Does Just War Theory Rest on a Mistake?
Adil Ahmad Haque
Contemporary just war theory begins with Michael Walzer’s interpretation and
defense of “the war convention,” of which the law of war is an integral part. Walzer
argues that, just as the law of war grants combatants the legal right to kill in pursuit of
an unjust cause, the war convention grants combatants the moral right to kill in
pursuit of an unjust cause. Jeff McMahan would later respond that combatants have
no moral right to kill in pursuit of an unjust cause. McMahan concludes that both the
law of war and the war convention diverge from the deep morality of war. Moreover,
McMahan concludes that the law of war *should* diverge from the deep morality of
war, on the grounds that attempts to align the former with the latter will do little good
but risk great harm. On this view, while the deep morality of war is concerned with
the moral rights of each individual, the law of war should concern itself with reducing
unjust harm overall. I will argue that both Walzer’s conventionalist view and
McMahan’s revisionist view rest on a mistake. The law of war is not as they both
assume, nor is the relationship between the law of war and the deep morality of war as
either believes.
Scott D. Sagan
“Atomic Aversion and Just War Principles”
To what degree does the American public support the just war doctrine principles of
distinction (non-combatant immunity) and proportionality? In 1945, 85% of
Americans approved of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, indeed, 23%
believed that the U.S. “should have quickly used many more bombs before Japan had
a chance to surrender.” Were such views the result of the brutal violence of the
Pacific War and the visceral hatred and racism the war produced? Or do these views
reflect deeper beliefs about the priority of protecting American lives over foreign lives
and a rejection of non-combatant immunity principles? I will report on a battery of
new survey experiments that measure American public support or opposition to
nuclear weapons use under a variety of realistic scenarios. The findings suggest that
there is no belief in a “nuclear taboo” among the American public and that many
Americans believe that mere political support for a government opposed to the United
States makes foreign civilians legitimate targets in war.
David Rodin
‘The Ethics of Revolutionary War’
This talk will address the ethics of revolutionary war in the context of contemporary
Just War scholarship. Certain classical authors have argued that there are more
stringent reasons to reject revolutionary war compared to other forms of war. I will
argue that this is not the case, but there are nonetheless strong objections to
revolutionary war and revolutionary violence more generally.
Helen Frowe
‘Reductive Individualism and the Just War Framework’
Both traditional collectivist accounts of war and revisionist reductive individualist
accounts of war employ the familiar distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in
bello. I argue that reductive individualists cannot sustain a distinction between jus ad
bellum and jus in bello. If these categories differ, they must either contain different
moral principles, or evaluate different objects, or both. Since reductivism is the claim
that there is a single set of moral principles that governs all uses of defensive force,
and since ad bellum and in bello govern the use of defensive force, reductivists cannot
hold that jus ad bellum and jus in bello differ in content. Some reductivists grant this,
but argue that the terms nonetheless pick out different objects. Jus ad bellum governs
the ‘war as a whole’; jus in bello governs individual actions or small groups of
individual actions. I reject the claim that jus ad bellum offers us a useful summative
assessment of the ‘war as a whole’. Both categories evaluate all the individual actions
of a war as a means of determining the justness of specific individual actions, and it’s
only the evaluation of those individual actions that is morally interesting. Thus, these
categories do not differ in their objects, and we ought to reject the familiar just war
framework.
Jeff McMahan
Against Collectivist Approaches to the Morality of War
Perhaps the most common way of thinking about war is that it is, as Rousseau says,
“something that occurs not between man and man, but between States.” According to
this view, states and certain other collectives have interests, desires, goals, and
intentions that are not reducible to those of individual persons. Collectives can also
act in ways for which they are responsible and even blameworthy, again in ways that
are not reducible to the responsibility or blameworthiness of individuals. This way of
thinking about states in war leads naturally to a conception of soldiers as instruments
through which states achieve their purposes rather than as responsible moral agents
whose acts of killing must meet a high standard of moral justification. I will oppose
this way of thinking about war and defend an individualist understanding of both
states and war, according to which political leaders, soldiers, and civilian citizens are
neither absolved of responsibility for their individual contributions to war nor made
responsible for the contributions of others simply by virtue of their membership in a
collective such as the state or the military.