Review Just Liberal Violence

Oxford University Press, 2014. xv + 339 pp. £50.00 How We Fight comprises 10 original essays by some of the best scholars in the field. While the essays cover a wide range of issues, they 'unashamedly' share an analytical approach to these issues, grounding discussions of complex and difficult 'real-world' questions in more foundational questions of self-defence and liability to harm. The collection meaningfully furthers many central debates in just war literature, including debates about, pacifism, punitive wars, the doctrine of double effect, rights theory, forfeiture theory, relationship between liability and justification, non-combatant status, reasonable chance of success and others. The advances made on these issues make this volume well worthwhile for a scholar already immersed in the field. In addition, since most of the essays also provide a significant background to the issues at hand and ground these discussions in more familiar foundational issues, the volume should be of interest more generally as well. In 'Varieties of Contingent Pacifism in War', Saba Bazargan argues that propor-tionality-based contingent pacifism arguments, which suggest that almost all wars violate the proportionality constraint and impose too great a harm on innocents relative to war's aims, are flawed. Instead, Bazargan provides reasons to seriously consider epistemic contingent pacifism, which is grounded in the fact that the uncertainty with respect to the justness of our war, along with knowledge of the great number of past false-positives with respect to the justness of a war and the terrible harm wars cause should lead us to prefer peace to war in almost all circumstances. In 'Punitive Wars', Victor Tadros considers possible justifications and in particular general deterrence arguments for punitive wars. He asks whether we can wage a war against country A to deter country B from attacking us? Tadros argues that previous acts of wrongdoing can in fact permit the use of the offender to deter others from harming us, because previous wrongdoing grounds a duty to compensate or rectify. This doesn't however lead him to conclude that we should wage deterrent punitive wars; the move from individual to collective cases of deterrence is problematic because of the harm to innocents that punitive wars necessarily involve that individual cases do not. Gerald Lang's 'Why Not Forfeiture?', offers a partial defence of the forfeiture account of self-defence. The forfeiture account of self-defence answers the Central Normative Transition (CNT) question (how does the victim acquire a right to kill

Violence is a slippery concept -nonlinear, productive, destructive, and reproductive. It is mimetic, like imitative magic or homeopathy. "Like produces like," that much we know. Violence gives birth to itself. So we can rightly speak of chains, spirals, and mirrors of violence -or, as we prefer -a continuum of violence. We all know, as though by rote, that wife beaters and sexual abusers were themselves usually beaten and abused. Repressive political regimes resting on terror/fear/torture are often mimetically reproduced by the same revolutionary militants determined to overthrow them (see Bourgois, Chapter 56; Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 30; and Fanon, Chapter 58). Structural violence -the violence of poverty, hunger, social exclusion and humiliation -inevitably translates into intimate and domestic violence (Sche per-Hughes, Chapter 33; Bourgois, Chapter 37). Politically motivated torture is amplified by the symbolic violence that trails in its wake, making those who were tortured feel shame for their "weakness" in betraying their comrades under duress. Rape survivors -especially those who were violated with genocidal or sadistic political intent during civil wars (Danner, Chapter 41) often become living-dead people, refusing to speak of the unspeakable, and are often shunned or outcasted by kin and community, and even by comrades and lovers (Das, Chapter 40 and Fanon, Chapter 58).

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and Re'em Segev for their helpful comments. I would also like to thank my research assistant Moran Harrari for her help in collating and preparing the materials. A revised version of this article, elaborating on the Israeli experience, will appear in a collection of essays on Torture to be published by Oxford University Press (Sanford Levinson, ed.)

Philosophical Inquiry in Education, 2019

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2018

Global Security and Intelligence Studies, 2015

2012

Rights is part of Routledge's "Framing 21st Century Social Issues" series, which aims to provide undergraduates with brief, "studentfriendly" texts that "introduce basic concepts in the social sciences, cover key literature in the field, and offer original analyses and diagnoses." (x) When approaching Hajjar's latest contribution to the sociology of torture,

Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 2016

How can just warriors prohibit torture absolutely while still allowing that killing can be just? The best arguments for torture’s wrongness and impermissibility seem to suggest that killing too is always wrong. If torture is wrong because it attacks imago Dei, why isn’t killing too – for killing seems at least as much an attack as torture? This question, which seems to force a choice between pacifism or countenancing “just torture” alongside just war killing, has scarcely been asked in Christian ethics. Among the only Christian ethicists to address this question, Nigel Biggar and Darrel Cole have leveraged these issues to argue for torture’s permissibility. Against such views, this essay shows why torture, but not killing, is always wrong, what distinguishes it from just war killing such that it but not killing should be categorically prohibited. I elucidate three features that distinguish torture from just war killing and establish it as always wrong: its intention and proximate end, its violating as opposed to destructive character, and its context of domination. I conclude by showing how these features are illustrated and exemplified by practices documented in the 2014 U.S. Senate report on torture.

Argumentation and Advocacy

Certainty leads us to attack evil; being less sure we would but resist it. The difference between attack and resistance is the difference between violence and argument, the thread on which our lives dangle.-Alien Wheelis, cited in Brummett, 1976, pp. 39-40. In the wake of September 11, 200 1, and the ensuing global "war on terrorism," we might expect students of public argument to return to the study of American foreign policy rhetoric with the fervor witnessed during the Cold War. As Gordon Mitchell (2002) recently observed, scholars from within and without communication departments have already begun the vital task of exploring security studies and international relations through the lens of argumentation. At the same time, scholars, myself included, drawn to the intellectual questions echoing in the cadence of war drums, would be mistaken to suppose that the only brutalities worth our attention are those so obviously framed by the flames of a terrorist bomb or the flash of a military rifle. In the hope of encouraging rhetorical inquiry relevant to the broad range of human aggression in the contemporary world, this essay considers four recent books concerned with diverse expressions of violence from equally varied theoretical perspectives. The texts reviewed herein address discursive violence in the form of hate speech, literary representations of rape, modem geopolitical violence, and the metaphysical underpinnings of violence as an abstract phenomenon. The decision to examine such eclectic treatments of violence

Philosophy in Review, 2021

My review of the book Just Liberal Violence: Sweatshops, Torture, War by Michael Neu, published in Volume 41, Issue 2 of Philosophy in Review.