Selling Arms and Expressing Harm

Christensen, James

doi:10.1111/japp.12477

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…A common defence of arms transfers to aggressive and oppressive states claims that they leave the victims of those states no worse off than they would otherwise have been. This argument merits independent treatment (see Christensen, 2021), and, for present purposes, I am setting it aside.…”

Section: The Mitigation Argumentmentioning

confidence: 99%

The morality of substitution intervention: The case of Yemen

Christensen

2021

Politics

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Throughout the Yemeni Civil War, western states have supplied weapons used in the indiscriminate bombing campaign conducted by the Saudis. In defence of their actions, British politicians have argued that they are exchanging weapons for influence, and using the influence obtained to encourage compliance with humanitarian law. An additional premise in the argument is that Britain is using its influence more benignly than alternative suppliers would use theirs if Britain were not on the scene. The idea is that Britain is substituting itself for other, less scrupulous, interveners. I argue that, regardless of whether British substitution intervention could be justified in this way…, it is not in fact justified, because Britain has not plausibly used its influence to secure an amount of good sufficient to offset the various harms that its actions have created (or to discharge the expanded duties of rescue that greater influence entails). In addition, the article identifies the various forms that substitution intervention can take, and shows how the concept reveals hitherto neglected reasons to both support and oppose intervention in foreign conflicts.

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Section: The Mitigation Argumentmentioning

confidence: 99%

The morality of substitution intervention: The case of Yemen

Christensen

2021

Politics

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“…According to this argument, it is permissible to sell arms to oppressive governmentsor 'outlaw states', as he calls thembecause the victims of such governments are thereby made no worse off than they otherwise would be, given that those oppressive governments would just source arms elsewhere. 10 Because the harm is substitutive, it is claimed to be morally irrelevant. Christensen's goal is to undermine the inconsequence argument on grounds amenable to consequentialists.…”

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confidence: 99%

Introduction: Symposium on The Ethics of Indirect Intervention

Frowe

Matheson

2020

J Applied Philosophy

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Intervention in foreign conflicts is, undoubtedly, one of the most urgent and controversial issues in modern politics. After NATO interventions in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo during the 1990s, which were widely regarded as reasonably successful, states were comparatively receptive to the idea of using military force abroad for humanitarian ends. There followed a flurry of academic literature on the normative implications of intervention, with two noticeable features. First, the literature is predominantly legal in character, focusing on how international law should respond to widespread human rights abuses. Even now, comparatively little philosophical work has been carried out on the morality of intervention, in contrast to the significant amount of work on just causes for war more generally. [1][2][3][4][5] Second, this literature almost exclusively addresses the permissibility of direct humanitarian interventionthat is, of states' deploying their own armed forces abroad, without the consent of the target state, in order to protect foreign citizens from harm. [6][7][8][9] In more recent years, political debates about how to respond to humanitarian crises abroad have shifted away from direct intervention. In the aftermath of disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, governments are increasingly reluctant to deploy their armed forces to fight in foreign domestic conflicts, and there is little public appetite for largescale interventionist wars. Limited NATO intervention in Libya in 2011 was followed by a lack of direct Western intervention in, for example, Syria and Yemen, despite the undoubted gravity of the harms facing the Syrian and Yemeni populations.Instead, several countries are increasingly advocating and employing indirect forms of intervention, such as funding, arming, or training foreign rebel groups. France, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States have armed and trained rebels in Syria, for example. Of course, there is nothing new about states indirectly intervening in foreign conflicts. But, historically, such intervention has been conducted largely covertly, and primarily or solely as a means of furthering the interveners' own political interests. Now, in contrast, indirect intervention is often carried out overtly and presented as a laudable means of discharging one's duties to aid without incurring either the physical or moral risks of waging war. But indirectly contributing to war is not without moral risks, as a growing body of literature in the ethics of war attests. And, of course, not all indirect contributions to foreign conflicts fall under the description of aiding foreign citizens. On the contrary: governments sell, or facilitate the selling of, weapons and equipment to authoritarian states that use those weapons to harm their citizens. Just as we ought to be concerned about vaunted attempts to influence foreign

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Selling Arms and Expressing Harm

Cited by 2 publications

References 13 publications

The morality of substitution intervention: The case of Yemen

The morality of substitution intervention: The case of Yemen

Introduction: Symposium on The Ethics of Indirect Intervention

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