This chapter aims to locate the critical juncture when securitization is – from a moral point of view – not merely permitted (and thus optional) but obligatory (mandatory). This chapter argues that securitization is morally obligatory (pro tanto) when ‘must cause’ is satisfied. This is the case when would-be securitizing actors have tried relevant less harmful alternatives and when these have failed to satisfy just cause. This view is in line with supererogationism a philosophical position that sees value in keeping morality – where possible – free from prescriptive behaviour whereby every good and right generates a moral obligation. It is argued that the value of autonomy that allows relevant actors (limited) freedom to choose on how to respond to a just cause for securitization diminishes as certainty that securitization is the best response increases. Certainty increases subject to evidence that less harmful options than securitization do not work. This chapter goes on to discuss must cause in detail on six illustrative hypothetical examples of different threat types, including drought disaster, cyberattack, and climate disaster.

Agape-justice conflicts provide unique opportunities for growth in supernatural excellence. There are “no tidy answers” in sorting through competing duties of justice and agape. However, justice’s obligees who hold strong legal and moral claims can voluntarily and generously choose to forego their claim-rights in favor of those who have none—agape’s beneficiaries. If we can give of ourselves with alacrity, then, even the most intractable agape-justice conflicts can be resolved with the adjudication of last resort—to love as Christ loves. Doing so leads to growth in Christified agape, that is, caritas. Such self-giving dissolves the competing claims of agape and justice.

Perfect duties are deemed to have priority over imperfect duties. We can rank order competing moral duties in a continuum of obligatoriness. Listing them in descending order of obligatoriness and stringency, we have strict legal dues, relational moral obligations, general moral obligations, and supererogation. Most agape-justice conflicts lie along one of three fault lines in this continuum, namely (1) legal debt versus moral debt; (2) particular moral duties versus general moral duties; and (3) legal and moral debt versus supererogatory, self-sacrificial beneficence. Justice requires; it demands. In contrast, agape does not require or demand, but elicits and entices.

In Purgatory where Dante learns how all the purposes of the journey thus far which had progressed from the terrifying dark mountainside, through Hell and into Purgatory, are achieved in his finally passing beyond the whole purgatorial mentality itself into a place of the recovery of the original innocence of Eden. Here Dante learns from Beatrice that the burdens of sin can be finally laid down in the Earthly Paradise, and that he should now have learned, at last, how to smile. For here, she says, sin no longer has any place on the agenda of Dante’s recovery, which takes the form of a redemptive act of memory, recalling the innocence lost in Eden; and now, with the recovery of that true memory, he is now able truly to narrate the journey thus far. Now he can write the Comedy.

This chapter argues that the case for just redistributive wars is ambiguous. It looks through the standard sufficient conditions for just war theory: there is reason to believe that the severity of global poverty is sufficient to be a just cause for war given its comparison with crimes against humanity and interpreting the definition of aggression; the question of legitimate authority is murkier, there is an acceptance that unjust state have the right to self-defence against aggressors, but the likelihood of unjust states waging a war in this context seems unrealistic; the question of last resort is difficult to assess but there is at least a case to make that in the face of intransigent non-compliance all reasonable choices are exhausted; reasonable probability of success is difficult to assess because reasonability is contingent and there are numerous examples of intuitively just wars being fought with long odds; finally, proportionality seems hard to discount even if the burdens are high, because the status quo is so onerous. The case for just war seems vaguely plausible, until it collides with reality where the asymmetry of power between affluent and poor states makes defeat inevitable for the latter.