In his recent encyclical
Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV devoted considerable attention to the possibility of justly waging war controlled by artificial intelligence (AI). He concluded that, confronted with militarized AI, “the just war theory is outdated.” The resistance to this conclusion was surprising, accusing Pope Leo of straying into matters political instead of staying in his theological lane.
Vice President JD Vance, in a Fox News interview, reacted to Pope Leo’s comments on America’s war with Iran. “It would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality… and let the President of the United States stick to dictating American public policy.” J. Daryl Charles agreed that the encyclical “advocates excessive regulation rather than… the Christian moral tradition as taught by the Church.” New York Times columnist Ross Douthat welcomed the observation of Yuval Levin that if the Pope wanted to constrain AI idolatry, it would take more than regulatory or distributive means. “Instead, the need,” Douthat believes, “is for philosophical argument and personal advice,” which presumably he found wanting in the encyclical.
Of course, Pope Leo was being political, but not in today’s party-political-power meaning of the term. Rather, he was speaking from a moral use of the term that goes back to Aristotle. At its center was the notion of the polis, the city-state in which humans find their ultimate good. In this sense, “political theory is continuous with ethics, for man is a political or social animal by nature.” It follows then from this appreciation of politics that “it is natural for humans to live in society, and to behave morally towards one another.” For Aristotle, politics is ethics, entailing the pursuit of virtue as the fulfillment of human nature within the communal dynamics of living in society.
Having accepted Aristotle’s ethical premise for the politicization or civilization (civitas/city) of humans as essential for moral development, Thomas Aquinas grounded it in the New Testament’s call for love of God merging with love of one’s neighbor. And since Aquinas, according to John Finnis, taught that “love of neighbor as oneself requires living with others in political community,” this means that love of neighbor as a mutual obligation was central to securing the common good. In addition, Finnis notes that “the wellbeing and right(s) of all, or almost all of us, are dependent on their being in place institutions of government and law of the relatively comprehensive kind we call ‘political’ and ‘state’”.
Earlier, a similar translation of secular to sacred occurred when St. Augustine of Hippo borrowed heavily from Cicero’s requirements for warfare. For Cicero, while warfare is a right, exercised as a last resort, “we may turn to violence only in case we may not avail ourselves of discussion.” Consequently, “the only excuse for going to war is that we may live in peace unharmed,” since peace is the natural order of things. Further, in the absence of a formal “demand for satisfaction,” there is no just war. It is only in the pursuit of justice that there is justice in war.
Augustine knew of the miseries of war and argued that a wise man would not wage war unless he is compelled to do so by the wrongdoing of others. In Contra Faustum Manicheum, Augustine insisted that the justice of war depended on it being for the “peace and safety” of the community, and ordered by rightful authority, including God. In defending the city, just warfare secures the city’s role in the moral development of its citizens. The political is continuous with the ethical and the theological.
Self-defense is a natural right of humans as humans, unchanging, unchangeable, and extending to society as their natural habitat. What means they employ to exercise this right are changeable, but only to be consonant with the right. Warfare is one. A theory of war to distinguish between just from unjust wars has been developed in a tradition that conveys it from one generation to the next to be appropriated and adapted as needed in the use of war.
Aquinas’ adoption and organization of Augustine’s thinking have given all three an enduring influence in what Madeline Kasper identifies as a just war tradition, distinct from but continuous with a just war theory of how war should be waged. The tradition is “A synthesis of Western moral thought on war,” that in the past two centuries has undergone renewal “as thinkers reckoned with changes to the nature of war, including the nuclear revolution … and a potential future of war fought with completely autonomous technology and weapons.”
When Pope Leo declares that the just war theory is outdated, he speaks from within this moral synthesis and for the right of self-defense. If Jacob Bronowski could characterize atomic warfare as warfare “face to face with its own implications” upon witnessing the annihilation of Nagasaki, surely Pope Leo, now considering the militarization of AI, could draw the same conclusion. Many have argued that a just war is not possible in a nuclear era. In so doing, they are not dismissing the just war tradition, but thinking within it. Pope Leo is making a similar point about the age of AI.
Seemingly ignorant of Kasper’s important distinction between the role of just war tradition and just war theory, Pope Leo’s critics have missed the mark. He sees now from within the tradition what Augustine saw at its outset: if war were not just, as modern warfare and its nuclear default— mutually assured destruction—cannot be, wise humans would not wage war. They would, finally, be free of war altogether.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
T. Patrick Hill is Associate Professor Emeritus, Rutgers University, where he taught ethics and law. He was a Visiting Professor, Konstanz University, Germany and served as resident ethics consultant to the Cancer Institute of New Jersey. His work is widely published in such journals as The Archives of Internal Medicine, Clinical Cancer Research, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Social Science & Medicine, and Linacre Quarterly. His recent book is No Place for Ethics: Judicial Review, Legal Positivism, and the Supreme Court of the United States (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press/Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) A graduate of Cambridge University (BA Hons), Hill completed his MA at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.
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