems, are all referred to as “cyber attack” or even “cyber warfare” regardless of whether these activities result in death, destruction of property, or merely the loss of information. Intrusions and other activity conducted by disgruntled employees, teen-age hackers, and criminals, are typically not distinguished from those by terrorists or foreign intelligence and military personnel. (Huntley Citation2010: 4) 8. Note that I am not claiming that the DDoS attacks on Estonia provided a just cause but that a military response would have been disproportionate. Rather, I deny that those wrongful attacks were sufficiently weighty as to provide a just cause for war. Bluntly put, the DDoS attacks on Estonia were similar in one morally relevant respect to the ‘insult to Russian honor’ that putatively provided the Russians with just cause to launch the DDoS attacks: even if the destruction of the commemorative statue dishonored Russia, it was not even remotely a weighty enough violation to provide a just cause for war. Of course, if a cyber-attack does provide a just cause for war, it is possible that war is nevertheless impermissible – should a military response violate the JWT's ad bellum proportionality requirement. My thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this point. 9. It might seem that the DDoS attack on Estonia was similar in relevant respects to an unjust blockade; at least it had blockade-like economic consequences. A nation-state that is targeted by a blockade might very well take itself to have a just cause for war. Consequently, a nation-state that is targeted by a DDoS attack, like that directed against Estonia, might very well take itself to have a just cause for war – as did some Estonians. But I doubt that the DDoS attack against Estonia was relevantly similar to the imposition of an unjust blockade. Indeed, it seems to have far more in common with the wrongful imposition of sanctions than with a blockade. Most pertinently, although blockades, sanctions, and DDoS attacks inflict economic harm, only blockades inflict economic harm by threatening lethal military violence. Sanctions and DDoS attacks inflict economic harm absent any lethal violence, threatened or otherwise. Plausibly, unjust DDoS attacks have roughly the same moral status as the imposition of unjust sanctions – so long as they inflict comparable economic harm. Given that the imposition of sanctions does not by itself provide a just cause for war, it is plausible to suppose that DDoS attacks on Estonia cannot by themselves satisfy the just cause requirement. My thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this point. 10. There are many important moral questions raised by these kinds of ‘communal conflicts short of war.’ So far as I am concerned they lie beyond the purview of the JWT and – even more so – far beyond the scope of this paper. 11. Iran might have responded to the Stuxnet virus with malware of its own – the so-called ‘Sharoom’ virus ‘virtually destroyed’ some 30,000 computers owned by the Saudi Arabian Oil Company Aramco (Panetta Citation2012). If Sharoom was a response to Stuxnet, then it was almost certainly impermissible, as it failed to target any party to the Stuxnet attack. Nevertheless, if the Stuxnet attack was unjust, and if the Sharoom virus had been directed at Stuxnet's actual perpetrator(s), it might very well have been a morally permissible response. The destruction of 30,000 computers seems an entirely apt response to the unjust destruction of nuclear centrifuges. 12. The kind of threat inflation committed by the Estonian Speaker is, in my experience, exceedingly common in the ever-proliferating discussions of cyberwar in the media. So, for example, a news commentator responded to Secretary of State Panetta's (Citation2012) recent warning about an impending cyber ‘Pearl Harbor’ by insisting that the United States had already committed a ‘Pearl Harbor’ of its own – the deployment of the Stuxnet virus to destroy Iranian centrifuges. But this assessment of the Stuxnet virus is morally obtuse – the two attacks have vastly differential normative weight – with respect both to their immediate destructiveness and to the plans they helped to enact. 13. Richard Clarke: ‘As one pilot told me, “Aircraft these days, whether it's the F-22 Raptor or the Boeing 787 … all they are is a bunch of software that happens to be flying through the air. Mess with the software and it stops flying through the air”’ (Clarke & Knake Citation2010: 174). 14. My sense is that those most concerned about the dangers of cyberwar have their eye on future attacks made possible by ever-increasing dependence on software, and are more than willing to admit that the cyber-attacks that have actually been carried out have had comparatively mild consequences. See Clarke & Knake (Citation2010: 32). 15. As Randall Dipert (2010) has noted, a cyber-attack can also impede technology from performing its designated function. 16. I rely on the account provided in David Sanger (2012: 188ff). 17. What then of the Stuxnet virus? Because no human being was killed, because there is no indication whatsoever that the damage caused by the Stuxnet virus is in any way a prelude to the future killing of innocents, because the destruction inflicted by the Stuxnet virus was, and looks to be, merely economic, that cyber-attack provides the Iranians with no just cause for war. As I noted above, however, it might provide ‘just cause’ for retaliatory measures short of war. 18. A comparable point applies to the purchase of compromised hardware, as discussed by Randall Dipert in his essay in this issue of Journal of Military Ethics. 19. Apparently, ‘patriotic hackers’ from the United States launched DDoS attacks on Iranian government websites in order to ‘thwart their ability to spread lies and propaganda’ (Morozov Citation2011: 227).

In this paper, I reflect on a number of issues raised in Kevin Carnahan's "Religion, and not just Religious Reasons, in the Public Square: A Consideration of Robert Audi's and Nicholas Wolterstorff's Religion in the Public Square" and Eric A. Anderson's "Religiously Conservative Citizens and the Ideal of Conscientious Engagement: A Comment on Wolterstorff and Eberle." In response to Carnahan, I argue that recent discussions of the proper public role of religious reason do not depend on an objectionable conception of religion. I also respond to Anderson's concern that my "ideal of conscientious engagement" is an insufficiently robust alternative to public reason liberalism.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsAudi, Robert. Democratic Authority and the Separation of Church and State.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. 192. $39.95 (cloth).Christopher J. EberleChristopher J. EberleUS Naval Academy Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 123, Number 4July 2013Symposium: David Gauthier’s Morals by Agreement Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/670932 Views: 59Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

My aim in the paper is to reflect on a very narrow question: under what conditions might a cyber attack provide a just cause for war? I begin by articulating what makes for a just cause, briefly address the problem of attribution, and then discuss three broad categories of cyberattck: those that clearly do not satisfy the just cause requirement, those that clearly do satisfy the just cause requirement, and three ambiguous cases -- the destruction of property, the emplacement of logic bombs, and the failure to prevent cyberattacks. My conclusions are exploratory and suggestive rather than definitive, partly by virtue of the extreme paucity of literature on the moral assessment of cyberwar.

Many political theorists have argued that religious reasons should play a rather limited role in public or political settings. So, for example, according to the Doctrine of Religious Restraint, citizens and legislators ought not allow religious reasons to play a decisive role in justifying public policies. Many military professionals seem to believe that some version of that doctrine applies in military settings, that is, that military professionals should not allow their religious convictions to determine how they exercise command authority. We explain why the Doctrine of Religious Restraint should not apply to military professionals and articulate an alternative understanding of the justificatory role legitimately played by religious considerations in military settings. This alternative understanding assumes that military professionals will exercise command authority with tact, wisdom, and due respect for both the spirit and letter of the law, even when they are guided by robust faith commitments.

Most contemporary advocates of the Just War Tradition (JWT) condemn religious war. If they are correct, waging war should be a secular affair, fully justifiable on non-religious grounds. This secularized understanding of the JWT draws on normative commitments that lead many political theorists to advocate in favor of a secularized politics in western liberal polities. As a matter of historical fact and contemporary commitment, many Muslims have rejected the secularized conception of the morality of war found in contemporary conceptions of the JWT. I argue that, given appropriate distinctions between relevantly different kinds of religious war, advocates of the JWT have excellent reason to rethink their antipathy to religious war. Specifically, I argue that distinct kinds of religious war can enjoy differential normative standing and that there is no compelling reason to believe that religiously justified wars must be waged in a morally improper manner, viz., in a way that violates the JWT's in bello requirements.

Most contemporary advocates of the Just War Tradition (JWT) condemn religious war. If they are correct, waging war should be a secular affair, fully justifiable on non-religious grounds. As a matter of historical fact and contemporary commitment, many Muslims have rejected the secularized conception of the morality of war at home in contemporary conceptions of the JWT. I argue that, given appropriate distinctions between relevantly different kinds of religious war, advocates of the JWT have excellent reason to rethink their antipathy to religious war.

We present two cases in which a Commanding Officer in the United States military relies on his religious convictions to determine whether to grant a subordinate's request to be granted leave to get an abortion. We use these cases to reflect on the proper role of religious conviction in the exercise of command authority. We argue that military professionalism does not require officers to refrain from relying on their religious convictions to make command decisions.

Contemporary formulations of the Just War Tradition are resolutely secular: they claim that religious considerations cannot decisively satisfy any of the conditions that specify what makes for a just war – just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, proportionality, and so on. Advocates articulate a number of arguments in favor of that claim – religiously justified wars are indiscriminate or unacceptably brutal, for example. But I argue that none of the arguments adduced in favor of a secular construal of the just war tradition are compelling.

The standard view of the relation between justified coercion and religion includes the following two claims, viz., that religious reasons cannot play a decisive role in justifying state coercion and that citizens and public officials in a liberal polity should not endorse state coercion that requires decisive religious support. The standard view is vulnerable to a number of serious objections. I articulate those objections by reflecting on the conception of justified coercion implicit in the so-called Just War Tradition.