Thomas E. Hill, Jr., interprets and extends Kant's moral theory in a series of essays that highlight its relevance to contemporary ethics. He introduces the major themes of Kantian ethics and explores its practical application to questions about revolution, prison reform, and forcible interventions in other countries for humanitarian purposes.

This essay explores Kant's writings on war and peace, and concentrates on the thesis that Kant has a just war theory. It strives to explain what the substance of that theory is, and finds that it differs in several respects from that offered by the just war tradition. Many scholars suspect that Kant has no just war theory. Effort is made to overturn this conventional understanding: first by showing, negatively, that Kant does not subscribe to the two main rival doctrines (...) on the issue, namely, realism and pacifism; and second by demonstrating, positively, how the core propositions of just war theory are consistent with Kant's basic moral and political principles. Interpretive reconstruction then reveals the full substance of Kant's just war theory, which is divided into accounts of jus ad bellum, jus in bello and jus post bellum. Kant's jus post bellum reflections remain his most deep, original and relevant in this regard. (shrink)

"The Law of Peoples" has been extended into a monograph with the same title,which is the main focus of this essay. Brown includes a sketch of Rawls’s project as a whole as a necessary preliminary.

Recently a number of liberal political theorists, including Rawls and Walzer, have argued for a 'supreme emergency exemption' from the traditional just war principle of discrimination which absolutely prohibits direct attacks against innocent civilians, claiming that a political community threatened with destruction may deliberately target innocents in order to save itself. I argue that this 'supreme emergency exemption' implies that individuals too may kill innocents in supreme emergencies. This is a significant theoretical cost. While it will not constitute a decisive (...) refutation of all arguments for a supreme emergency exemption, my hope is that many will see this cost of endorsing the exemption as unacceptable. (shrink)

The Law of Peoples, with “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited”. john rawls. William James and the Metaphysics of Experience. david c. lamberth.

This chapter discusses the tradition of just war theory. It focuses on Rawls's comments in A Theory of Justice (TJ). The discussion is entirely in the service of an account of conscientious refusal to fight in war. The chapter focuses on Rawls's best developed discussions of the doctrines of just war and related ideas in The Law of Peoples (LP). It discusses the place of these doctrines in Rawls's account of the law of peoples, the importance of human rights to (...) the accounts, and Rawls's account of the conditions in which the hope for peace is reasonable. Rawls takes Kant's Perpetual Peace as a guide for the development of his views in LP. The domestic conditions that Rawls takes to be necessary to produce satisfaction for the right reasons are demandingly egalitarian. Rawls maintains that it would be unrealistic to hope for an international society comprised entirely of liberal people. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Cultural Imperialism in Rawls's Law of Peoples Rawls's Answers to the Charge Conclusion: Peace or Justice? Acknowledgements Notes.