New biotechnologies have the potential to both dramatically improve human well-being and dramatically widen inequalities in well-being. This paper addresses a question that lies squarely on the fault line of these two claims: When as a matter of justice are societies obligated to include a new biotechnology in a national healthcare system? This question is approached from the standpoint of a twin aim theory of justice, in which social structures, including nation-states, have double-barreled theoretical objectives with regard to human well-being. (...) The first aim is to achieve a sufficient level of well-being in each of six core dimensions. In the special case of healthcare systems, this aim is focally but not exclusively attentive to achieving health sufficiency as one of the core dimensions. The second aim is to combat the emergence and persistence of densely woven patterns of systematic disadvantage that tend to undermine the achievement of a sufficient level of health and the other core elements of well-being of some persons and groups. Judgments about entitlements to health related resources, including new biotechnologies, are made in light of a threshold notion of health sufficiency. What is enough or sufficient health? The answer that is defended here is that sufficient health is enough health for a decent human life, understood as enough health to live a full life course without preventable, significant functional disability or decrement in health, or treatable pain or suffering. When a state must include a new biotechnology in its national healthcare system is also influenced by ancillary concerns about the connection between health and other core dimensions of well-being. What counts as a significant functional impairment or health decrement is thus explicated, in part, in relation to the theory’s sufficiency aim for the other essential dimensions of well-being, and thus for a decent life, overall. Those elements of health that play a critical role in the experience of sufficient reasoning, affiliation, security, respect and self determination are especially important; any loss of health function or capacity that threatens the individual’s prospects for sufficiency in these other dimensions, including the relational egalitiarian concerns they entail, constitutes a significant functional impairment. Within national borders, individuals are thus entitled to those health-related goods and services that are essential for a sufficiency of each of the dimensions of well-being; with regard to self determination and respect, what is sufficient by way of guaranteed access to specific goods and services is going to depend on the implications of such access for where an individual stands in relation to her co-nationals. The content of any entitlement to health-related goods and services is also necessarily dynamic. What can be done for health and the other core dimensions of well-being as a function of technological innovation and diffusion is in constant flux. The paper concludes by considering the implications of this analysis for the conditions under which states are obligated to include access in their healthcare systems to one biotechnology, deep brain stimulation. (shrink)

this paper advances a novel account of part of what justifies killing in war, grounded in the duties we owe to our loved ones to protect them from the severe harms with which war threatens them. It discusses the foundations of associative duties, then identifies the sorts of relationships, and the specific duties that they ground, which can be relevant to the ethics of war. It explains how those associa- tive duties can justify killing in theory—in particular how they can (...) justify overrid- ing the rights to life of some of those who must be killed to win a war. It then shows how these duties can be operationalised in practice: first, showing how soldiers who fight on behalf of their community can act on reasons that apply to the members of that community; second, showing that the argument from associative duties does not prove too much—in particular, that it does not license the intentional killing of noncombatants in war. (shrink)

A variety of ethical objections have been raised against the military employment of uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs, drones). Some of these objections are technological concerns over UAVs abilities’ to function on par with their inhabited counterparts. This paper sets such concerns aside and instead focuses on supposed objections to the use of UAVs in principle. I examine several such objections currently on offer and show them all to be wanting. Indeed, I argue that we have a duty to protect an (...) agent engaged in a justified act from harm to the greatest extent possible, so long as that protection does not interfere with the agent's ability to act justly. UAVs afford precisely such protection. Therefore, we are obligated to employ UAV weapon systems if it can be shown that their use does not significantly reduce a warfighter's operational capability. Of course, if a given military action is unjustified to begin with, then carrying out that act via UAVs is wrong, just as it would be with any weapon. But the point of this paper is to show that there is nothing wrong in principle with using a UAV and that, other things being equal, using such technology is, in fact, obligatory. (shrink)

Yitzhak Benbaji defends the view that soldiers on both the ‘just’ and the ‘unjust’ side in a war have the same liberty right to kill one another, because soldiers have ‘tacitly accepted’ the egalitarian laws of war and thereby waived their moral rights not to be attacked. I argue that soldiers on the ‘just’ side have not accepted the egalitarian laws of war; even if they had, they would not thereby have waived their moral rights not to be attacked. Moreover, (...) the egalitarian laws of war and ‘the war convention’ are not fair and mutually beneficial, and so would not be accepted. Benbaji does not come to grips with the problem of the killing of civilians in war: his idea that states could waive the moral rights of their citizens is untenable. (shrink)

War should be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political communities. Thus, fisticuffs between individual persons do not count as a war, nor does a gang fight, nor does a feud on the order of the Hatfields versus the McCoys. War is a phenomenon which occurs only between political communities, defined as those entities which either are states or intend to become states (in order to allow for civil war). Classical war is international war, a war (...) between different states, like the two World Wars. But just as frequent is war within a state between rival groups or communities, like the American Civil War. Certain political pressure groups, like terrorist organizations, might also be considered “political communities,” in that they are associations of people with a political purpose and, indeed, many of them aspire to statehood or to influence the development of statehood in certain lands. (shrink)

In recent decades, revisionist philosophers have radically challenged the orthodox just war theory championed by Michael Walzer in the 1970s. This review considers two new contributions to the debate, Benbaji and Statman’s War by Agreement and Ripstein’s Kant and the Law of War, which aim to defend the traditional war convention against the revisionist attack. The review investigates the two books’ respective contractarian and Kantian foundations for the war convention, their contrast with the revisionist challenge, and their points of disagreement. (...) Building on the responses to Ripstein in the edited collection, The Public Uses of Coercion and Force, and providing an overview of the broader debate, the review offers an analysis of the two books’ positions on the relationship between the morality and laws of war, on just cause and the crime of aggression, and on the equality between just and unjust combatants. (shrink)

Las aeronaves remotamente tripuladas han tenido una incidencia creciente en los conflictos armados contemporáneos, y es esperable que ésta no haga sino aumentar en el futuro cercano. A menudo han sido presentados como “revolucionarios” y tanto resistidos como defendidos a ultranza en la literatura especializada. Este artículo procura analizar cómo los drones nos obligan a repensar el marco normativo en virtud del cual consideramos el uso de la fuerza permisible. En particular, examina cómo algunos de sus principales rasgos inciden no (...) solamente en la aplicación de los principios de necesidad y proporcionalidad, sino también en su precisión conceptual, y argumenta que las probabilidades de éxito forman parte sustancial de una concepción plausible del principio de proporcionalidad. El artículo cierra considerando el argumento de Walzer según el cual, dado que el daño causado es finalmente responsabilidad de quienes usan a civiles inocentes como escudos humanos, y no de quienes operan los drones, el hecho de que puedan causar una cantidad desproporcionada de daño es irrelevante a la hora de evaluar su permisibilidad. (shrink)

Most philosophers writing on the ethics of war endorse “reductivist individualism,” a view that holds both that killing in war is subject to the very same principles of ordinary morality ; and that morality concerns individuals and their rights, and does not treat collectives as having any special status. I argue that this commitment to individualism poses problems for this view in the case of national defense. More specifically, I argue that the main strategies for defending individualist approaches to national (...) defense either fail by their own lights or yield deeply counterintuitive implications. I then offer the foundations for a collectivist approach. I argue that such an approach must do justice to the collective goods that properly constituted states make possible and protect through certain acts of defensive war; and that any such picture of national defense must make room for some form of national partiality. (shrink)

Traditional just war doctrine holds that political leaders are morally responsible for the decision to initiate war, while individual soldiers should be judged solely by their conduct in war. According to this view, soldiers fighting in an unjust war of aggression and soldiers on the opposing side seeking to defend their country are morally equal as long as each obeys the rules of combat. Revisionist scholars, however, maintain that soldiers who fight for an unjust cause bear at least some responsibility (...) for advancing an immoral end, even if they otherwise fight ethically. This article examines the attitudes of the American public regarding the moral equality of combatants. Utilizing an original survey experiment, we find that the public's moral reasoning is generally more consistent with that of the revisionists than with traditional just war theory. Americans in our study judged soldiers who participate in unjust wars as less ethical than soldiers in just wars, even when their battlefield conduct is identical, and a large proportion supported harsh punishments for soldiers simply for participating in unjust wars. We also find, however, that much of the American public is willing to extend the moral license of just cause significantly further than revisionist scholars advocate: half of the Americans in our survey were willing to allow an unambiguous war crime—a massacre of innocent women and children—to go unpunished when the act was committed by soldiers fighting for a just cause. Our findings suggest that incorporation of revisionist principles into the laws of war would reinforce dangerous moral intuitions encouraging the killing of civilians. (shrink)

Debates over how best to ensure appropriate conduct in battle typically draw a binary distinction between rule compliance and rule violation. This framing is problematic, excluding a critical third element of battlefield conduct, supererogation—that is, positive acts that go beyond what is demanded by the explicit rules of war. This article investigates this moral category of action; specifically, situations in which combatants refrain from taking the life of an enemy despite their moral and legal license to do so. It first (...) considers the moral tension between the duty of combatants to kill and battlefield mercy, and goes on to explore the factors that motivate the latter. The article then shifts to consider the significance of supererogation to the ongoing efforts to moderate the conduct of contemporary war. As the article illustrates, supererogatory restraint is constituted by values that when cultivated also incentivize adherence to the more explicit rules and standards of the battlefield. This is demonstrated through analysis of the conduct of Western special forces. The concept of supererogation is of further use when evaluating the origins and implications of “moral injury.” This is verified empirically in the context of armed unmanned aerial vehicles. (shrink)

The war in just war theory Just war theory has an ancient pedigree. While the substantive norms and application of those norms have always been debated, the debate today is entirely polarized. So polarized, that there seems to be a ‘war’ raging in just war theory. On one side are representatives of Walzer’s conventional position and on the other side so-called revisionists as McMahan, Fabre, Rodin, and Frowe. This paper offers a critical analysis of that dichotomy. While most of the (...) debate is focused on the substantive level (the norms itself), I focus here on the conceptual level (terminology and character of the positions) and meta-level (the underlying theoretical premises). My aim is threefold: to assist readers in understanding contemporary contributions to just war theory; to facilitate a truce between both camps by highlighting respective strengths and weaknesses and by exposing a certain division of labor; and to suggest improvements for both positions. (shrink)

Contemporary just war theory is divided into two broad camps: revisionists and traditionalists. Traditionalists seek to provide moral foundations for something close to current international law, and in particular the laws of armed conflict. Although they propose improvements, they do so cautiously. Revisionists argue that international law is at best a pragmatic fiction—it lacks deeper moral foundations. In this article, I present the contemporary history of analytical just war theory, from the origins of contemporary traditionalist just war theory in Michael (...) Walzer's work to the revisionist critique of Walzer and the subsequent revival of traditionalism. I discuss central questions of methodology, as well as consider the morality of resorting to war and the morality of conduct in war. I show that although the revisionists exposed philosophical shortcomings in Walzer's arguments, their radical conclusions should prompt us not to reject the broad contemporary consensus, but instead to seek better arguments to underpin it. (shrink)

Interest in just war theory has boomed in recent years, as a revisionist school of thought has challenged the orthodoxy of international law, most famously defended by Michael Walzer [1977]. These revisionist critics have targeted the two central principles governing the conduct of war (jus in bello): combatant equality and noncombatant immunity. The first states that combatants face the same permissions and constraints whether their cause is just or unjust. The second protects noncombatants from intentional attack. In response to these (...) critics, some philosophers have defended aspects of the old orthodoxy on novel grounds. Revisionists counter. As things stand, the prospects for progress are remote. In this paper, we offer a way forward. We argue that exclusive focus on first-order moral principles, such as combatant equality and noncombatant immunity, has led revisionist and orthodox just war theorists to engage in “proxy battles.” Their first-order moral disagreements are at least partly traceable to second-order disagreements about the nature and purpose of political theory. These deeper disputes have been central to the broader discipline of political theory for several years; we hope that bringing them to bear on the ethics of war will help us move beyond the present impasse. (shrink)

In a recent article Duncan Purves, Ryan Jenkins, and B. J. Strawser argue that in order for a decision in war to be just, or indeed the decision to resort to war to be just, it must be the case that the decision is made for the right reasons. Furthermore, they argue that this requirement holds regardless of how much good is produced by said action. In this essay I argue that their argument is flawed, in that it mistakes what (...) makes an agent morally good for what makes an act morally good. I argue that the main thrust of Purves et al.’s argument in fact undermines the conclusion they wish to draw, and that the reasons for one’s action do not make an in principle difference to the morality of actions in war. I further argue that this position undermines the traditional ad bellum just war constraint of right intention, and that the morality of actions in war is, at core, only concerned with outcomes. I conclude by clarifying that one’s reasons for action do in fact matter when deciding to enter war or kill in war, but only because one’s reasons significantly impact the way in which one acts. The purpose of this paper is to clear the theoretical space by showing why intentions/reasons do not in principle matter when assessing the morality of war (or killing), but this should not be taken as an argument that we should ignore intentions/reasons altogether. (shrink)

In light of the enormous suffering brought about by war, war might be justified only if the benefit it yields is significant enough, namely, a clear and durable victory over the enemy. The logic of this argument leads to a Clausewitz-style war of “annihilation.” I argue that the best way to justify the ending of war short of such annihilation is by relying on a contractarian view of jus ex bello. I conclude by exploring the implications of this view to (...) warfare in which no effective social contract is in place. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relation between the right to self-defense against an innocent attacker and the notion of moral luck. It argues that those who accept the existence of such a right rely on the assumption that mere agency makes a significant moral difference – which is precisely the assumption that underlies the view held by believers in moral luck. Those who believe in the right to self-defense against innocent attackers are thus committed to the (...) idea of moral luck much more than they usually acknowledge. The paper also argues that the arguments offered in support of moral luck, in particular the one based on the relation between agency and self-identity, might help to shed light on the rather puzzling above right. (shrink)

This paper surveys the most important recent debates within the ethics of war. Sections 2 and 3 examine the principles governing the resort to war (jus ad bellum) and the principles governing conduct in war (jus in bello). In Section 4, we turn to the moral guidelines governing the ending and aftermath of war (jus post bellum). Finally, in Section 5 we look at recent debates on whether the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello can be evaluated independently (...) of each other. (shrink)