Moral agents sometimes have to act on the basis of beliefs that are reasonable in the context but are in fact false. In these circumstances, agents often act in ways that would be right if their beliefs were true but that they would recognize as wrong if they could see that their beliefs were false. Sometimes our tendency is to think that what these agents do is justified – for example, in the case discussed by Ferzan in which one person, (...) Defender, kills another, Threatener, who has loaded one bullet into a revolver, spun the chambers, pointed the gun at Defender’s head, and started to squeeze the trigger.1 We think that Defender was justified in killing even if we discover that the chamber was in fact empty. (Let us refer to this as the ‘‘Roulette case.’’) We accept, however, that if Apparent Defender had known with certainty that the chamber was empty and that Apparent Threatener would (or could) have pulled the trigger only once, it would have been pointless and therefore wrong to kill her. (shrink)

Christopher Kutz has written an excellent book: part metaphysics, part ethical theory, and part legal philosophy. The aim of the book, as is clear from the title, is to examine and defend the idea of complicity, that is, the responsibility of individuals for their participation in collective harms. While there has not been a lot of philosophical work on this topic, there has been some good work, and Kutz is responsive to most of it. But basically, this book strikes out (...) on its own, building a conception of complicity from an analysis of collective action and individual intention. The cornerstone of the analysis is the idea that individuals should be responsible for what they participate in, regardless of whether the participation makes a causal difference for the outcome. (shrink)

Killing in War presents the Moral Equality of Combatants with serious, and in my view insurmountable problems. Absent some novel defense, this thesis is now very difficult to sustain. But this success is counterbalanced by the strikingly revisionist implications of McMahan’s account of the underlying morality of killing in war, which forces us into one of two unattractive positions, contingent pacifism, or near-total war. In this article, I have argued that his efforts to mitigate these controversial implications fail. The reader (...) is left stranded: to reach plausible conclusions, Walzer deployed an implausible conception of our rights to life; McMahan’s more rigorous account of those rights generates untenable conclusions. Absent new developments, it seems that the prospects for grounding the ethics of war in individual rights are poor: any theory of our rights to life that is sufficiently indiscriminate to work in the chaos of war is not discriminating enough to be a plausible theory of our rights to life. Perhaps by rejecting the ideal of the rights-respecting war altogether we might develop an alternative theory of justified warfare, which marries theoretical soundness with conclusions that we can more confidently support. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Jeff McMahan's "Just Cause for War". It defends a more permissive, and more traditional view of just war liability against McMahan's claims.

If I were asked to put forward an ethical principle which I considered to be especially certain, it would be that no one can be responsible, in the properly ethical sense, for the conduct of another. Responsibility belongs essentially to the individual. The implications of this principle are much more far-reaching than is evident at first, and reflection upon them may lead many to withdraw the assent which they might otherwise be very ready to accord to this view of responsibility. (...) But if the difficulties do appear to be insurmountable, and that, very certainly, does not seem to me to be the case, then the proper procedure will be, not to revert to the barbarous notion of collective or group responsibility, but to give up altogether the view that we are accountable in any distinctively moral sense. (shrink)

We live in a morally flawed world. Our lives are complicated by what other people do, and by the harms that flow from our social, economic and political institutions. Our relations as individuals to these collective harms constitute the domain of complicity. This book examines the relationship between collective responsibility and individual guilt. It presents a rigorous philosophical account of the nature of our relations to the social groups in which we participate, and uses that account in a discussion of (...) contemporary moral theory. Christopher Kutz shows that the two prevailing theories of moral philosophy, Kantianism and consequentialism, both have difficulties resolving problems of complicity. He then argues for a richer theory of accountability in which any real understanding of collective action not only allows but demands individual responsibility. (shrink)

Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0048-3915%28198923%2918%3A4%3C334%3AAIACTD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P..

There is a nonabsolute or “contingent” form of pacifism that claims that war in contemporary conditions inevitably involves the killing of innocent people on a scale that is too great to be justified. Some contingent pacifists argue that war always involves a risk that virtually everyone that one might kill is innocent – either because one can never be sure that one’s cause is just or because even most of those who fight in wars that lack a just cause are (...) nevertheless not culpable and are therefore innocent in the relevant sense. Others argue that there is no just cause for war that is sufficiently important to justify the large-scale killing of innocent civilians that is unavoidable in war. I seek to refute contingent pacifism by arguing that its theoretical presuppositions are untenable. (shrink)