Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations; The Great War and Modern Memory

Walzer, Michael; Fussell, Paul

doi:10.1111/j.1748-0922.1978.tb00022.x

Cited by 166 publications

(59 citation statements)

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“…Even though terrorist attacks in this sense are uncontroversially mala in se, many authors discuss hypothetical cases where they might be justifiable [classically, Walzer (1977) but also Held (1991), and Wilkins (1992)]. My view is that, although hypothetical justifications are imaginable (Finlay 2015, Chapter 9), they wouldn't greatly contribute to the strain between morality and law.…”

Section: Illegal But Justified Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Deadly Serious Causes of Legitimate Rebellion: Between the Wrongs of Terrorism and the Crimes of War

Finlay

2017

Criminal Law, Philosophy

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This article challenges the tendency exhibited in arguments by Michael Ignatieff, Jeremy Waldron, and others to treat the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) as the only valid moral frame of reference for guiding (and judging) armed rebels with just cause. To succeed, normative language and principles must reflect not only the wrongs of 'terrorism' and war crimes, but also the rights of legitimate rebels. However, these do not always correspond to the legal privileges of combatants. Rebels are often unlikely to gain belligerent recognition and might sometimes have strong moral reasons to exceed the rights of regular combatants. Where this gives rise to tensions between morality and the LOAC, a decision is needed to determine which to follow. Setting aside the idea of (a) suppressing just war theory altogether in favour of a more purely regulatory approach to war and (b) reforming law in the direct light of moral theory, I question the attempt by Waldron (among others) (c) to argue that moral weight of the legal conventions at the heart of the LOAC trump any moral reasons there might be for breaching them. Even if noncombatant immunity is, as Waldron suggests, a deadly serious convention, I argue that war is justified only if pursued for the sake of deadly serious causes which may even be serious enough to oblige agents to break the law. A political theory of the ethics of war is needed (d) to mediate between the moral and legal in such cases where they cannot be reconciled directly.

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Section: Illegal But Justified Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Deadly Serious Causes of Legitimate Rebellion: Between the Wrongs of Terrorism and the Crimes of War

Finlay

2017

Criminal Law, Philosophy

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“…Up to the midtwentieth century, the dominant modern understanding of war resembled Jean-Jacques Rousseau's: war was a formally recognized condition of enmity between states with clearly defined limits in terms of who was and who wasn't involved, in what capacity, and over what period of time or tract of geographic space (Rousseau 1762(Rousseau / 2004Walzer 1977). But over the last generation or so, just war theorists have increasingly tended to think about war in a much more open-ended way: it encompasses small-scale conflict possibly running from the case of two people fighting in the street (one an aggressor, the other defending themselves) on a moral continuum that runs up to much more organized, coordinated large-scale uses of violence by lots of individuals (McMahan 2004;cf.…”

Section: The Concepts Of War and Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

Just War, Cyber War, and the Concept of Violence

Finlay

2018

Philos. Technol.

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Recent debate on the relationship between cyber threats, on the one hand, and both strategy and ethics on the other focus on the extent to which 'cyber war' is possible, both as a conceptual question and an empirical one. Whether it can is an important question for just war theorists. From this perspective, it is necessary to evaluate cyber measures both as a means of responding to threats and as a possible just cause for using armed kinetic force. In this paper, I shift the focus away from 'war' as such in order to ask whether some cyber threats might justifiably be characterized as a form of 'violence.' Some theorists argue that the term violence ought to be defined so as to encompass things like 'structural' harm or harm by neglect and thereby question implicitly the focus of just war theorists on armed force. This paper draws on a theory of violence I developed elsewhere as a defence of just war theory's narrow understanding of violence. According to the 'Double-Intent' theory, a distinctive form of 'Violent Agency' is the factor uniting the category of violence while partly accounting for the peculiar moral connotations of the term. Here, I argue that the resulting definition of violence reshapes the category in a way that includes some forms of cyber-attack. This may help us to see where cyber might fit in relation to just war theory and the ethics of kinetic attack.

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“…The contemporary consensus on the justifiability of coercive third-party intervention is formed in large part by Michael Walzer's discussion in Just and Unjust Wars (Walzer 1977), further reinforced by John Rawls's discussion in The Law of Peoples (Rawls 1999). In rough outline, the consensus recognizes that preventable human suffering comes in degrees, but maintains that only situations which go above a certain threshold could justify coercive intervention from the outside.…”

Section: The Problem Of Intervention In Recent Global Justice Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

A Role for Coercive Force in the Theory of Global Justice?

Begby¹

2014

New Waves in Global Justice

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Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations; The Great War and Modern Memory

Cited by 166 publications

References 0 publications

The Deadly Serious Causes of Legitimate Rebellion: Between the Wrongs of Terrorism and the Crimes of War

The Deadly Serious Causes of Legitimate Rebellion: Between the Wrongs of Terrorism and the Crimes of War

Just War, Cyber War, and the Concept of Violence

A Role for Coercive Force in the Theory of Global Justice?

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