Column Research Audio

Just War Theory

(22 Apr 2026: Just War Theory)

~ 10 to 12 minutes of audio

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I’m your host, Michael Alan Prestwood and this is the column research for the

Wednesday, April 22 2026 edition

of the TST Column.

This is the expanded story mode edition.

This is the last weekly TST Column. Starting May 1, the column moves to a monthly rhythm. I’ve kept the weekly pace up for several months, and I’m grateful for what it has produced, but it has also been exhausting. Writing a thoughtful column every week is one thing. Having the time to fully support it, share it, and let it live is another. More than that, the weekly pace has begun to pull time and energy away from the rest of my 30-series books, and those books matter deeply to me. They are the larger home for many of the ideas I most want to finish and share. So this change is not about doing less. It is about making each column stronger, while creating more room for the deeper work ahead. Thank you for being here with me.

Over the coming months, I’ll publish one more column in the Understanding Philosophy series, then begin the Understanding Ethics series. This column is the first in that new ethics arc, moved to the front because it felt timely. Trump’s war with Iran and his feud with Pope Leo XIV over war, peace, and Just War Theory suddenly made an old ethical question feel very current. Reuters covered the dispute in mid-April, and Vatican-linked coverage, along with the U.S. bishops, addressed the Just War issue directly. That also makes this a fitting follow-up to our recent columns on truth, belief, and confidence, because before we judge war, we first have to judge the claims, evidence, and authorities surrounding it

With that, let’s frame the key idea.

Just War Theory.

This week, we explore the idea of Just War Theory.

Just war theories use situational ethics to place moral limits on war, avoid its worst horrors, and establish when war is justified.

Now for the 6 research tidbits. The goal, to blend intersections into wisdom.

Tidbits are the smallest working units of the Living Touchstone project — focused facts, stories, explanations, quotes, or timeline entries tied directly to evidence and sources.

The key ideas are available on the home page, but this story mode is the only place to get the “rest of the story.”

1.

History Story.

Augustine of Hippo.

born 354

Lived from 354 to 430 CE, aged about 76.

67 Generations Ago.

30 Philosophers, Chapter 15: Augustine, Time, and War.
Saint Augustine of Hippo was born in 354 CE in Roman North Africa, in what is now Algeria. Raised by a Christian mother and a pagan father, he spent his early years exploring rival ideas before converting to Christianity and eventually becoming bishop of Hippo. Augustine matters because he stands at the crossroads of theology, philosophy, and lived human struggle. In 30 Philosophers, his chapter is framed around time, eternity, and war, which fits him well. He was not just a church thinker. He was a builder of moral and metaphysical structure, trying to reconcile human suffering, divine order, and the realities of life in a collapsing world.

Augustine’s Just War Theory is one of his most enduring contributions to situational ethics. He faced a hard question: if Christianity calls us toward love, peace, and neighborly duty, what do we do in a violent world where war still comes? Rather than take a total “just say no” stance against all war, Augustine chose a situational path. He argued that war might be justified under limited conditions, such as self-defense, right intent, legitimate authority, and the exhaustion of peaceful alternatives. He also argued that even when war begins, it must be morally restrained. Noncombatants should not be targeted, force should be proportional, and violence should be limited to what is necessary. In that sense, Augustine was trying to place a moral leash on one of humanity’s worst instincts.

Beyond war, Augustine’s reach was much wider. He is also remembered for his reflections on time, memory, eternity, sin, grace, and the restless nature of the human soul. His Confessions helped shape inward self-examination, and The City of God helped frame the tension between earthly politics and higher moral order. Even when people disagree with his theology, they still feel his influence. He helped define how the West would think about inner life, moral struggle, and the search for meaning for centuries to come.

My favorite Augustine quotes:

The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.
Right is right even if no one is doing it; wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it.
There is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future.

That History Story,

was first published on TST 4 years ago.

2.

Philosophy Quote.

“In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary.”.

Thomas Aquinas.
circa 1265.

Saint Augustine, born in 354, is widely cited as the author of Christian Just War Theory. This area of thought takes a look at situational ethics and tries to add temperance. Augustine looked at a violent world and refused the fantasy that moral people could always stay clean. He did not hand us a checklist. He handed us the wound. He made the tradition wrestle with a brutal question: if peace is the goal, what do we do when violence is already at the door? That is Augustine’s role in this story. He gave Just War thinking its grief, its caution, and its sense that even a necessary war is still a tragedy, not a triumph.

Many centuries later, around 1265, Thomas Aquinas clarifed his message:

“In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary.”

Aquinas, born about 1225, gave us moral clarity to war based on situational ethics. His famous three necessary conditions are proper authority, just cause, and right intent. In plain English, war cannot just be somebody’s anger with weapons. It cannot be private revenge. It cannot be conquest dressed up as virtue. It must be in defense and answer a real wrong. It must be declared by the proper authority, and aim at restoring justice or peace rather than feeding corruption, greed, or bloodlust.

I picture Aquinas in stone halls and candlelight, huge in mind, methodical, patient, almost architectural in the way he thought. A Dominican friar in the 13th century, he was not trying to be flashy. He was trying to build a structure strong enough to hold truth without collapsing into chaos. He gathered scripture, reason, Aristotle, law, and theology, then laid them out like a builder laying blocks. Augustine gave the tradition its moral storm. Aquinas gave it columns, beams, and load-bearing walls.

From there, Just War thinking spread far beyond medieval Christianity. Its descendants helped shape the broader moral grammar of war across the world, especially through international humanitarian law. The basic idea is simple but powerful: even war has limits. You do not target civilians. You do not torture prisoners. You do not take hostages. You do not humiliate detainees. You do not use force without restraint. Those rules exist to prevent the worst kinds of war crimes: attacks on civilians, cruel treatment, torture, degrading treatment, unlawful execution, intimidation, and abuse of prisoners. So even when modern nations no longer speak in Augustine’s or Aquinas’s language, they still live in the shadow of the same ancient effort to put a moral leash on organized violence.

That Philosophy Quote,

was first published on TST 2 months ago.

3.

Science FAQ.

Why do we overreact and escalate?.

Sometimes we overreact. A moment hits us wrong, we answer too strongly, something worse happens, and later, when the heat is gone, we feel the guilt. We replay it in our minds and think, I should have handled that better. That pattern is deeply human, and it has evolutionary roots. We evolved in a world where fast reactions often meant survival. And that means overreaction is not always a moral failure first. Sometimes it is an ancient survival system firing too hard, too fast, in a situation that did not truly require it.

In everyday life, both animals and humans often handle irritation fairly well. If you have cats, you have probably seen this. One wants to sleep, the other wants to play. The annoyed cat tolerates it for a bit, then finally smacks the other in the face a few times, walks off, and goes back to sleep. Problem handled. No grand war. Just a proportionate response that says, enough. Humans do this too. In this sense, proportion is natural too. Not every conflict becomes a crisis.

The real trouble starts with deeper threats, especially threats tied to survival, territory, or resources. Imagine a lion about to lose a fresh kill to a pack of hyenas. It has to make an instant fight or flight judgment. Flight means losing something valuable. Fight means risking injury. In that moment, nature often leans on bluffing before full decision. The lion growls, postures, bares its teeth, and makes itself look more dangerous than it may be ready to prove. Birds puff up. Snakes hiss. Mammals lunge without biting. Feathers rise, fur stands up, bodies widen, voices get louder. Bluffing is a kind of exaggerated warning meant to avoid the real fight. In that sense, the roots of overreaction may lie partly in this ancient survival strategy.

But bluffing is risky, because once both sides raise the stakes, the performance can become real. And when exaggerated force works, it teaches a dangerous lesson. The mind learns: this got me what I wanted. Over time, that can become habit. It can turn people into manipulators, narcissists, and bullies. In politics and war, it can create leaders who treat domination as strength and escaltion as strategy. What began in nature as a survival bluff can become, in human society, a pattern of needless escalation. The answer, a desire to make things better for all.

That Science FAQ,

was first published on TST 2 months ago.

4.

Philosophy FAQ.

How does TST Ethics handle the trolley problem?.

The traditional trolley problem asks a brutal question: if a runaway trolley will kill five strangers unless you pull a lever that redirects it toward one stranger, should you do it? In its classic form, it is a numbers problem wrapped in moral tension. Do you act and cause one death, or do nothing and allow five deaths? Is doing nothing the exact same decision as pulling a lever? The question is designed to force a conflict between outcome, responsibility, and personal conscience.

TST Ethics does not pretend this question has one neat universal answer. Nor does it flatten everything into one moral formula. Instead, it asks you to weigh good intent and good result together. It lets group ethics guide personal morality, but personal morality is the decider. Finally, TST Ethics does not pretend doing an act is the same as judging it, nor does it pretend hypotheticals can settle real acts.

Let’s break it down.

Good intentions alone are not enough if the outcome is disastrous, but good results also matter in ethical judgment. So answering a complex moral question like this has layers. The first layer to consider is group ethics versus personal morality. In TST Ethics, group ethics and personal morality are connected but not identical. Group ethics helps guide us toward shared standards, while personal morality directs the choice when a real person must act.

Group ethics guides, personal morality directs.

So let’s start by exploring this purely hypothetically within the group ethics layer. Clearly, killing one person is better than killing five. That is an easy group consensus to assume. The only other major variable in the hypothetical is whether group consensus treats letting something happen and doing something as equal. In a binary decision like this, it is logical to treat doing and not doing as ethically equivalent choices. In this thought experiment, group ethics points toward pulling the lever and choosing the lesser harm. A philosophical debate could dive deeper into those two guiding questions.

You now have some input, but since group ethics only guides, you still have a choice. Do you follow the group or not? This is where the question gets interesting. In a purely hypothetical case, TST guides you toward following group ethics unless you have a reason not to. That ambiguity is also part of the question.

Reality is never as neat as philosophy class. What if the one person is unaware and will certainly die, but the five people see the trolley coming and each has some chance to escape? What if the odds are unclear? What if the person on the side track is your child? TST Ethics reminds us that real decisions happen in messy reality, not sterile thought experiments.

In a philosophy class, the next discussion would usually shift to the footbridge case. There is a big difference between declaring that pulling a lever is morally equivalent to not pulling it and deciding whether to push a person off a bridge to stop the trolley. That is a different question. The footbridge case explores the contrast between direct personal force and the more abstract lever, helping expose the moral difference many people see between killing and letting die.

Finally, acting is not judging. TST separates acting ethically from judging ethical behavior afterward, because those are related questions, but they are not the same question. It also recognizes that there is a real difference between discussing ethics in a clean theoretical thought experiment and facing ethics in the mess of lived reality. Asking what someone ought to do in theory is one thing. Judging what they did afterward is another. TST Ethics makes room for that difference. A person may fail the cleaner group-ethics test and still remain understandable on the level of personal morality. So if someone chose to save their wife or child rather than five strangers, TST would not erase the cost of that decision, but it would also recognize the human reality behind it. The framework does not remove moral burden. It asks us to own it.

That Philosophy FAQ,

was first published on TST 3 months ago.

5.

Critical Thinking FAQ.

How do you prevent yourself from overreacting?.

Preventing yourself from overreacting is simple, at least in concept:

Focus on the outcome you actually want.

That means:

Train your mind to think about results before you act.

It really is that simple, even if hard for the hot tempered. You will not always succeed, I don’t. But that is the goal. In the heat of conflict, most of us start by justifying our intent. We tell ourselves why we are right or offended, and why the other person deserves what is coming. But after the moment passes, that is usually not what we judge. We judge the result. We look back and ask whether we made things better or worse. So the smarter move is to get there sooner. Shift from defending your feelings to asking what outcome you actually want.

That is hard because conflict narrows the mind. Anger, fear, and insult create urgency. Your body prepares for action before your better judgment fully arrives. That is ancient biology doing what it evolved to do. But modern life is full of conflicts that do not need maximum force.

The mechanics are simple, even if they are not easy. Stop. Breathe. Count to ten if you need to. Put a little space between the feeling and the action. Then ask yourself a better question:

What result will I be proud of later?

Over time, that habit can turn conflict from something that controls you into something you handle with proportion, dignity, and better results.

That Critical Thinking FAQ,

was first published on TST 2 months ago.

6.

History FAQ.

What is the history of ethical war?.

War ethics are almost as old as war itself. In the ancient world, people were already trying to separate acceptable violence from chaos. Among tribal societies, this often showed up as custom: feud rules, revenge limits, compensation, ritual declarations, or protections for kin and envoys. In the Greco-Roman world, the thinking became more explicit. Greeks debated honor, restraint, and what counted as a justified cause, while Romans developed ideas about lawful authority, formal declarations, and rules tied to civic duty and empire. Even then, the basic moral problem was already clear: if war happens, can it be limited?

In the East, China added a deeper layer of reflection. Thinkers like Confucius stressed order, duty, and humane conduct, while Sun Tzu treated war as something dangerous that should be handled with discipline, intelligence, and minimal waste. The ideal was not endless destruction, but swift success with the least disorder possible. Across parts of India, texts like the Mahabharata also wrestled with rules of battle, including concerns about timing, weapons, and conduct toward those no longer fighting. So in the East, just like in the West, war ethics grew from the same painful insight: conflict may be unavoidable at times, but cruelty does not have to be limitless.

Later, the medieval world sharpened these ideas. Augustine helped frame the idea that war might sometimes be tragic but morally necessary, and Aquinas gave clearer structure to what later became Just War Theory: proper authority, just cause, and right intent. Around the same broad era, Islamic legal and moral traditions also developed rules about proportionality, noncombatants, treaties, and restraint. Even Viking and Germanic societies, often remembered mainly for raiding, lived under honor cultures and legal traditions that tried to regulate violence through assemblies, compensation, oathkeeping, and limits on feud. The rules were uneven, often harsh, and not always followed, but the pattern is striking: again and again, societies tried to place moral fences around force.

That long history helped shape modern warfare today. The basic questions never disappeared: Who may start a war? For what reason? How far is too far? Over time, those old customs and philosophies fed into modern international law, military codes, and the laws of armed conflict. That is why countries today still talk about self-defense, proportional response, civilian immunity, prisoners of war, and war crimes. The language is more formal now, but the moral struggle is ancient. Ethical war has never meant good war. It has meant trying, however imperfectly, to stop war from becoming pure atrocity.

That History FAQ,

was first published on TST 2 months ago.

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The end.