Peace Ethics in an Age of Risk

Global Risks

From systemic financial failure to rising greenhouse gas emissions, from the militarisation of space to unsustainable population growth, cyber attacks to severe income disparity, global governance failure and food shortage crises to the unforeseen consequences of the new life science technologies, from rising religious fanaticism and the diffusion of weapons of mass destruction to the antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the global risks landscape is increasingly complex and fast-changing. ‘Dynamism in our hyperconnected world requires increasing our resilience to the many global risks that loom before us’, says Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, in his Preface to the Insight Report Global Risks 2013. ⁴ Global risks do not respect national borders: ‘false information posted on social networks can spread like wildfire to the other side of the globe in a matter of milliseconds; and genes that make bacteria resistant to our strongest antibiotics can hitch a ride with patients on an intercontinental flight’. ⁵

Risk assessment can be a morally responsible endeavour albeit not context-free or politically non-committed. Those who accept with Ulrich Beck, Christopher Coker, et al. that the idea of risk is the predominant political reality of our times rapidly find themselves in debates about how risk and responsibility are intrinsically connected. Leaving aside for the moment problems associated with the reduction of ethics to calculation and algebraic formulae, we may accept that risk-management decisions are often necessary and made in morally responsible ways amid complex uncertainties. Analyses of risk might entail consideration of how risk and uncertainty relate to principles such as respect for the dignity of every human being, the rule of law, promotion of human rights, and such like.

Analyses are always of the risk of something to someone, someone’s possession, some species, society, or such like. Outside academic and management contexts, risk is rarely perceived solely in terms of probabilistic numbers and technical measurements but in terms of how this affects me, my family, my employer or employees, my nation-state or geographical region. The expansion in nuclear technologies and weaponry in the 1960s was accompanied by high anxiety levels among the general public and questions among the social-scientific community about perceptions of risk. ⁶ Today, debate continues about what biases people in their perception of certain risks, the role of the emotions in risk perception, and lack of numeracy among the general public. Policy makers are advised to take cultural and emotional factors into account when assessing the public’s broad conception of risk.

Christian ethics knows about the need to examine one’s own (or community’s) range of commitments in all decision-making. Liberation theologians have taught since the 1960s that Christian theologians must examine their own interpretive sites and strategies when thinking doctrinally because context determines consciousness in significant ways. I broadly suppose in what follows that the context from which I write is that of locus imperii in the sense that, while global risks are facts of life for everyone, vulnerability to risk is something very different: ‘disaster risks are skewed toward developing countries’. ⁷ Small islands, developing states and other small countries have far higher levels of relative risk of poverty in a changing climate with respect to the size of their populations and economies than do the USA, UK or other members of the G8. ⁸ Non-white and low-income communities typically breathe air polluted with more hazardous ingredients than affluent white communities. ⁹ The source of many risks associated with climate change and economic volatility affect the world’s poor but can be traced to energy consumption patterns and political choices in the rich world. ¹⁰ Very poor people in diverse countries around the world are already bearing the brunt of the consequences of climate change, the targeted killing of terrorist suspects, downturns in the global economy, and more.

Christian Ethics Locus Imperii

Attempting to work from the dis-ease of our locus imperii, our primary theological question lies in the relationship between the peace proclaimed in Christ and the realities of global risks. We must affirm straight away that, from the perspective of Christian ethics, the meaning of peace cannot be measured adequately by merely human standards but only by the divine–human standard of the king of peace (Heb. 7:2). The christological criterion finds its reference in the union of the divine and the human in the One person of Christ and the revelation of the divine purposes of peace in all creation (Rom. 15:13; 1 Cor. 14:33; 1 Thess. 5:23). ‘Christ is our peace’ (Eph. 2:14). ¹¹ Only because the peace of Christ is gift and blessing is it also an imperative and demand upon Christian people to work for a more peaceful world (Matt. 5:9; Heb. 12:14). This does not mean that Christian ethics can speak only negatively about the possibilities of human peace and rarely advocate particular courses of action. The political theologian is not only to be spectator and arbiter, that is, having merely a reactive role and not risking ‘dirty hands’. ¹² More is required, not least critical engagement with the possibilities and problems of peace-making through law; the potentially liberating ends of international law.

It might seem odd to suggest that Christian ethics can contribute to public discussion about the relation between peace, law and justice in ways that are emancipatory, healing and reductive of risk for the world’s majority poor especially, when theologians are responsible, in part at least, for international law on the use of force as it developed in the modern era to protect commercial interests, thereby contributing substantively to the complex of phenomena that comprise global risks today. Hugo Grotius’s Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty (1603) and The Freedom of the Sea (1609) were responses to trading routes being disrupted when the Dutch were at war with Spain, and the Portuguese were limiting access to the spice-islands. Grotius’s reply was that a God-given right to do what was necessary for self-preservation was being violated. ¹³ God permits defence of one’s own life and resistance of that which threatens to prove injurious. ¹⁴ Therefore the owners of the impeded vessels could justly undertake a private war ‘in so far as judicial recourse is lacking’. ¹⁵ The emancipatory power of seventeenth-century, Christian-influenced international law lay in liberating Dutch merchants to seek wealth in the Indies and elsewhere; the notion of bellum iustum was developed in this period in support of an emerging global economic system, expounded par excellence by Adam Smith and supported all the while by theological argumentation.

Whether it is possible today to prise Christian engagement with international law apart from its justifications of the interests of mercantile capitalism backed by the use of force evades simple answers. At the least, there is a serious debate to be had about international law on the use of force being in thrall to capitalist interests, and the contribution of Christianity historically to these realities. With some ‘left-wing’ secularist theorists of international law, my claim is that a Christian ethic of international law can, and should, call for a deeper and more wide-ranging investigation than is commonplace ‘of such phenomena as exploitation, immiseration, alienation and commodification, and of the ways in which these phenomena shape and are themselves shaped by international law’. ¹⁶ (Against other, Lenin-leaning left-wing theorists, the kind of Christian ethic of international law that I advocate does not plan to ‘wait for an outburst of “divine violence”—a revolutionary version of Heidegger’s “only God can save us”’ and do nothing in the face of systemic violence because resistance to the powers of capitalism is impossible. ¹⁷ ) In contrast to the political theology of Grotius and his successors, however, a consideration of peace-making through international law from the perspective of Christian ethics locus imperii in an age of unprecedented global risks will:

I have written elsewhere about the unavoidably ambiguous character of Christian engagement with all human law because of the association of law with death (Rom. 3:20; 4:15; 5:20), the use of law as a weapon of war in ‘lawfare’, ¹⁸ as well as the (often in recent years well-deserved) associations of international law with political indecision, impotence. ¹⁹ All human law, law-making and law-keeping is inherently violent. True justice exceeds all human law. Jesus’ condemnation under the law of empire and with the blessing of religious officials puts a question mark over everything positive that Christian ethics might want to say about what can be achieved through human law. Rather than distancing Christian ethics from the inherent violence of human law as a matter of principle, decided a priori, however, the choice that I make here is to contend with problems of coercion, enforcement, and more, in the light of what the church catholic confesses to be the revealed law of God. The messiness of this engagement becomes rapidly apparent but it is possible to conceive of international juridical order in terms oriented towards common good, understood with primary reference to those most vulnerable to global risks. In this respect, Christian ethical engagement with international law can and should be radical.

Several points may be ventured in development of this thesis. First, that we need structural analyses which examine the varied and highly uneven distributions of vulnerability to global risks, and how this vulnerability that attaches to poverty follows from what is commonly called ‘the priority for the poor’ in Christian ethics and Jesus’ persistent concern for the masses (Greek: ochlos) or anonymous crowds in the background of his ministry (Matt. 5:1; 9:36; 13:34; 14:23; Mk 2:13; 5:31; 7:14; Lk. 9:11; 12:1; Jn 6:2). Those comprising the multitude are portrayed variously as needy, unreasonably demanding, fickle, and contributors to Jesus’ death when mobilised against him. Jesus is portrayed as trying to escape the crowds (Matt. 8:18; 14:14; 15:39; Mk 3:9; Jn 5:13) and spoke often to the smaller circle of disciples (Matt. 13:36; Mk 6:45; Lk. 9:12) but the evangelists also speak of him healing, teaching and feeding great multitudes. ²⁰ Jesus is moved by compassion for the crowds because they were ‘weary and scattered, like sheep having no shepherd’ (Matt. 9:36 NKJV), he was pressed and jostled by those seeking his attention (Mk 3:10), and made practical arrangements to meet their needs (Mk 4:1). There are no instances of Jesus’ rebuking the ochlos whose interests are contrasted routinely with the ruling classes based in Jerusalem. ²¹ The word ochlos is used by all the evangelists in preference to laos which is used only when referring to the historical people of Israel. ²² Ahn Byung-Mu has argued convincingly that German historical-critical exegesis typically viewed the ochlos as similar to the ‘antique choir’ or chorus ‘thereby failing to acknowledge its social and theological significance’. ²³ Instead, he observes Jesus’ consistent commitment to the ochlos and points out that Jesus’ call to follow him is to the crowd as well as the disciples (Mk 8:34-38). With Ahn Byung-Mu, I attempt to avoid politically simplistic references to ‘the masses’ but suppose nonetheless that ochlos is a ‘group of reference’ which conveys God’s option for those who are not the politically powerful or members of the social elite but the majority poor, including those marginalised for a variety of socio-economic reasons. ²⁴

Second, that most of us locus imperii delude ourselves about climate change not really demanding change to our lifestyles is self-evident. Most of us deny in practice that our species seems destined to extinction due to greed and failure to restrain self-interest; this is the decadent delusion in which we live. Hence a Christian approach to international law must re-encounter the Jesus of the Gospels as interrogator and seeker after truth. Ched Myers points out that more than three-quarters of the episodes in Mark’s Gospel are composed around questions to, by, or about Jesus. ²⁵ (Something similar may be observed of the other Gospels.) Jesus’ challenge is less that of memory than of truth. The politics of the Gospel is the transformation effected by dedication to the truth, who is the person of Jesus, in concrete places. ²⁶ ‘Who do you say that I am?’ (Matt. 16:25). ‘Which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?’ (Lk. 12:25). ‘For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?’ (Matt. 16:26). ‘What do you think?’ (Matt. 18:12). ‘What do you want?’ (Matt. 20:21). ‘What do you think about the Christ?’ (Matt. 22:42). ‘Why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?’ (Matt. 15:3). Such questions in the Gospels are utterly contingent and everyday occurrences that, because asked by Jesus or of Jesus, become truth events that exceed the immediate terms of the conversations taking place, expose the delusions and untruths that were sustaining the status quo, and begin to effect transformation. Jesus’ questioning effects not so much the prising of information from interlocutees but transformation of the situation as its truth appears.

Third, that the resurrection of Jesus, Son of the Earth (the New Adamah Heb. אדם בן), brings healing not only to the creatures of God but the physical environment too, recalls the centrality of the land in the covenantal histories of the Old Testament and places all humanity’s dependence on our relationship to the land at the centre of an ethic of law. Some explications of the environmental implications of hailing Jesus Son of the Earth might be overstated. If Larry Hurtado is correct that the phrase ‘Son of Man’ is not a christological title and was used primarily in the Gospels merely to refer to Jesus, not to characterise his ministry, Christian ethicists must be wary of ascribing meaning where there is none. Understood minimally, however, ὁὑιός του~ ‘ἀνθρώπου functioned to express Jesus’ sense of being chosen for a special purpose before God, and was used by Septuagint writers to translate אדם בן (Heb. ben ‘adam, Son of Adam the earth) and האדם בני (i.e., with the article). ²⁷ Traditional Christian witness is that the dynamic of resurrection life reaches every part of the cosmos; the destiny of the entire created order is transfiguration in Christ. ²⁸ The life of the old Adam was eating what was forbidden and failure to exercise restraint. Participation in the life of the resurrected Christ Jesus, Son of the Earth, entails the claim that the earth is the Lord’s (Ps. 24:1) and must not be sold ‘in perpetuity’ (Lev. 25:23 or ‘permanently’ NKJV (Heb. tsĕmiythuth) because ‘the land is mine’. Protection of the environment in Christian ethics cannot simply be part of a desperate attempt to reverse damage to the planet on the off-chance that it is not already too late. Viewed merely in terms of increasing our prospects for survival, a peace ethic for the earth would miss the point that even the earth can become an idol if valued apart from its Maker but, in relation to its source of life, becomes a way of living in thankfulness and priestly offering back to God of all natural resources.

Fourth, that the New Testament church (Greek: ecclesia) is a political movement amid religious oppression and the military machine of empire is impetus to critical, politio-ethical engagement with what is required for peacemaking in an age of global risk. Working with Alain Badiou’s matrix of conditions when and under which a phenomenon may be deemed political, ecclesia is a political event because it:

I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh …

even on my male servants and female servants ….

And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved (Acts 2:16-21).

We must distinguish ‘politics’ from ‘policy’. Christian ethics is not able, nor is it required, to formulate the technical, or otherwise specific, regulations necessary for the implementation of broad ideas, goals or legal judgments. The politics of the Gospel is not definable as a policy that exists already or can be created. If the politics of the Gospel were to equate to a policy or party, charter or law, we should be identifying Christ Jesus with the historical processes of our age—a kind of natural theology that is to be resisted. Nevertheless, biblical teaching can provide a lens through which to see how (at least some of) the priorities of peace ethics in relation to international law could be reset and global risks addressed differently.

Peace Ethics and/or Just War Reasoning?

Immediately, however, reasons for caution abound. Even the seemingly innocuous phrase ‘peace ethics’ is a dangerous but necessary expedient at a time when the language of ‘just war’ is alienating to many and tied tight to Kant’s ‘sorry comforters’ who wanted merely to justify the resort to war. The most cursory survey of international relations and political theory literature pertaining to peace ethics suggests that the classic just war tradition is now defunct. Of the forty-four essays in The Oxford Handbook of War (2012) none has the phrase ‘just war’ in the title. Some refer to how the Christian just war tradition has influenced the considerable body of law and sets of moral presumptions that now surround war, ³² but none takes this tradition as its starting point for constructive engagement with how the global political community may move towards closer sharing of how war may be prevented, weaponry regulated, and the causes of war diminished. My purpose in making this observation is not to express a sense of pique, disappointment and frustration at the lack of editorial wisdom but to note that many serious debates these days are located elsewhere with respect either to the neo-Kantian assumption that any claims to the justice of war are inseparable from political and economic advantage and to be discredited for that reason, and/or the Clausewitzian assumption that war is merely an extension of (economic) policy by other means, such that ethics—understood as humanitarian appeals to common-sense rationality—must concentrate on the reduction of pain inflicted by war. In this kind of context where war is always irrational, or rational only when cast in Clausewitzian or Darwinian terms of the survival of the fittest, the focus of ethical debate is increasingly either showing war to be irrational or limiting the violence of war and armed conflict when it occurs.

A risk for Christian ethics in opting for ‘peace ethics’ rather than ‘just war reasoning’ is slipping unintentionally into a mindset that implicitly assumes the contradictory ‘modern’ assumptions that war is both rational (Hobbes, Darwin and Clausewitz) and irrational (Kant) and, for reasons from both sides of this divide, is less concerned with the questions ‘What is war?’ and ‘Is this armed conflict justified?’ than with how to minimise cruelty in armed conflict. Consider Christopher Coker’s response to the changing face of war and a future when warrior robots are programmed to act morally or, at least, in accordance with internationally agreed rules, and warfare strategy is conducted through computer programming. His question in Warrior Geeks: How 21st Century Technology Is Changing the Way We Fight and Think about War is whether war will continue to remain a human, all too human, activity. ³³ He asks whether humans will be needed as soldiers when warfare strategy is conducted through computer programming in ways that are humane, in the sense of being less cruel and committed to the measuring of pain and ways to reduce it. In his Clausewitzian vision of the future, the best way of limiting the violence of war looks increasingly to be that nations should fight with automatons devoid of empathy, courage, prejudice and hatred. Ethical principles might help but are not necessary; we just need common sense and humanitarian commitment to reduce cruelty and suffering. Delimiting war by means of working towards tighter legal definition appears to be less important to Coker than reducing cruelty and exposing all that militates against humane behaviour.

Coker the humanitarian concentrates on the counting and reduction of pain. Coker the seer foretells a world with empathy removed from decision-making both about and within war. For all his insight, however, accepting a Darwinian or Clausewitzian worldview ultimately normalises war in ways that Christian tradition has refuted consistently. What matters is not only that it is ‘rational’ to reduce human suffering but that questions are asked about the purpose of a given war in relation to justice, peace, and the overcoming of wrongdoing. If opting for ‘peace ethics’ rather than ‘just war reasoning’ is deemed to replace just war reasoning because its criteria are out-dated and so the distinctions are increasingly blurred between war and peace, the phrase should be resisted. The question ‘What is war?’ remains vitally important because fundamental human rights, various laws of war, rules of engagement, procedures of due process, and more, depend upon whether a war or armed conflict is lawfully recognised or not. ³⁴ Only when understood with more direct reference to the evangelical imperative to peace, and the duty upon Christians to engage in the service of a peace that is just for all humankind, is the phrase ‘peace ethics’ directly useful to Christian ethics.

The Rule of Law

An overtly Christian ethic of law must be wary also of touting the ‘rule of law’ as the solution to global risks as though it were a single phenomenon or somehow immune to the political interests of those least vulnerable to global risks. ‘The concept is everywhere … a rising imperative of the era of globalisation … Yet its sudden elevation as a panacea for the ills of countries in transition from dictatorships or statist economies should make both patients and prescribers wary’. ³⁵ So wrote Thomas Carothers in 1998 about ‘the rule of law’ as a solution to the world’s troubles. More recent attempts by Carothers and others to recount the histories of ‘rule of law’ reform in various places around the globe have exposed both successes and problems with ‘rule of law’ assistance whereby the United States and other countries have sought to nation-build after civil war, reduce human rights abuses and promote democracy and/or support local civil-society groups. ³⁶ We should be aware, however, that the phrase means different things to different people, and theoretical tensions here as above broadly reflect the neo-Hobbesian/Darwinian/Clausewitzean versus neo-Kantian models of international order.

Debate tends to centre round whether the ‘rule of law’ emanates from state-based legal institutions or from wider socio-political relationships and norms common to societies. Those advocating the former tend to see the ‘rule of law’ as associated primarily with legal institutions designed to protect property rights and trading practices. ³⁷ The rhetoric of ‘the rule of law’ is subsumed within the (perhaps proper) politics of national interest; an element in the game-play between nation-states. Political realists who, in previous generations might have based their arguments with Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans J. Morgenthau on the assumption that humans are fallen and prone to the sins of pride and self-centredness, now sometimes suppose with evolutionary theorists both that war has played a role in human evolution and that evolutionary theory can be used to explain how the export of a particular model of ‘the rule of law’ is integral to a state’s assertion of influence in the international arena. ‘Evolutionary theory suggests that groups may go to war to increase inclusive fitness. A group becomes more fit if it can successfully attack to take the resources of others.’ ³⁸ Advancing a particular model of ‘the rule of law’ can also be part of a nation’s pursuit of its own interests.

By contrast, new cosmopolitan theorists variously associate ‘the rule of law’ with global constitutionalism and universally accepted norm-based approaches to international law that prioritise individuals and peoples over nation-states. For some, a potentially realisable hope is a global, perhaps constitutionally-based ‘rule of law’ to which the domestic law of nation-states should make reference. ³⁹ A global constitutional ‘rule of law’ would serve as a kind of higher law, to which global institutions, including the UN, are subject. For such theorists, a shift is already underway whereby the normative discourse of international law is no longer state-centred but focused on the protection of individuals and peoples; the classic Westphalian norms of territoriality and sovereignty are increasingly suspended when human rights are at stake. ⁴⁰ Ruti Teitel claims in Humanity’s Law, for instance, that a re-alignment of law is underway in relation to the use of force, and that the rise of universal jurisprudence is evidence of a new relationship of law, peace and justice. She traces a shift of interest in the international community from concern with the crime of aggression and punishment of an entire nation (as after World War I) to the notion of crimes against humanity and sanctions against individuals (as at Nuremberg), and the establishment of a standing international court, all of which promises greater protection for individuals through the growth of institutionalisation and respect for the law in the regulation of conflict. Teitel affirms that her work is interpretive; she is simply offering a way of explaining a succession of events and political moves. ⁴¹ To others, the rhetoric of universalism in connection with ‘the rule of law’ is yet another instrument of Euro-American domination. ⁴²

A longer article could explore how these competing ideas about peace ethics and the rule of law derive variously from tensions in Christian theology regarding the ‘now’ and ‘not yet’, the realities of human sin and hoped-for reign of God, secularised to become the familiar polarisation between political realism and cosmopolitanism. ⁴³ For the moment, we observe a reoccurring split between ‘utopia and its opposites’, ⁴⁴ between a fictional projection towards an overly-optimistic future versus the lurking notion of the ‘state of nature’ as ruthless rivalry demanding authoritarian governmental regimes pitted against one another. What is properly held together in the church (albeit not always successfully) as two essential aspects of the same reality, splits apart in modern secularist theory. Peace ethics in Christian perspective is not immune to problematically dichotomised ways of thinking. Nor is our work to mend the ‘broken middle’ of modernity. ⁴⁵ New Testament texts condemn α’νομία or the condition of being without law whether due to contempt, wilful violation or ignorance (Matt. 7:23; 13:41; 23:28; 24:12; Rom. 6:19; 2 Thess. 2:7; 1 Jn 3:4). But there is no conduit-like channel between biblical teaching, divine will and/or the created natural order and the minutiae of international law. At the least, we must be clear that Christian ethics does not translate directly into a theory of the ‘rule of law’ and become wary of hitching our wagon to available agendas, regardless of how amenable the rhetoric sounds.

Hail! Weapon of Peace

In the Orthodox liturgical year, 14 September is dedicated to the Universal Exaltation of the Precious and Life-Giving Cross. ⁴⁶ Both a celebration of Christ’s passion per se and of the material means by which the triune God put devils to flight and freed creation from corruption, this service raises aloft the instrument of salvation by which mere humans have been made sharers in the ineffable compassion and grace of the Godhead. The service has its origins according to tradition in the fourth-century dedication in Jerusalem of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre by Emperor Constantine and his mother Helena, who is reputed to have rediscovered the true cross during efforts to clear the holy site of extraneous buildings and debris. Constantine is said to have seen a vision of this cross and heard the words: ‘In this sign you will conquer’ (Latin: In Hoc Signo Vinces; Greek: Εν Τούτω˛ Νίκα). ⁴⁷ He subsequently used the symbol of the cross in battle and 14 September became a day of imperial as well as spiritual celebration. Priests are said to have treated the cross like the imperial flag of empire; it was held by bishops in the four directions of the earth, in perhaps something like the atmosphere of 4th July in the USA: ⁴⁸

Hail! Cross of the Lord: through thee mankind has been delivered from the curse. Shattering the enemy by thine Exaltation, O Cross all venerable, thou art a sign of true joy. Thou art our help, thou art the strength of kings, … thou art a weapon of peace round which angels stand in fear. Thou art the divine glory of Christ, who grants the world great mercy. ⁴⁹

Today, even Orthodox theologians denounce the association of the Gospel with empire and yet hail the cross of Christ as a weapon of peace. ⁵⁰ Echoing their denunciation, we return to the exegetical observations above in setting priorities for peace ethics in Christian perspective locus imperii in an age of risk.

The first concerns thinking with and about the global poor in ways that do not render ‘the other’ somehow different from myself. Prevailing ways of thinking about ‘the poor’ tend to employ either a neo-Kantian appeal to abstract universality that translates into affirmations of human rights, or a utilitarian calculus, or recognition of the irreducible alterity of the Other that slips easily into ‘Other as victim’, ‘Other as oppressed’, ‘Other at a great distance from me, from whom I can insulate myself’, ‘Other as different’. All variously build on Cartesian assumptions about the intuitive and inductive operations of the mind, and what G. W. F. Hegel identified as a restricted notion of individual identity as a momentary totality of thought over against all that is different from it. ⁵¹ Hegel diagnoses the pathology but fails to escape individual identity as a momentary totality of thought over against all that is different from it. In affirming the cross as ‘weapon of peace’, Christian ethics cannot settle for these boundary conditions for speaking of individual identity and mutual interrelation that yield an account of the person as merely an individual numerically different from me. If ‘for all my Lord was crucified; for all, for all my Saviour died’, that is, if salvation is universal in scope, we must eschew the modern ethic of otherness for the inclusion of all in Christ. ⁵² This conviction from faith is compatible with that of Grotius and the scholastic tradition that God gave the world to humankind in common but is oriented towards the future, from where this truth will become historical reality. ⁵³ Zwischen den Zeiten this primary universal truth is not dependent per se on a perspective from privilege—though how an ethic of commonality is taken seriously, with all that it implies for the redistribution of resources and risks, is undertaken unavoidably from a perspective of privilege for those of us locus imperii.

The second, related priority concerns retrieval of the twin ideas of ‘naturalness’ and ‘distributive justice’ in natural law reasoning as they bear upon international law and the use of force. Neither idea is much evident in present-day debates about international law where natural law reasoning is anathema to many but both were lost much earlier in the modern history of international law shaped by the Catholic Spanish theologians of the sixteenth century, especially the so-called School of Salamanca, Grotius and his followers. This history that was built conceptually on the Roman law notion of dominium, interpreted through a theory of virtue learned from Aquinas, had a strongly developed account of commutative but not distributive justice. ⁵⁴ Martti Koskenniemi makes the point in his account of Francisco de Vitoria’s application of the notion of dominium within both international public law governed by an inter-state structure of diplomatic relations and the realm of individual private rights governed by principles of commutative justice. Vitoria, in particular, he writes,

portrays trade and commerce as part of the ‘natural partnership and communication’ between humans … [And] begins to sketch an international system of commerce based on the free use of their dominium by private merchants and bankers that the princes were not entitled to impede. ⁵⁵

Vitoria and his followers dealt with the liberties entailed in the concept of dominium in the context of ‘relationships between subjects themselves, excluding ideas about the intervention of public power’. ⁵⁶ They variously offered a legal language and set of concepts that allowed natural law reasoning with respect to international law to be equated more-or-less with the protection of commercial interests, enforceable by war, but lost sight of questions of distributive justice because, as for Aquinas (for whom the topic was relatively unimportant), the act of distributing the goods of the community belongs to those who exercise authority over those goods, that is, to the ‘organising principle of the community in question’, and the norms of distributive justice vary according to what is being distributed. ⁵⁷

Today, against the backdrop of unprecedented global risks pertaining to the environment and the militancy that takes root in deprivation, there is renewed interest among Christian ethicists in ‘naturalness’ as a topic for consideration and, of more immediate interest here, among scholars of international jurisprudence in Thomist-influenced natural law reasoning. Theorists as diverse as Martti Koskenniemi, Alexander Orakhelashvili, Robert J. Araujo, Stephen Hall, Sean Coyle, Karen Morrow, Mary Ellen O’Connell, Anthony Lang, Nicholas Rengger, Jean Porter and Catherine Pickstock, and more, are variously probing how legal conventions can (and should) be understood to arise from processes of reasonable reflection that presuppose the flourishing of pre-rational nature to have moral force. As yet little sustained attention has been given to distributive justice internationally by theorists advocating natural law reasoning. ⁵⁸ This might be due, in part, to Aldous Huxley-inspired fears of a world state in which a unified regime administers the entire planet. ⁵⁹ With Mary Ellen O’Connell, however, we may note that conformity with international law is based primarily on compliance not enforcement, and that domestic courts are used more frequently than any other institution for international law enforcement. ⁶⁰ While there is pressing need for expansions in the work of international courts and tribunals, ‘[e]nforcement sits on the margins of international law’. ⁶¹ As there is increasingly what Aquinas might have recognised as community life at the international level, the work of natural law reasoning is not to advocate the establishment of World Controllers but the practical reasonableness (Greek: phronesis) necessary to the pursuit of the good internationally. That there is no global people or global democracy (nor should we seek such) does not preclude but makes possible questions about why distributive justice should be treated at an international as well as national level, and that structures of authority should be operative.

The third priority concerns whether and/or how to speak of common good internationally. In Thomist tradition, it is important to ensure that the language of common good does not become detached from the dynamics of community life, political deliberation, and communal activities ‘instantiated in a particular community … tethered to the distinctive ways in which that community embodies natural goodness’. ⁶² Jean Porter voices this concern and implies the absence at the international level of a lawgiver oriented towards the common good. ⁶³ Only a community, she says, has a natural orientation towards individual and communal perfection. ⁶⁴ Porter does not decry the language of international common good but warns that ‘the peoples of the world do not form a polity, unified by shared ideals and commitments’. ⁶⁵ Her concern (rightly) is with cosmopolitan fantasies to the effect that the peoples of the world can form a polity in the relevant sense. This much is agreed. I assume in this article that there will be differences between speaking of common good at local, national and international levels. Yet, as Porter is clear, we share a common humanity that provides a basis for shared agreement ‘on at least the outer limits of tolerable behaviour’ and also the need for shared agreements from ‘the proper use of shared resources to the intricacies of shared economic structures’. ⁶⁶ As she concludes: ‘even though the peoples of the world do not constitute a polity, they do nonetheless constitute a kind of extended community by virtue of their ongoing mutual interactions and the limited yet vitally important shared interests that can only be pursued in common’. ⁶⁷ In broad agreement with Porter about both the limited sense in which international affairs may be described in the same language of ‘community’ and yet the realities of those things that are shared in common at this level, I persist with the language of international common good because fair access to shared resources, preventing the unjust distribution of vulnerability to global risks, regulating the use of armed force, and more, concern relations between countries and their citizens—which is the business of international law.