I respect J. Daryl Charles and appreciate his recent effort to bring basic moral principles to bear on the problem of the war in Ukraine. Nevertheless, I think he errs in his application of these principles. Accordingly, I would like to offer this response, which I hope will be a helpful contribution to our nation's public discourse on this important issue.
Professor Charles takes as his point of departure the parable of the Good Samaritan, which Jesus offered to explain the meaning of the command to love one's neighbor as oneself. "Who is my neighbor?" a student of the law had asked. Jesus responded by telling the story of a man who had been beaten and robbed, neglected by religious figures who had ignored his plight, but was then helped by a passing Samaritan. Who, Jesus asked the lawyer, had been a neighbor to this man in his need?
The lesson of the parable is clear: we have an obligation to help anyone we find who is in need if we can. Each individual has a duty of benevolence that extends in principle to the whole human race. I agree with Professor Charles that a decent and just approach to politics must be informed by this elementary moral rule, even in the realm of international relations. At the same time, it is also important to note that the application of the parable to a problem like the Ukraine war is not as simple as Charles's account suggests.
The Good Samaritan encountered someone who needed help because he had been severely beaten and left for dead. He did not encounter someone who was in the middle of being subjected to such a vicious assault. If he had, his obligations would not have been so clear.
The Good Samaritan - like any human being - is bound by the Great Commandment to love his neighbor as himself. As Saint Augustine observed, this is in effect a command to love oneself as well as one's neighbor. In such a dangerous situation, the Good Samaritan could not and should not treat his own self-preservation as a matter of indifference. He would have to make some judgment whether intervening would have any serious chance of stopping the gang of robbers, or whether he, too, would end up robbed and beaten nearly to death.
The problem becomes more complex when we are considering a nation or a government intervening in a violent conflict. If a government or a nation decides to help in such a situation, it is not really deciding to bear the costs and risks of the intervention. Either the nation as a whole (if it is consulted and decides the question) or the relevant public officials are deciding to impose those costs and risks on some other people - specifically, on members of the nation's military service. The Good Samaritan himself helped his neighbor in need. He did not use coercive authority to order others to provide such help and bear the dangers of doing so.
But the lives of a nation's soldiers are also worth preserving. Indeed, to the nation in question they ought to be more worth preserving than the lives of foreigners. Professor Charles is right to invoke Thomas Aquinas's claim that duties of charity govern even questions of war and foreign relations. He overlooks, however, that Aquinas likewise taught that there is an "order of charity" according to which we are obliged to love ourselves first, then those who are closest to us, then those to whom we are more distantly connected, and so on. In the Christian tradition, the duty of universal benevolence is not understood as a duty to assist all human beings indiscriminately.
Finally, it is worth noting that in Jesus's parable there is no suggestion that the Good Samaritan went out searching the world for someone to help. Rather he generously helped the person he encountered in the course of doing his own business. It would therefore be difficult to derive from the parable a general duty of a nation to help another nation on the other side of the world.
This is not to deny that the United States has obligations in relation to the Ukraine war. We certainly do have such obligations. They arise, however, not so much from any duty of universal benevolence as from our own actions. America has been involved both in the origins and the conduct of the war. We can't honorably or justly just wash our hands of it now. What, then, are we to do?
Professor Charles suggests (without openly saying) that the United States has a moral duty to wage war on behalf of Ukraine. This is surely the implication of his invocation of the just war tradition, his call to "act decisively," and his complaint that the support we are currently providing is not enough to ensure a Ukrainian victory. But what is the basis of such a duty?
The opening phase of his argument seems to invoke a duty of the United States in international law, but this does not get him very far. His argument implies that America is an "ally" of Ukraine. It is not. There is no treaty of alliance between the two nations. He invokes the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 and asks whether we will "keep our word." This claim too is inadequate to the issue at hand. In the Memorandum, the United States agreed to "respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine," which is different from a promise to wage war to defend them.
Perhaps in view of the weakness of these arguments, Professor Charles turns to more general moral principles. He invokes, as we have seen, the parable of the Good Samaritan, love of neighbor, the Golden Rule, and the just war tradition. Again, I agree with him that all of these are relevant to serious thinking about war and diplomacy. Nevertheless, none of these considerations leads directly to his practical conclusions in the present controversy. Indeed, his argument is bound to go astray, because it is based on a superficial and one-sided account of the moral and empirical realities that we must confront honestly before a decision to wage war can be regarded as morally responsible.
Would American war on behalf of Ukraine be a just war? Professor Charles rightly invokes the Golden Rule (do to others what you would wish them to do to you) on this question, observing that we have a general obligation to assist those in need. His application of the Golden Rule, however, is frankly partisan in character. He does not even try to take seriously the way the Russians think about the war. Yet they too are part of the human family to whom our duty of general benevolence extends.
An honest and evenhanded application of the Golden Rule would require us to ask the question that parents often propose to children when they are trying to teach them how to behave: "How would you like it if somebody did that to you?" We must, as Professor Charles argues, ask this in relation to the Ukrainians. We would want help if we were in their position. But we would also have to ask the question in relation to Russia. We would have to ask ourselves: how would the United States act if Russia had a powerful alliance with numerous South American nations, had been steadily expanding that alliance northward into Central America, and was now proposing to bring Mexico into that alliance?
The answer to this question is obvious, and it is sad evidence of the poverty of the current public debate (and the propagandistic character of our media's coverage of the war) that this question has been almost entirely neglected among American commentators. Any candid observer would have to admit that the United States would regard a Russian-Mexican military alliance as a threat to our vital national security interests. Would America wage a preventive war to forbid such an alliance? Having lived through the Iraq war, I certainly would not bet against it. Yet this case is precisely parallel to the position in which the United States has placed Russia through a policy of relentless NATO expansion, including proposed membership of Ukraine in the alliance, which the Russians have warned repeatedly, over many years, that they must regard as a hostile policy dangerous to their security.
These considerations show that the justice of American war on Russia, on behalf of Ukraine, is not as clear-cut as Professor Charles suggests. It would certainly be just to wage war in defense of Ukraine against unprovoked Russian aggression. But to rest the case for war on this understanding would be to embrace what Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. rightly derided in his speech announcing the suspension of his presidential campaign, as a "comic book justification" for the war. The war is also, in reality, a war to make Russia accept Ukraine as a NATO ally and thus to accept a permanent Western military presence right on Russia's doorstep. The justice (and necessity) of such a policy is hardly evident.
The just war tradition also calls for us to grapple with certain empirical questions that are essential to the morality of a choice to use military force. We must consider the question of "proportionality": will the war do more harm than good? We must also ask whether the war has a realistic prospect of success because we are not to throw human lives away on a mere moral gesture.
Professor Charles does not take seriously the possibility that the war he is advocating would do more harm than good. He suggests that the reluctance of Western nations to wage war is the result of mere "self-interest" and a "fear of escalation" that he dismisses out of hand. In truth, the danger of escalation is real; and taking it seriously is not a manifestation of mere self-interest but a serious moral responsibility, since escalation would result in the deaths of more human beings, an outcome that is to be avoided if possible.
Russia regards the war as existential on its part. It has accordingly warned that it will do what is necessary to win and prevent Ukraine from becoming a NATO member. There is every reason to take such threats seriously. Professor Charles rightly laments the destruction wreaked by the bombing of Ukrainian cities. But the path he advocates involves the very real possibility that Russian cities will be bombed by us, and Polish and German cities will be bombed by the Russians.
Given these grim possibilities, it is not clear that the war could be a "success" for anybody, even if it were to end with Russian capitulation. Indeed, Professor Charles overlooks the crucial fact that war itself is not even politically viable from the standpoint of American domestic politics. Such a war could not even get off the ground.
America is a democracy. There cannot be a successful war that the American people do not solidly support. But it is a fact that must be faced that they would not support such a war if it meant the commitment of American forces and the deaths of American soldiers. This is evident to anybody who has seriously observed American politics. The Biden administration used to claim that the war was of historic importance. Now they hardly mention it. Former President Trump, representing a sizable portion of American public opinion, advocates a negotiated settlement of the war. Vice President Harris will not propose an escalation of American involvement in the war because she knows that to do so would achieve nothing more than sink her presidential campaign.
As Professor Charles observes, the ongoing war of attrition will not save Ukraine. In view of this fact, and of the risks of escalation, there is certainly nothing cowardly or immoral in seriously considering the remaining alternative: a negotiated settlement of the war. Many will complain that this alternative is morally unpalatable because it will seem to reward military aggression by giving the Russians some of what they demand. This is true, but it is one of the costs of doing politics in a fallen world, and especially in tragic situations in which there are no attractive alternatives.