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In my last column, I argued that we cannot suspend the moral requirement to love our neighbors in wartime. Even the enemy soldiers whom the Christian must reluctantly kill are precious in God's sight. The column provoked such an interesting range of e-mails (pro and con) that I want to further pursue the subject of war in Christian thought.

In an essay entitled "War and Massacre," philosopher Thomas Nagel asks us to envision a conversation between two soldiers on the battlefield. Each seeks to explain to the other why he must be killed. This scenario reminds us that we must always justify so serious a moral act as killing. We cannot do it until we are persuaded, morally, that it is necessary.

The criterion of necessity is a difficult one, and the early Christians struggled with it. They knew that Christians must not kill casually. Many believed that Christians may not ever kill. Today, most Christians—like most other people—accept killing (even if reluctantly) when grim necessity forces upon us a war we would rather avoid.

For example, most of us agree that war is morally permissible to defend one's own country against aggression. There are difficult questions still. (What counts as aggression? May one attack before the enemy strikes?) But wide consensus exists on the general principle of self-defense.

The more difficult question, and one that increasingly confronts the world, is the justice of going to war to protect not our own people but someone else's. In other words, if Christian morality will permit Country A to fight Country B if Country B attacks it, will it allow Country A to fight Country B if Country B attacks Country C? Or what if Country B is slaughtering only its own people? May Country A go to war to protect the people of Country B against their own government?

Plainly this question arises today with what President Bush described at the United Nations in September as genocide in Darfur, Sudan. Earlier Secretary of State Colin Powell and other leaders across the political spectrum made the same point. It also arose in the late 1990s during the Hutu slaughter of the Tutsi in Rwanda, which Samantha Power, prize-winning author of A Problem from Hell, described as history's fastest rate of murder.

Meeting Nagel's test seems fairly simple. The soldier of Country A can tell the soldier of Country B, "I must reluctantly use force because your government is slaughtering its people." At the same time, one can immediately see a problem. If Country B is killing its own people, Country A will have to invade Country B. That is, Country A will have to commit an act of war itself.

The literature on just-war theory refers to this conundrum as the problem of "humanitarian" war. This does indeed present a moral puzzle. It might seem obvious that Country A ought to intervene to stop the killing. The trouble is, governments attack their own people so often that Country A might find itself constantly at war.

In cases of genocide, we often hear opponents of unilateral action say that it is up to the world community to act. But this argument touches only expediency, not morality. We can well imagine a war that is morally imperative even though every country in the world lines up against it. We can also imagine a war that is morally prohibited even though every country supports it. If protecting a people against the ravages of their own sovereign is indeed a matter of moral urgency, one cannot shirk it on the ground that others do not agree.

Indeed, one might argue that there is a provincialism, if not selfishness, in saying that it is moral for me to defend my own people but not someone else's. In much the same way, my right to defend myself against an attacker on the street also gives me the right to defend the fellow next to me.

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November 2004, Vol. 48, No. 11