The conventional view of Just War thinking holds that militaries operate under “special” moral rules in war. Conventional Just War thinking establishes a principled approach to such moral exceptionalism in order to prevent arbitrary or capricious uses of military force. It relies on the notion that soldiers are instruments of the state, which is a view that has been critiqued by the Revisionist movement. The Revisionist critique rightly puts greater emphasis on the moral agency of individual soldiers: they are not (...) mere instruments of the state. Although Revisionism has something particularly important to contribute when applied to cases that are short-of-war, where an individual agent’s moral culpability plays a greater role, soldiers fighting wars are not wholly autonomous moral agents. An Institutionalist approach that responds to Revisionist criticisms is a plausible alternative to the conventional Just War account for grounding the moral exceptionalism of war. For the Institutionalist, soldiers are moral agents with state-imposed obligations whose fundamental responsibility is the performance of the proper moral ends of the military institution they serve. If this is true, then soldiers have a moral obligation to be attentive to the moral corruption of the military institution of which they are a part. (shrink)

This thesis examines the key moral principles that should govern decision-making by police and military when using lethal force. To this end, it provides an ethical analysis of the following question: Under what circumstances, if any, is it morally justified for the agents of state-sanctioned security institutions to use lethal force, in particular the police and the military? Recent literature in this area suggests that modern conflicts involve new and unique features that render conventional ways of thinking about the ethics (...) of armed conflict, and the use of lethal force, as inadequate or redundant. In particular, there is an increased concern with the moral difficulties created by “non-standard” cases. This is where the police or military are obliged to operate outside their conventional contexts. In such non-standard cases, on what moral basis can (or should) state actors – especially the police and military – use lethal force? One approach argues that there is nothing morally exceptional about the use of lethal force by police or military. This says the only available moral justification for using lethal force is killing in self-defence or defence of others. In contrast, I use an institutional approach to develop a moral framework for the state’s morally exceptional use of lethal force. The institutional approach is concerned with the ends (telos) or purpose of a social institution. It says that the moral purpose of a social institution alters the moral responsibilities of its agents; what is referred to as role morality. My analysis demonstrates that there is an important moral distinction between justified killing in self-defence and state-sanctioned uses of lethal force. My claim is that police and military uses of lethal force are not morally justified in the same way as the average person’s use of lethal force (i.e. self-defence or defence of others). Instead, I argue that the state-sanctioned institutional role of police and military give these state actors special moral duties, and therefore exceptional moral justification, for using lethal force. I argue that the institutional end of the police is the preservation of public safety. This includes using lethal force where it is necessary to protect life and prevent serious injury to jurisdictional inhabitants. In contrast, a morally responsible state uses military force to defend the “common good.” That is, when it is necessary to defend the peaceful functioning of a state from armed threats or other forms of political violence. I then conclude that non-standard cases require the addition of jus ad vim (or the just use of military force short-of-war) as a hybrid element to the moral framework for the state-sanctioned use of lethal force. This provides a better way of applying ethics to the use of military force when defending the common good against serious threats in non-standard cases. This is because jus ad vim complements the conventional military paradigm by permitting the use of military capabilities to defend the common good. But, at the same time, it inhibits the move towards the more destructive levels of violence characteristic of conventional warfighting. (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)

Just War Theory debates discussing the principle of the Moral Equality of Combatants involve the notion of Invincible Ignorance; the claim that warfi ghters are morally excused for participating in an unjust war because of their epistemic limitations. Conditions of military deployment may indeed lead to genuinely insurmountable epistemic limitations. In other cases, these may be overcome. This paper provides a preliminary sketch of heuristics designed to allow a combatant to judge whether or not his war is just. It delineates (...) the sets of relevant facts uncontroversially accessible and inaccessible to contemporary professional soldiers. Relevant facts outside these two sets should by default be treated as inaccessible until proven otherwise. Even such a rudimentary heuristic created in this way demonstrates that practical recommendations of MEC-renouncing Just War Theory are not too challenging to follow and still signifi cantly impact a compliant combatant’s behavior. (shrink)

On ‘caritas’ and the promise of ‘right intent’Back to the roots of justice in warIn classical Just War texts, the criterion of ‘right intent’ is considered a key concept with regard to the justice of a war as such, since it refers to the basiciustusdisposition from which the other criteria (ad bellumas well asin belloandpost bellum) should be applied. However, in current JW debates, determined to a large extent by Traditionalists and Revisionists, the importance of this key concept threatens to (...) disappear from view. This article aims to show the relevance of further reflection on the role and meaning of the criterion of ‘right intent’ using classical JW insights and in particular Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Augustine’s concept of ‘caritas’, given the political relevance of this concept as pointed out by Arendt. The criterion of ‘right intent’ is closely connected to Arendt’s distinction between power and violence and her principle of the right to have rights. Right intent, as a virtue, based on and inspired by caritas, in more contemporary discourse, a humanitarian ethos, implies the promise of theiustusapplication of the JW criteria that were originally formulated precisely for that reason. (shrink)

In this contribution, I defend the standard list of jus ad bellum principles. In The Ethics of War and the Force of Law: A Modern Just War Theory, Uwe Steinhoff endorses only three principles of jus ad bellum (right intention, just cause, and proportionality) and claims that the others are redundant. I argue that, although fundamentally all jus ad bellum principles can be reduced to proportionality, in practice it is vital to retain the main jus ad bellum criteria as separate (...) principles. (shrink)

If the resources used to wage wars could be spent elsewhere and save more lives, does this mean that wars are unjustified? This article considers this question, which has been largely overlooked by Just War Theorists and pacifists. It focuses on whether the opportunity costs of war lead to a form of pacifism, which it calls ‘Opportunity Costs Pacifism’. The article argues that Opportunity Costs Pacifism is, at the more ideal level, compelling. It suggests that the only plausible response to (...) Opportunity Costs Pacifism applies in highly nonideal circumstances. This has major implications for Just War Theory and pacifism since it is only at the highly nonideal level that war can be justified. (shrink)

This paper defends revisionism against a challenge: that it cannot convincingly hold that many instances of killing in war are morally wrong but should nonetheless remain legally permissible. The paper argues that we should view the relationship between the morality of war and the laws of war as analogous to the relationship between fundamental principles and rules of regulation in debates about theories of justice. This yields a fresh justification for the law’s divergence from morality, which absolves revisionism from the (...) twofold charge of being at once irrelevant and incoherent. It also helps clarify persisting ambiguities concerning the contrast between war and ‘ordinary life,’ the contested notion of a ‘deep morality’ of war, and revisionism’s relationship to ideal and non-ideal theory. (shrink)

This article provides a response to the contributors of this symposium. Notably, I respond to the following objections: that my list of just war criteria is too long on an “ideal” level and too short for practical purposes; that in particular my rejection of legitimate authority is misguided; that I am wrong in claiming that in just war theory the conditions of proportionality and necessity, which are separate in the self-defense justification, must be merged; that my “social practice view” – (...) which denies the existence of an “immutable”, “deep” morality of war and holds instead that widely accepted conventions have moral force and are therefore partly constitutive of the morality of war – faces severe challenges and makes too much of standing to complain and considerations of reciprocity; and that my account of rights forfeiture is mistaken. (shrink)

Volume 21, Issue 2, August-October 2022, Page 183-189.

Peace plays a central role in the ethics of war and peace, but this proves to be an enormous challenge. In a recent article, Elisabeth Forster and Isaac Taylor grapple with this important topic. They argue that certain concepts in just war theory—aggression, legitimacy, and peace—are essentially contested and susceptible to manipulation. Because the rules are interpreted and applied by the very states that wage war, it is as if the fox is asked to guard the chicken coop—a recipe for (...) disaster. To avoid manipulation of the theory and make the goal of peace attainable, they defend “minimalism” in the ethics of war and peace. This paper responds to and builds on their article. After nuancing the analysis, I will argue that their minimalism does not solve the problem since the proposed alternative concept is equally prone to misuse, and that their minimalism is mistargeted. What I propose is to specify and ground the rules of war without raising the standard too high, to disentangle jus ad bellum and jus post bellum and see peace as guiding principle for jus post bellum, and to interpret that in a minimalist way. (shrink)