Legitimate Authority and the Ethics of War: A Map of the Terrain

Parry, Jonathan

doi:10.1017/s0892679417000065

Cited by 20 publications

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“…On the need and meaning of the legitimate authority condition, see, e.g.,Parry (2017) andBenbaji (2018).6 This argument is compatible with the view that legitimate authority is morally required for wars waged in name of some community-as being either authorized by or having political authority over a person seems a general precondition for acting in their name(Benbaji 2018: 309-311; cf. Fabre 2008 cf.…”

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confidence: 72%

The Right to Wage Private Wars of Subsistence

Olsthoorn¹

2021

The Public Uses of Coercion and Force

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Some philosophers have recently argued for the revisionist just war doctrine that individuals can have the right to initiate war in defense of their human rights when their government fails in its duty to protect them. It was a central tenet of early modern just war theory, too, that when judicial recourse is not available, individuals are entitled to enforce their basic rights by force of war. How should we conceptualize such remedial rights to secure basic rights by armed force? And where to fit such rights within ethical theories of war? This chapter explores these questions by critically contrasting two ways to ground individual rights to wage so-called “private subsistence wars”: via “modern” duties of global justice and via “old” rights of necessity. I argue that the right-of-necessity model—for better or worse—can sidestep problems of indeterminate and underdetermined moral liability by grounding resistance rights in enforceable rights (of subsistence) rather than in enforceable duties (of global justice). My analysis thus charts normative implications of dispensing with the legitimate authority condition by analyzing what it means for rights and duties to be enforceable.

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confidence: 72%

The Right to Wage Private Wars of Subsistence

Olsthoorn¹

2021

The Public Uses of Coercion and Force

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“…1 Writing in 2018, this claim can no longer be maintained. Rather, it seems that the authority criterion has moved to the forefront of debate as a host of publications on the question indicates (cf., e. g., Benbaji 2018;Fabre 2008Fabre , 2012Finlay 2010;Kutz 2005;Parry 2015Parry , 2017Reitberger 2013;Schwenkenbecher 2013;Steinhoff 2007;Wrange 2017). Interestingly, the revived interest in authority has returned philosophical attention to the principle classical just war thinkers such as St Thomas Aquinas considered to be the most important of all.…”

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confidence: 99%

Just war and the question of authority

Braun

2018

ZEMO

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This article assesses the recently renewed interest in the just war criterion of sovereign authority from a Thomistic perspective. It contrasts the classical conceptualisation of authority as found in the work of St Thomas Aquinas with the argument made by today's revisionist just war thinkers. The article points out that the two approaches start from fundamentally different units of moral analysis. While the Thomistic just war emphasises the common good of the political community revisionists advocate the perspective of moral individualism. As a result, for Thomism, only those entrusted with the responsibility for the common good of the political community are entitled to wage war while, in contrast, revisionists argue that any individual has the right to wage war. The latter side's position, the article criticises, is problematic from a moral point of view as it runs counter to the just war tradition's concern about restraint in the employment of force.

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Public war and the requirement of legitimate authority

Yuan

2021

Philos Stud

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This paper offers a non-reductivist account of the requirement of legitimate authority in warfare (RLA). I first advance a distinction between private and public wars. A war is private where individuals defend their private rights with their private means. A war is public where it either aims to defend public rights (e.g., a people's right to self-governance) or relies on public means (e.g., conscription and taxation). I argue that RLA applies to public war but not private war. A public war waged by a belligerent without legitimate authority involves a form of illegitimate domination of the people. Contra the conventional wisdom that RLA is only an ad bellum principle, I show that RLA is also a vital in bello principle. Relying on the Kantian non-voluntarist account of political authority, I argue that only legitimate states have the right to wage public wars. However, I also contend that RLA is not an absolute requirement, even regarding the justice of public war. Under extremely unfavorable conditions, this requirement may be overridden by weighty considerations in favor of resorting to public war without legitimate authority. In sum, my account of RLA protects ordinary people from illegitimate coercion involved in guerrilla warfare in general yet generates proper permission for responsible, aspiring state founders to secure social justice by coercive means under extraordinary situations.

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Legitimate Authority and the Ethics of War: A Map of the Terrain

Cited by 20 publications

References 41 publications

The Right to Wage Private Wars of Subsistence

The Right to Wage Private Wars of Subsistence

Just war and the question of authority

Public war and the requirement of legitimate authority

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