Note: The ethical judgments on this page refer exclusively to the action — never to the person who carries it out. Every person possesses inalienable dignity, regardless of what they do or have done. Cf. note on ethical judgments.
The organized, violent confrontation between groups. War is the most radical form of practical oblivion of the person: persons are reduced to enemies, and their dignity is systematically negated in the act of killing.
War and the Personalist Norm
War violates the Personalist Norm in its most extreme intensification. The norm holds that the person is to be affirmed for their own sake — war is the organized opposite: the systematic negation of the other’s personhood.
In war the human being becomes a means to political or economic ends — an instrumentalization that extends as far as physical annihilation. The soldiers on both sides are degraded into instruments of power; the civilian population becomes “collateral damage” — a phrase that carries oblivion of the person within it.
War and Technology
Modern technology intensifies the personal-ontological problematic of war: combat drones, artificial intelligence, and lethal autonomous weapon systems make killing at a distance possible and remove the action from the immediate judgment of conscience of the agent. Responsibility becomes diffuse — yet it does not disappear: it remains with the persons who develop, deploy, and command these systems.
The Personal-Ontological Demarcation: Meaningful Human Control
The personal-ontologically decisive question is: Who decides over life and death? A decision over the life of a person can be made only by a person, not by a non-personal system. The international debate works with the concept of meaningful human control — control that must be substantial, not merely formal. The classification of degrees of autonomy makes the differentiation technically precise: the normative fault line runs between human-in-the-loop (a human decides each shot), human-on-the-loop (a human supervises with the possibility of intervention), human-in-command (a human sets the framework conditions), and fully autonomous target detection and engagement.
The Responsibility Gap
As the autonomy of technical systems increases, a responsibility gap arises (responsibility gap, Matthias 2004; Sparrow 2007): developers can appeal to the unforeseeable behavior of the system, commanders to the algorithmic target selection, operators to the lack of direct control. Personal-ontologically, this gap is an illusion: responsibility is bound to being a bearer of rational nature; it cannot be delegated to a non-personal system. Where the autonomy of technical systems makes attribution more difficult, attribution must be made institutionally and legally precise — not abandoned.
Regulation under International Law
At the international level, the UN Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems has, since 2013, been negotiating rules or a ban on such systems. From the outset the Holy See has held there a position of preventive prohibition, appealing to the inalienability of personal dignity. On 6 November 2025 the First Committee of the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution by 164 votes in favor to 6 against, aiming at a legally binding ban on certain lethal autonomous systems.
Particularly Precarious Constellations
- Combat robots and drone swarms shift the level of decision from the selection of the individual target to the algorithmic overall control, and decouple it from the individual personal decision.
- The killing of the innocent remains murder under all technical circumstances — an intrinsically evil act that no automation can relativize.
- Proportionality (means of engagement not worse than the evil) and the sparing of the innocent require a substantial personal assessment of the situation, which statistical target detection cannot replace.
War as an Expression of Collective Oblivion of the Person
War is never a merely political phenomenon — it is always also a spiritual one: a loss of insight into what the other human being is. Where this insight remains alive, where the conscience is awake, war is recognized for what it is: the gravest violation of that which makes the human being human.
Can There Be a Just War?
The question of the bellum iustum — the just war — belongs to the most difficult problems of ethics. The Personhood ontology makes possible here a precise differentiation that lapses neither into a naive pacifism nor into a normalization of war.
The Decisive Taxonomic Distinction
War is classified as a subclass of Practical Oblivion of the Person — not as an intrinsically evil act. This is philosophically significant: an intrinsically evil act (such as murder, torture, or rape) is prohibited without exception and absolutely — no intention, no circumstance, no consequence can justify it. War, by contrast, is always an evil and always a violation of the Personalist Norm. But it is not, by its object, simply and without exception morally evil in that absolute sense which excludes any differentiation according to circumstances.
At the same time, the ontology defines murder explicitly as “the direct and intentional killing of an innocent human being” — and distinguishes from this the killing in self-defense. This distinction is the ontological core of the doctrine of just war: not every killing in war is murder.
War of Aggression — Always Immoral
A war of aggression — one that, without provocation, systematically negates the dignity of the persons attacked — is the “most radical form of practical oblivion of the person.” It is, moreover, the action of an illegitimate authority that violates the Personalist Norm at the institutional level. Here there is no differentiation: a war of aggression remains, without exception, morally illegitimate.
Defense as a Duty
When an aggressor systematically violates the right to life of entire populations, an ontological dilemma arises. The legitimate authority — defined as legitimate precisely insofar as it is grounded in the common dignity of all persons and serves the common good — has the function of protecting fundamental rights. The right to life is a non-negotiable fundamental right.
The ontology knows omission as “the knowing and willing failure to act in a situation that requires action.” Omissions too are morally imputable. An authority that does not act in the face of a war of aggression commits a morally imputable omission and thereby violates the Personalist Norm toward those attacked. The obligation to protect follows from the objective value of the person.
The Tragic Collision of Norms
In the case of a war of defense, several norms collide:
- The Personalist Norm requires affirming the person for their own sake — and thus using no violence.
- The prohibition of omission makes the failure to act in the face of a systematic violation of dignity morally imputable.
- The duty of protection of the legitimate authority toward the fundamental rights of the persons entrusted to it.
- The right to life of every person — including the aggressor.
The ontology resolves this collision not by abolishing one of the norms, but through taxonomic differentiation: war is Practical Oblivion of the Person (and thus always an evil), but it is not an intrinsically evil act. Under certain circumstances, defense can be the lesser evil — not because it would be good, but because the omission would be worse.
Strict Criteria of Limitation
The ontology knows justice as an irreducible spiritual evidence — “that to each person is owed what is due to them (suum cuique).” From this follow strict criteria of proportionality:
- The harm must be certain, grave, and lasting.
- All peaceful means must have been exhausted — defense is ultima ratio.
- The use of arms must not be worse than the evil to be eliminated.
- The killing of the innocent remains murder — and thus an intrinsically evil act that is prohibited without exception.
The Dignity of the Enemy
The aggressor too possesses inalienable ontological dignity — “the necessary essential law that every person possesses inalienable ontological dignity.” Even in war, the enemy may never be reduced to a mere object. Any act of war that makes the enemy into a mere object is instrumentalization and violates the Personalist Norm. This grounds ontologically the strict criteria of limitation: proportionality, ultima ratio, the sparing of the innocent.
Reconciliation as an Ontological Demand
Peace, in the ontology, is “not merely the absence of war, but a positive state that is grounded in the recognition of the personhood and the dignity of every human being.” A mere ceasefire would be no true peace. The ontology demands reconciliation — “the process of restoring an interpersonal relationship broken by guilt,” which presupposes repentance, forgiveness, and reparation. Without reconciliation, war persists as oblivion of the person — merely in another form.
The Overall Judgment of the Personhood Ontology
The Personhood ontology makes possible the doctrine of the just war of defense through a threefold differentiation:
- Taxonomically: War is Practical Oblivion of the Person, not an intrinsically evil act — it is always an evil, but not absolutely and without exception prohibited.
- In terms of action theory: Murder (the direct, intentional killing of the innocent) is an intrinsically evil act; killing in self-defense is explicitly distinguished from it.
- Normatively: The omission of the protection of fundamental rights is morally imputable; the legitimate authority has an obligation to protect the common good.
At the same time, the ontology sets insurmountable limits: the ontological dignity of every person — including the enemy — is inalienable. Murder (the killing of the innocent) remains an intrinsically evil act. Peace demands not a mere ceasefire, but reconciliation. Every war remains the “most radical form of practical oblivion of the person.” It can be justified, but never good.
A just war of defense is not simply “permitted,” but a tragic minimum. It is the choice of the lesser evil in a situation in which every option for action violates the Personalist Norm. The ontological dignity of all those involved — the defenders, the attacked, and the aggressor — remains the immovable measure.
Captivity
Captivity is the enforced restriction of freedom of movement to a confined space. As a state, it affects the person in their bodily freedom and thereby directly touches the First Dimension of personhood.
The personalist perspective demands that even a just captivity must preserve the dignity of the captive. The captive remains Someone — a person with inalienable ontological dignity, not a mere object of punishment. Any form of captivity that systematically disregards the dignity of the person becomes practical oblivion of the person. Locomotion as an expression of freedom and self-determination is withdrawn from the captive, which makes clear the gravity of this intrusion into personal life.
Ontological Classification
Superordinate concept: State
Ontological relations:
- restricts: Freedom, Locomotion
- must preserve: Dignity
Ontological classification:
- Superclass: Practical Oblivion of the Person
- violates: Personalist Norm
- is morally illegitimate
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 40 (De bello — the doctrine of just war).
- Augustine: De civitate Dei XIX, 7 (war as evil, peace as end).
- Catechism of the Catholic Church (1997): nos. 2307–2317 (conditions of legitimate defense).