"MORALISTS are unhappy people," wrote Jacques Maritain. A great many Americans are turning into unhappy moralists about the war in Viet Nam. It is a new sensation. Americans are accustomed to feeling right about the fights they get into. The majority probably still feels right—but troubled. The President summed up the uneasy moral choice in his State of the Union Address. "It is the melancholy law of human societies," he said, quoting Thomas Jefferson, "to be compelled sometimes to choose a great evil in order to ward off a greater evil." On the other side, a chorus of clerics, academics and polemicists of every tone proclaims that the U.S. position is evil, or at least morally questionable. When Cardinal Spellman exhorted American soldiers to hope and fight for victory in Viet Nam, he was widely criticized by other churchmen, many of them Roman Catholics. William Sloane Coffin, chaplain of Yale University, has said: "It may well be that, morally speaking, the United States ship of state is today comparable to the Titanic just before it hit the iceberg."
There are in the U.S. remarkably few Machiavellians who believe that war is simply a matter of state, beyond questions of good or evil. At the other extreme, there are also relatively few all-out pacifists. Most critics concede that in certain conditions, war is morally justifiable—but assert that this is not the case in Viet Nam. Why one war is justified but not another is an immensely difficult question; the answer, tentative at best, requires logic, precision and a measure of emotional detachment. These qualities are largely missing in the Viet Nam debate. The tendency is to call anything there that is distasteful or tragic "immoral." Yet the concept of a just or an unjust use of force involves complex judgments of means and aims—an accounting of lives and deaths and intentions—that go to the very heart of civilization.
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Early Ground Rules
History was well along before it occurred to anybody that there were two ways of looking at war. War was war —bloody, awful, sometimes glorious—and the normal way in which a nation established itself in the days when Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria and Persia were harrying each other for territory and tribute. Aggression invariably had the sanction of a deity. The Israelites' takeover of the Canaanites was commanded by Jehovah himself. And wars were usually as total as soldiers with limited technology could make them.
War to the death only began to go out of style when the belligerents recognized some kind of relationship, as in the case of the Greek city states, which tried to soften their deadly rivalry through diplomacy and mercy. But such temperateness was strictly limited to social equals; Aristotle, who is credited with inventing the term "a just war," could apply it to military action "against men, who, though intended by nature to be governed, will not submit." The Romans took over the idea of a just war as an instrument of efficient administration, and Cicero laid down some pragmatic ground rules. Only states could wage war, he insisted, and only soldiers could fight them—a useful device to preclude revolution. Before one state could attack another, hostilities had to be formally declared, leaving time for reply.