Gregory Reichberg’s argument against my reading of the classical just war theorists falsely assumes that if just cause is unilateral, then there is no moral equality of combatants. This assumption is plausible if we assume an individualist framework. However, the classical theorists accepted quasi-Aristotelian, communitarian social ontologies and theories of justice. For them, the political community is ontologically and morally prior to the private individual. The classical just war theorists build their theories within this framework. They argue that just war (...) is only waged by supra-individual political communities for irreducibly social ends. War by private individuals for private ends is always unjust. The ends sought in just war presuppose the justice of a hierarchy of authority over war such that the soldier is obligated to serve in war upon the command of his legitimate authority. In this way, the classical theorists accept a unilateral theory of just cause and a division of authority over war that entails the possibility of the moral equality of combatants. (shrink)

The possibility that autonomous weapons will be deployed on the battlefields of the future raises the challenge of determining who can be held responsible for how these weapons act. Robert Sparrow has argued that it would be impossible to attribute responsibility for autonomous robots' actions to their creators, their commanders, or the robots themselves. This essay reaches a much different conclusion. It argues that the problem of determining responsibility for autonomous robots can be solved by addressing it within the context (...) of the military chain of command. The military hierarchy is a system of distributing responsibility between decision makers on different levels and constraining autonomy. If autonomous weapons are employed as agents operating within this system, then responsibility for their actions can be attributed to their creators and their civilian and military superiors. (shrink)

Jeff McMahan has argued against the moral equivalence of combatants (MEC) by developing a liability-based account of killing in warfare. On this account, a combatant is morally liable to be killed only if doing so is an effective means of reducing or eliminating an unjust threat to which that combatant is contributing. Since combatants fighting for a just cause generally do not contribute to unjust threats, they are not morally liable to be killed; thus MEC is mistaken. The problem, however, (...) is that many unjust combatants contribute very little to the war in which they participate—often no more than the typical civilian. Thus either the typical civilian is morally liable to be killed, or many unjust combatants are not morally liable to be killed. That is, the liability based account seems to force us to choose between a version of pacifism, and total war. Seth Lazar has called this “The Responsibility Dilemma”. But I will argue that we can salvage a liability-based account of war—one which rejects MEC—by grounding the moral liability of unjust combatants not only in their individual contributions but also in their complicit participation in that war. On this view, all enlistees, regardless of the degree to which they contribute to an unjust war, are complicitously liable to be killed if it is necessary to avert an unjust threat posed by their side. This collectivized liability based account I develop avoids the Responsibility Dilemma unlike individualized liability-based accounts of the sort developed by McMahan. (shrink)

According to the dominant position in the just war tradition from Augustine to Anscombe and beyond, there is no "moral equality of combatants." That is, on the traditional view the combatants participating in a justified war may kill their enemy combatants participating in an unjustified war - but not vice versa (barring certain qualifications). I shall argue here, however, that in the large number of wars (and in practically all modern wars) where the combatants on the justified side violate the (...) rights of innocent people ("collateral damage"), these combatants are in fact liable to attack by the combatants on the unjustified side. I will support this view with a rights-based account of liability to attack and then defend it against a number of objections raised in particular by Jeff McMahan. The result is that the thesis of the moral equality of combatants holds good for a large range of armed conflicts while the opposing thesis is of very limited practical relevance. (shrink)

Recent work in the ethics of war has done much to challenge the collectivism of the convention-based, Walzerian just war theory. In doing so, it raises the question of when it is permissible for soldiers to resort to force. This article considers this issue and, in doing so, argues that the rejection of collectivism in just war should go further still. More specifically, it defends the ‘Individual-Centric Approach’ to the deep morality of war, which asserts that the justifiability of an (...) individual’s contribution to the war, rather than the justifiability of the war more generally, determines the moral acceptability of their participation. It then goes on to present five implications of the Individual-Centric Approach, including for individual liability to attack in war. (shrink)

Some contemporary Just War theorists, like Jeff McMahan, have recently built upon an individual right of self-defense to articulate moral rules of war that are at odds with commonly accepted views. For instance, they argue that in principle combatants who fight on the unjust side ought to be liable to punishment on that basis alone. Also, they reject the conclusion that combatants fighting on both sides are morally equal. In this paper, I argue that these theorists overextend their self-defense analysis (...) when it comes to the punishment of unjust combatants, and I show how in an important sense just and unjust combatants are morally equal. I contend that the individualistic and quid pro quo perspective of the self-defense analysis fails to consider properly how the international community, morally speaking, ought to treat combatants, and I set forth four elements of justice applicable to war, which, together, support the conclusion that in principle the international community should not take on the activity of punishing combatants solely for fighting on the unjust side. (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)

The paper examines the justification of warfare. The main thesis is that war is very difficult to justify, and justification by invoking “justice” is not the way to succeed it. Justification and justness are very different venues: while the first attempts to explain the nature of war and offer possible schemes of resolution, the second aims to endorse a specific type of warfare as correct and hence allowed – which is the crucial part of “just war theory.” However, “just war (...) theory,” somewhat Manichean in its nature, has very deep flaws. Its final result is criminalization of war, which reduces warfare to police action, and finally implies a very strange proviso that one side has a right to win. All that endangers the distinction between ius ad bellum and ius in bello, and destroys the collective character of warfare. Justification of war is actually quite different – it starts from the definition of war as a kind of conflict which cannot be solved peacefully, but for which there is mutual understanding that it cannot remain unresolved. The aim of war is not justice, but peace, i.e. either a new articulation of peace, or a restoration of the status quo ante. Additionally, unlike police actions, the result of war cannot be known or assumed in advance, giving war its main feature: the lack of control over the future. Control over the future, predictability, is a feature of peace. This might imply that war is a consequence of failed peace, or inability to maintain peace. The explanation of this inability forms the justification of war. Justice is always an important part of it, but justification cannot be reduced to it. The logic contained here refers to ius ad bellum, while ius in bello is relative to various parameters of sensitivity prevalent in a particular time, with the purpose to make warfare more humane and less expensive. (shrink)

Following international humanitarian law, soldiers who are authorized by their states to fight wars of aggression have a legal right to kill enemy soldiers, and even enemy civilians, as long as they respect such jus in bello norms as discrimination and proportionality. I criticize a variety of arguments in support of this “combatant’s privilege” of aggressor soldiers that maintain that these soldiers have a moral right to kill or are not culpable for their wrongful killing. I also contest some arguments (...) in support of the view that even though soldiers executing wars of aggression may be morally liable for their wrongful killing, it is impractical or dangerous to seek to change international law so that they would also be held legally liable. In conclusion, I cautiously articulate some conditions under which combatant’s privilege should not be legally granted and those who fight unjust wars should be prosecuted. (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)

Rights-based approaches and consequentialist approaches to ethics are often seen as being diametrically opposed to one another. In one sense, they are. In another sense, however, they can be reconciled: a ‘global’ form of consequentialism might supply consequentialist foundations for a derivative morality that is non-consequentialist, and perhaps rights-based, in content. By way of case study to illustrate how this might work, I survey what a global consequentialist should think about a recent dispute between Jeff McMahan and Henry Shue on (...) the morality and laws of war. (shrink)

Conventional modern just war theory is fundamentally incoherent. On the one hand, the theory contains a theory of public war wherein ethical responsibility for the justice of war belongs uniquely to political sovereigns while subjects, including soldiers, are obligated to serve in war upon the sovereign’s command. On the other hand, the theory contains a theory of discrimination which presupposes that participants in war, including soldiers, are responsible for the justice of the wars they fight. Moreover, these two components are (...) derived from two inconsistent visions of political justice. The theory of public war, it turns out, is derived from a theory of justice that places the value of political society conceived of as a supra-individual communal entity above the value of the private individual. The theory of discrimination, however, is derived from a theory of justice that places the value of the private individual above that of political society. This inconsistency is revealed by analyzing the theories of Vitoria, Grotius, and Walzer. Appreciating this problem also helps situate the recent revisionist critiques of conventional just war theory. (shrink)

The principle of noncombatant immunity prohibits warring parties from intentionally targeting noncombatants. I explicate the moral version of this view and its criticisms by reductive individualists; they argue that certain civilians on the unjust side are morally liable to be lethally targeted to forestall substantial contributions to that war. I then argue that reductivists are mistaken in thinking that causally contributing to an unjust war is a necessary condition for moral liability. Certain noncontributing civilians—notably, war-profiteers—can be morally liable to be (...) lethally targeted. Thus, the principle of noncombatant immunity is mistaken as a moral (though not necessarily as a legal) doctrine, not just because some civilians contribute substantially, but because some unjustly enriched civilians culpably fail to discharge their restitutionary duties to those whose victimization made the unjust enrichment possible. Consequently, the moral criterion for lethal liability in war is even broader than reductive individualists have argued. (shrink)

Those of us who are not pacifists face an obvious challenge. Common-sense morality contains a stringent constraint on intentional killing, yet war involves homicide on a grand scale. If wars are to be morally justified, it needs be shown how this conflict can be reconciled. A major fault line running throughout the contemporary just war literature divides two approaches to attempting this reconciliation. On a ‘reductivist’ view, defended most prominently by Jeff McMahan, the conflict is largely illusory, since such killing (...) can be justified by aggregating individuals’ ordinary permissions to use force in self- and other-defence. In opposition, a rival ‘nonreductivist’ approach holds that these considerations are insufficient for the task. One prominent version of non-reductivism grounds the permission to kill in combatants’ membership in certain kinds of group or association. The key claim is that participation in certain morally important relationships can provide an independent source of permission for killing in war. This paper argues that non-reductivism should be rejected. It does so by pushing a dilemma onto non-reductivists: if they are successful in showing that the relevant relationships can generate permissions to kill in war, they must also jettison the most intuitive restrictions on conduct in war—the constraint on intentionally killing morally innocent non-combatants most saliently. Since this conclusion is unacceptable, non-reductivism should be rejected. (shrink)

Contrary to what has been alleged, the moral equivalence of combatants (MEC) is not a doctrine that was expressly developed by the traditional theorists of just war. Working from the axiom that just cause is unilateral, they did not embrace a conception of public war that included MEC. Indeed, MEC was introduced in the early fifteenth century as a challenge to the then reigning just war paradigm. It does not follow, however, that the distinction between private and public war had (...) no place in the traditional teaching. Thomas Aquinas and his successors did not analyse just war by extrapolation from the related idea of self-defense. Rather, they likened just war to a legal proceeding that could solely be undertaken by persons possessed of legitimate authority. For this reason, just war was first and foremost public war. Private war was deemed ?war? only in a secondary and reduced sense of the term. It was accordingly understood that public war should be waged and its morality judged by reference to a set of norms that are not directly reducible to those governing private self (and other)-defense. (shrink)

Through a critical engagement with Jeremy Waldron’s work, as well as the work of other writers, I offer an account of the relative scope of the morality of war, the laws of war, and war crimes. I propose an instrumentalist account of the laws of war, according to which the laws of war should help soldiers conform to the morality of war. The instrumentalist account supports Waldron’s conclusion that the laws of war justifiably prohibit attacks on civilians even if it (...) turns out that some civilians lack a moral right not to be killed. Importantly, the instrumentalist account also offers what Waldron thinks impossible: a non-consequentialist defense of the failure of the laws of war to prohibit the killing of nonthreatening combatants. Finally, I argue that new war crimes can be broader than the morality of war as well as established laws of war and that many of the arguments for defining war crimes more narrowly than either the morality of war or the laws of war are unconvincing. In all of these ways, I hope to carry forward Waldron’s project of exploring the relationship between law and morality in war. (shrink)

In this paper, I suggest that for some proposed solutions to global justice problems, incompatibility with the necessary features of international law is a reason to reject them. I illustrate this by discussing the problem raised by the case of unjust combatants, that is, combatants lacking a just cause for war. I argue that the principle of inequality of combatants, which suggests that we ought to prohibit those without a just cause for war from fighting, is not only a bad (...) international legal principle, but also a bad principle of global justice. (shrink)

This essay addresses one of the central questions in the ongoing debate about just war theory: are soldiers morally responsible for serving in unjust wars? Francisco de Vitoria addressed this question in the sixteenth century using the concepts of invincible and vincible ignorance. He excused soldiers serving in unjust wars, if they did not know the war was unjust and if they did not have the means to overcome their ignorance; if they had the means, they were morally culpable. In (...) modern just war theory, ignorance is still used both to blame and excuse military service in unjust wars. This essay identifies ten different ways that scholars have used ignorance to argue about the moral responsibilities of soldiers. It then applies the different meanings of ignorance to soldiers serving in Western nations and, using Vitoria’s means tests, evaluates if modern soldiers do indeed have the means to overcome their ignorance. Since many soldiers do have the means, invincible ignorance should no longer be used as an excuse for their service in unjust wars; furthermore, soldiers may, in fact, be morally culpable for serving in them. (shrink)

Purpose: The remarkable increase of sophistication of artificial intelligence in recent years has already led to its widespread use in martial applications, the potential of so-called 'killer robots' ceasing to be a subject of fiction. -/- Approach: Virtually without exception, this potential has generated fear, as evidenced by a mounting number of academic articles calling for the ban on the development and deployment of lethal autonomous robots (LARs). In the present paper I start with an analysis of the existing ethical (...) objections to LARs. -/- Findings: My analysis shows the contemporary thought to be deficient in philosophical rigour, these deficiencies leading to an alternative thesis. (shrink)

The fifteen new essays collected in this volume address questions concerning the ethics of self-defense, most centrally when and to what extent the use of defensive force, especially lethal force, can be justified. Scholarly interest in this topic reflects public concern stemming from controversial cases of the use of force by police, and military force exercised in the name of defending against transnational terrorism. The contributors pay special attention to determining when a threat is liable to defensive harm, though doubts (...) about this emphasis are also raised. The legitimacy of so-called "stand your ground" policies and laws is also addressed. This volume will be of great interest to readers in moral, political, and legal philosophy. (shrink)

Revisionist just war scholarship employs the rigors of analytical philosophy to make arguments about the deep morality of war. Accepting the individual and cosmopolitan are paramount to making sense of war as many revisionists do, this essay looks outside the just war canon to Montaigne—a sixteenth century French humanist hailed for his exploration of the self and cosmopolitan musings—for alternative insights. It explores how Montaigne was read during the Second World War by three intellectuals to make sense of war: Stefan (...) Zweig, Jean Guéhenno, and François Mauriac. While Montaigne’s skepticism and turn to the self as an act of preservation was, in the 1930s, rejected as a strategy to combat rising authoritarianism in Europe by philosophers such as Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt school, the thinkers studied here shed light on Montaigne as a source of active humanism based in reflective action that leads to Resistance. Building on trends in just war thinking that call for paying greater attention to the lived experience of war, the article identifies several psychological and moral processes—the inward turn, the cosmopolitan gaze, casting an existential anchor, and the humanist’s wager—to shed light on the doubt-laden process of making individual moral choices amidst the rising dogmatic forces that war tends to impose. (shrink)

McMahan argues that justification defeats liability to defensive attack (which would undermine the thesis of the "moral equality of combatants"). In response, I argue, first, that McMahan’s attempt to burden the contrary claim with counter-intuitive implications fails; second, that McMahan’s own position implies that the innocent civilians do not have a right of self-defense against justified attackers, which neither coheres with his description of the case (the justified bombers infringe the rights of the civilians) nor with his views about rights (...) forfeiture, is unsupported by independent argument, and, in any case, extremely implausible and counter-intuitive; and third, that his interpretation of the insulin case confuses the normative relations between an agent’s justification and non-liability on the one hand and permissible or impermissible interference with the agent’s act on the other. Similar confusions, fourth, affect his discussion of liability to compensation. (shrink)

In his recent book Killing in War, McMahan develops a powerful argument for the view that soldiers on opposite sides of a conflict are not morally on a par once the war has started: whether they have the right to kill depends on the justness of their war. In line with just war theory in general, McMahan scrutinizes the ethics of killing the enemy. In this article, I accept McMahan's account, but bring it to bear on the entirely neglected, but (...) nevertheless interesting, issue of what the military call killings or, as I refer to such acts here, internecine war killings. I focus on the case of the soldier who is ordered by his officer, at gunpoint, to go into action or to kill innocent civilians, and who kills his officer in self-defence. I argue that, at the bar of McMahan's account of the right to kill in self-defence, the officer lacks a justification for attacking the soldier as a means of enforcing his order, and the soldier thus sometimes (but not always) has the right to kill his officer should the latter so act. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the use of military robots in terms of the jus in bello concepts of discrimination and proportionality. It argues that while robots may make mistakes, they do not suffer from most of the impairments that interfere with human judgment on the battlefield. Although robots are imperfect weapons, they can exercise as much restraint as human soldiers, if not more. Robots can be used in a way that is consistent with just war theory when they are programmed to (...) avoid using force against all but the most clearly hostile targets. However, the essay also cautions against using robots for counterinsurgency because they may alienate people in the contested area and lead to an escalation of hostilities. (shrink)

Can the global poor wage a just redistributive war against the global rich? The moral norms governing the use of force are usually considered to be very strict. Nonetheless, some philosophers have recently argued that violating duties of global justicecanbe a just cause for war. This paper discusses redistributive wars. It shows that the strength of these arguments is contingent on the underlying account of global distributive justice. The paper focuses on the “doing harm argument,” under the assumption that the (...) alternative “allowing harm argument” is a more difficult route to justify redistributive wars. After highlighting several preliminary problems, the paper breaks down and assesses in depth the “doing harm argument”: the empirical premise, the rights violation that constitutes the wrong, liability and degrees of responsibility, and the conditions for justified self-defense. By drawing on principles reflected in criminal law, this paper argues that a general “doing harm argument” for redistributive wars is unconvincing, while a reinterpretation of that argument could theoretically give rise to a just cause for war. (shrink)

International and domestic law offer a study in contrasts: States' legal obligations often depend on their consent to specific international legal norms, whereas domestic law applies to individuals with or without their consent; enforcement in international law is weak and, for many international treaties, non‐existent, whereas states spend considerable resources to create centralized coercive enforcement mechanisms; and international law is characterized by much less institutional differentiation and specialization of functions than domestic legal systems are. These differences have invited a number (...) of skeptical challenges to international law, 3 of which we explore in this essay. The first points to 1 or more of the deviations of international law's institutional structure from that of a modern state's legal system as a basis for denying that international law is really “law.” Central to the debates over international law's status as law are concerns about whether and why the concepts of law inherited from domestic legal systems should serve as the blueprint for theorizing law in general and international law in particular. The second skeptical challenge targets international law's legitimacy. It claims that we lack reasons to treat international legal norms or the exercise of political power by international institutions, as anything other than an attempt by states to advance their national interests. If this challenge succeeds, states and other subjects of international law have merely prudential reasons to comply with it rather than a moral duty to obey it. Following a brief description of recent debates over how we ought to understand the concept of legitimacy when used to assess international political practices or global governance, we survey several possible bases for a moral duty to obey or respect international law. These include state consent, instrumental accounts of legitimate authority, and global democracy. The third set of challenges focuses on the relationship between state sovereignty and international law. International rules and institutions often make demands for reform affecting the domestic law of a state in order to elicit compliance with international law. Skeptics argue that the rule of international law is incompatible with states' political self‐determination. Regardless of whether their defense of this claim ultimately succeeds, thoughtful engagement with it may well require us to rethink some of the fundamental concepts and normative ideals in political philosophy, including state sovereignty, democracy, individual rights, political authority, and political obligation. (shrink)

The focus on the moral rights of combatants in the ethics of war ignores a very important point: although morally unjust combatants cannot be considered moral equals to just combatants, especially with regard to the right to kill, there are sound moral reasons why the laws of war should accept a kind of equality between them, a concept referred to as “reduced legal equality.” Reduced legal equality is not about equal moral rights but about granting legal immunity to combatants for (...) their conduct in accordance with the laws of war. This article shows that reduced legal equality of combatants is not only the morally best legal regulation in our nonideal international world but also the correct interpretation of international law. (shrink)

This article examines, through a theoretical lens, two issues concerning equality under international law thrown up by the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War: the equal treatment of belligerents on different sides under international humanitarian law (IHL), which is being contested by revisionist just war theorists, and the unequal treatment of Ukrainians with different genders assigned at birth who are trying to flee Ukraine, which is being contested under international human rights law (IHRL). By examining different conceptions of equality through the lens of (...) social ontology, this article distinguishes between the regulatory focus of IHL on individual agency and the regulatory focus of IHRL on social structures, which directly influence how ‘difference’ and ‘sameness’ are recognized and determined for the purpose of conceptualizing equality. Because of IHL’s focus on individuals, whose agency is limited in war, only highly agential conduct (e.g. targeting civilians) makes a ‘difference’ under IHL. Meanwhile, outside IHL’s regulatory focus, the different causes of states’ participation in war are evened out as the ‘same’ structured positions occupied by different individuals, warranting their same treatment according to belligerent equality. On the other hand, because of IHRL’s focus on social structures, which heavily condition the individuals, structural arrangements make a ‘difference’ under IHRL. Outside IHRL’s regulatory focus, individuals’ different innate characteristics such as sexual characteristics are evened out as the ‘same’ agential quality of being human, warranting their same treatment according to sex equality. The article argues that the contestations about these equality principles find deeper roots in their divergent social ontological visions, the revelation of which can open up new spaces for dialogue on and inquiry into a common social world that grounds the legal conceptions of equality. (shrink)

According to most accounts of just war theory, jus ad bellum is concerned with the morality of initiating war. This gives jus ad bellum a temporal dimension, making it a set of principles that are applied to judge belligerents’ actions at the outset of a war, but that cannot be revisited after a war begins. I challenge this synchronic conception of jus ad bellum by arguing that the considerations the principles of jus ad bellum are meant to judge can, and (...) often do, change substantially over the course of wars. It is inappropriate to determine the ad bellum justice of a war solely based on how the principles of jus ad bellum are satisfied at a war’s outset. Because of the mercurial nature of war, jus ad bellum principles should be applied diachronically, as moral norms that can be used to guide or to judge belligerents even after a war has been initiated. (shrink)

Since 2007, five scientists involved in Iran’s nuclear program have been killed under mysterious circumstances. This is not the first time that nuclear scientists have come under direct attack. Scientists are legally civilians. Like the rest of us, they are protected by laws prohibiting murder and perfidious killing, and enjoy civilian immunity during wartime. Moreover, powerful moral arguments oppose assassination policies specifically. Nevertheless, contemporary theories of just war allow for the partial extension of combatant status to civilians who are either (...) threatening or responsible for unjust threats. Weapons manufacturers, their factories and employees, are accorded less than absolute protection within just war theory, and even under international law. Dramatic events compel us to think through these issues of political violence in a principled manner, whatever our particular views on the Iranian case may be. The various moral arguments against assassination on the one hand and the complex status of munitions workers on the other suggest that scientists involved in weapons manufacturing may in some cases be morally liable to direct harm, as well as being legally liable to proportionate collateral damage. (shrink)

This article challenges the tendency exhibited in arguments by Michael Ignatieff, Jeremy Waldron, and others to treat the Law of Armed Conflict as the only valid moral frame of reference for guiding armed rebels with just cause. To succeed, normative language and principles must reflect not only the wrongs of ‘terrorism’ and war crimes, but also the rights of legitimate rebels. However, these do not always correspond to the legal privileges of combatants. Rebels are often unlikely to gain belligerent recognition (...) and might sometimes have strong moral reasons to exceed the rights of regular combatants. Where this gives rise to tensions between morality and the LOAC, a decision is needed to determine which to follow. Setting aside the idea of suppressing just war theory altogether in favour of a more purely regulatory approach to war and reforming law in the direct light of moral theory, I question the attempt by Waldron to argue that moral weight of the legal conventions at the heart of the LOAC trump any moral reasons there might be for breaching them. Even if non-combatant immunity is, as Waldron suggests, a deadly serious convention, I argue that war is justified only if pursued for the sake of deadly serious causes which may even be serious enough to oblige agents to break the law. A political theory of the ethics of war is needed to mediate between the moral and legal in such cases where they cannot be reconciled directly. (shrink)

In _War By Agreement_, Yitzhak Benbaji and Daniel Statman argue that the morality of war can be governed by a freely accepted agreement over the principles that apply to it. This war contract supersedes the application of the principles of everyday morality to war, thus defying ‘revisionist’ approaches to war, and it upholds a recognizable version of traditional just war theory. This article argues for three claims. First, the contractarian apparatus Benbaji and Statman deploy is actually inconsistent with the deep (...) reasoning they advance on its behalf, since, unsatisfactorily, the contract is supposed to retain normative force even when it is breached by aggressors. Second, the underlying character of their theory makes it something closer to a consequentialist account. Third, this new understanding of their account renders it less distinct from certain articulations of revisionism than they think. (shrink)