A Challenge to the Reigning Theory of the Just War

Conatus - Journal of Philosophy, 2023

In this paper the author aims to explain the consequences of the implicit application of the zero-sum game model of distribution of moral responsibility for war, i.e., for causing war, within the context of the dominant perspective of modern-day ethics of war -Just War Theory. The main criterion of the jus ad bellum concept of Just War Theory, "just cause," recognizes the possibility of only one "cause" of war, and every attempt to further analyze and investigate deeper causes of war is automatically perceived through the zerosum lens, as an attempt to justify or excuse the unjust side in war. No such thing happens when analyzing other, extremely morally troubling and disturbing phenomena as we invest significant effort into attempting to explain evil without this effort ever being understood as a justification attempt. The author demonstrates how the described approach in Just War Theory prevents us from fully understanding war, and thus implicitly from how to normatively prescribe human actions in and regarding war. The author also asserts that this perspective actually represents a presupposition concerning the possibility of justness of war. The author concludes that, in order to fully understand war and properly morally evaluate it, ethics of war must adopt a non-zero-sum model of distribution of moral responsibility and acknowledge the existence of a wide variety of causes of war.

2019

War is an extreme human activity—not only because of the horror of war, but because of the severe emotional, physical, psychological, and moral strain it has on its combatants. Understanding war from the combatant’s point of view is hard enough without personally experiencing war. Without the direct experience of combat, an epistemic gap lies between one who knows what it is like and those lucky enough not to experience it. Consequently, the theoretical propositions of just and unjust conduct in war become difficult to support. I argue that just war theory and its tenets such as jus in bello, or just conduct in war, needs a thorough examination of combat experiences to define the principle with the reality of war in mind. For example, as a precept of moral responsibility in war, jus in bello is an abstract principle which can be supported by concrete historical examples if and only if the epistemic gap between the experience of combat and abstraction is bridged by a consideration of...

OSSA, 2003

Much of the vocabulary that we use to talk about the cluster of concepts associated with war is commonly applied to arguments. Some parts, of course, do not seem to apply so easily, if at all, and that creates problematic distortion. For all its problems, however, there is still much to be gleaned from the argument-is-war paradigm because there are war-concepts that can be but largely have not been deployed in thinking about arguments. Some of them really should be because of the light they can shed on argumentation. In particular, the concepts, principles, and lessons from Just War theory provide a valuable lens for looking at arguments. We can theorize about Just and Unjust Arguments.

Journal of Political Philosophy, 2008

I. THE CHALLENGE M ORAL responsibility for an unjust threat, or a threat of wrongful harm, is, I have argued, a basis of liability to attack in war. Uwe Steinhoff correctly observes that many acts of war by those who fight in a just war ("just combatants") threaten innocent people with wrongful harm. This, he claims, makes them morally liable to attack according to the criterion of liability I have defended. But if both just combatants and unjust combatants (those who fight without just cause) are morally liable to attack, so that each is permitted to attack the other, the doctrine of the moral equality of combatants, against which I argued in my earlier essay, is not only true but, embarrassingly, true on the basis of my own claims. This is a perceptive and important challenge that raises a number of issues that are important to understanding the morality of war. I am grateful to Steinhoff for raising them, and for providing me with an occasion to contribute to the discussion, and to defend and refine my position. The criterion of liability to attack in war that I have defended invokes the notion of a "wrongful harm." There are different ways in which harms inflicted by just combatants on innocent people may be wrongful. First, a wrongful harm may be one that is wrongfully inflicted, or inflicted by wrongful action. Just combatants might, for example, attack innocent people intentionally-for example, as a means of coercing their government to surrender-and to attack innocent people intentionally is generally conceded to be wrong, except perhaps in extreme conditions in which such an attack is necessary to avert a greater harm to the same people, or a much greater harm to other innocent people. Or just combatants might harm innocent people unintentionally, but recklessly or negligently-for example, by attacking a military target when this foreseeably causes harm to innocent bystanders that is unnecessary or disproportionate in relation to the importance of destroying the target. Second, a wrongful harm may be inflicted by action that is permissible, or morally justified. In such a case, the action that inflicts the harm is not itself *I am grateful to Christian Barry for illuminating comments on an earlier draft.

Public Integrity, 2017

Our changing environment must, in turn, change the way we think about Just War Theory. While there is a long rich history within the just war tradition of considering an attack on natural resources to constitute an act of war (e.g. Victoria 1532; Grotius 1625), and while there have been more recent analyses about how environmental impacts can alter which wars and which actions within war can be justified (e.g., Drucker 1989; Reichberg & Syse 2000; Woods 2007), there has not yet been, to the best of our knowledge an analysis of how the environmental impacts of war ought to alter the just war framework itself. In other words, there has not yet been a consideration of how environmental impacts ought to change not only the content of just war principles, but also the way those principles are utilized, and in some cases even the principles themselves. In this paper, we argue that the time has come for such an analysis.

Much work in the ethics of war is structured around the distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello. This distinction has two key roles. It distinguishes two evaluative objects— the war 'as a whole', and the conduct of combatants during the war—and identifies different moral principles as relevant to each. I argue that we should be sceptical of this framework. I suggest that a single set of principles determines the justness of actions that cause nonconsensual harm. If so, there are no distinctive ad bellum or in bello principles. I also reject the view that whilst the justness of, for example, ad bellum proportionality rests on all the goods and harms produced by the war, the justness of combatants' conduct in war is determined by a comparatively limited set of goods and harms in a way that supports the ad bellum–in bello distinction.

War is not the only or even the major cause of human suffering. But it is the cause for which we are most often most directly responsible. Our voluntary choices result in huge increases in mortality, massive refugee crises, and the dislocation of whole generations. So while there are other equally pressing problems facing humanity, none of them raises as pointed moral questions as those to do with whether and when we may take our polities to war and how we must fight if we do so. This Handbook offers a guide to thinking through the morality of war, from the perspective of contemporary analytical just war theory. This introduction explains the methodological and substantive choices made in designing the volume, then summarizes the key insights of the chapters to follow.

International Encyclopaedia of Ethics, 2013

Analytic just war theorists often attempt to construct ideal theories of military justice on the basis of intuitions about imaginary and sometimes outlandish examples, often taken from non-military contexts. This article argues for a sharp curtailment of this method and defends, instead, an empirically and historically informed approach to the ethical scrutiny of armed conflicts. After critically reviewing general philosophical reasons for being skeptical of the moral-theoretic value of imaginary hypotheticals, the article turns to some of the special problems that this method raises for appraisals of warfare. It examines some of the hypothetical examples employed in the construction of Jeff McMahan's revisionist just war theory, and finds that they sometimes stipulate incomprehensible conditions, lead to argumentative impasses of diverging yet uncertain intuitions, and distract attention away from the real problems of war as we empirically know it. In contrast, empirical and historical studies of warfare reinforce the deep connections between facts and values, and compel theorists to face uncomfortable moral ambiguities. Perhaps most importantly, the analytic method of focusing on imaginary hypothetical examples can not only be distracting, but it can also be genuinely dangerous. Hence, the article pays special attention to the way in which a seemingly innocuous fiction like the famous Ticking Time Bomb scenario can come to frame a new paradigm of inhumanity in the treatment of prisoners of war.

Distributing the Harm of Just Wars, 2021

This book argues that the risk of harm in armed conflict should be divided equally between combatants and enemy non-combatants. International law requires that combatants in war take ‘all feasible precautions’ to minimise damage to civilian objects, injury to civilians, and incidental loss of civilian life. However, there is no clear explanation of what ‘feasible precautions’ means in this context, or what would count as sufficiently minimised incidental harm. As a result, it is difficult to judge whether a particular war or offensive actually satisfies this requirement. Just war theorists often consider it common sense that merely not intending to harm innocent civilians is not sufficient, but there is little clarity in the literature regarding what this means. One crucial question that is almost always overlooked is that of what the appropriate baseline distribution of risk should be. This book defends the Minimal Harm Requirement (MHR), which states that combatants should make an effort to reduce merely foreseen harm to enemy non-combatants to the lowest reasonable level. In order to assess which risk impositions are reasonable, and which are not, an egalitarian baseline should be adopted, suggesting that other things being equal risk of harm should be distributed equally between just combatants and unjust non-combatants. This book will be of much interest to students of just war theory, ethics, security studies, and international relations.

Abstract. Analytic just war theorists often attempt to construct ideal theories of military justice on the basis of intuitions about imaginary and sometimes outlandish examples, often taken from non-military contexts. This article argues for a sharp curtailment of this method and defends, instead, an empirically and historically informed approach to the ethical scrutiny of armed conflicts. After critically reviewing general philosophical reasons for being sceptical of the moral-theoretic value of imaginary hypotheticals, the article turns to some of the special problems that this method raises for appraisals of warfare. It examines some of the hypothetical examples employed in the construction of Jeff McMahan's revisionist just war theory, and finds that they sometimes stipulate incomprehensible conditions, lead to argumentative impasses of diverging yet uncertain intuitions, and distract attention away from the real problems of war as we empirically know it. In contrast, empirical and historical studies of warfare reinforce the deep connections between facts and values, and compel theorists to face uncomfortable moral ambiguities. Perhaps most importantly, the analytic method of focusing on imaginary hypothetical examples can not only be distracting, but it can also be genuinely dangerous. Hence, the article pays special attention to the way in which a seemingly innocuous fiction like the famous Ticking Time Bomb scenario can come to frame a new paradigm of inhumanity in the treatment of prisoners of war.

2023

This brief paper is a general treatment of war -its morality and its political and social effects. Accordingly, we discuss primarily those armed interactions between nations, or, in "civil" wars, those aimed at securing the reins of government. These must, we contend, be inherently immoral on one side -the one which "starts" the war in question -and inherently moral on the other, who after all are defending their lives against the first. To say this requires a moral theory, which we briefly develop. It proceeds on Hobbesian-contractarian lines: if mankind occupies a "state of nature," then we will all be worse off than if we join with each other in adopting the restrictions of morality -fundamentally, and primarily, of nonviolence, of living at peace with each other. This raises a question about the very rationality of war, to be sure. And yet, war we have, in considerable and unfortunate abundance. How can this be? Some tentative answers are suggested.