This paper offers a non-reductivist account of the requirement of legitimate authority in warfare. I first advance a distinction between private and public wars. A war is private where individuals defend their private rights with their private means. A war is public where it either aims to defend public rights or relies on public means. I argue that RLA applies to public war but not private war. A public war waged by a belligerent without legitimate authority involves a form of (...) illegitimate domination of the people. Contra the conventional wisdom that RLA is only an ad bellum principle, I show that RLA is also a vital in bello principle. Relying on the Kantian non-voluntarist account of political authority, I argue that only legitimate states have the right to wage public wars. However, I also contend that RLA is not an absolute requirement, even regarding the justice of public war. Under extremely unfavorable conditions, this requirement may be overridden by weighty considerations in favor of resorting to public war without legitimate authority. In sum, my account of RLA protects ordinary people from illegitimate coercion involved in guerrilla warfare in general yet generates proper permission for responsible, aspiring state founders to secure social justice by coercive means under extraordinary situations. (shrink)

Yitzhak Benbaji argues that those combatants who have agreed to blindly obey their superiors and who are ordered to fight in unjust wars are released from their duty to deliberate about the merits of the acts that they are ordered to perform. This is because their agreements result in the combatants’ permissible lack of a necessary capacity for moral responsibility. Thus, the combatants are not morally responsible for their wrongful acts—their moral responsibility is “transferred” to their superiors. We argue, first, (...) that Benbaji’s own reasoning suggests that the agreements entered into between the combatants and their superiors are not binding and, second, that even if such agreements are binding, those combatants who obey their orders to fight are nevertheless morally responsible for their wrongful acts. Thus, Benbaji has failed to show that the combatants are permitted to act as ordered. By critically examining Benbaji’s view, then, we defend the revisionist position that just and unjust combatants are morally unequal. (shrink)

David Estlund and Massimo Renzo argue that, given the right background conditions, combatants are obligated to obey orders to fight in unjust wars, a thesis they put forward even as they recognize that this involves committing serious moral wrongs. Their views, then, fall between traditionalism and revisionism in the theory of just war. We argue that both Estlund and Renzo fail to adequately distinguish between binding and nonbinding serious morally wrong orders, that their views are incompatible with their assumed fact‐relative (...) understanding of morality, and that they fail to establish that combatants are obligated to obey orders to fight in unjust wars. We conclude that just as untenable as these two middle‐ground positions is the traditionalist view. (shrink)

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

Revisionist just war theorists maintain that, soldiers, and not merely their leaders or superiors, bear moral responsibility for objectively wrongful harms imposed in pursuit of an unjust war. The conviction that underlies revisionism is that a person's responsibility for her intentional, objectively unjustified, killing is non-transferable. In this essay I aim to elaborate a specific counterexample to this general claim. I will argue that in cases that I characterize as "special authority cases", the moral responsibility for the unintended outcomes that (...) a person brings about because of following the orders of a legitimate authority is transferred to the authority. (shrink)