In a letter written around 412 AD, St. Augustine notes that, “If Christian teaching condemned all warfare, then the soldiers in the gospel who were seeking guidance about their security would have been told to throw away their weapons and withdraw entirely from the army.” At the same time, he stresses that warfare is legitimate if and only if it is waged for the sake of peace and in a moral way. Over the centuries, the Catholic Church has matured its teaching on the ethics of warfare. Some may wonder, though, whether that teaching is still valid in a world where the military marshals advanced technology to produce arsenals of immensely destructive weaponry. In this episode, Prof. Gregory Reichberg, a specialist in military ethics, explains his pick of the five best books on the ethics of warfare.
A philosopher by training (with a Ph.D. from Emory University), Gregory Reichberg is a Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, where he writes on historical and contemporary issues in military ethics. He is the author of Thomas Aquinas on War and Peace (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and co-editor of several volumes, including The Ethics of War: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Blackwell Publishing, 2006), Religion, War, and Ethics: A Sourcebook of Textual Traditions (Cambridge U P, 2014), and Robotics, AI, and Humanity: Science, Ethics, and Policy (Springer, 2021). His articles have appeared in Catholic journals and magazines, including The Thomist, La Revue Thomiste, Nova & Vetera (English Edition), Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, Commonweal, and America Magazine. His current work focuses on artificial intelligence and its implications for military ethics.
Prof. Reichberg's recommended books on the ethics of war are:
- Summa Theologiae: Volume 35, Consequences of Charity: 2a2ae. 34-46 by St. Thomas Aquinas
- Vitoria: Political Writings edited by Anthony Padgen and Jeremy Lawrence
- Freedom in the Modern World by Jacques Maritain
- Church of the Word Incarnate, vol. 1 by Charles Journet
- Fratelli tutti by Pope Francis
Read the interview at https://www.fivebooksforcatholics.com/the-ethics-of-war/
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