The Problem of Perfidy and the Failure of Forms

This commentary on Arthur Ripstein’s Tanner Lectures takes up several principal concerns with Ripstein’s powerful argument. First, the author suggests that Ripstein understates the tension, verging on contradiction, of the ius ad bellum and the ius in bello, where the former (in modern thought) treats wars as a great evil to be avoided at nearly all costs, while the second treats war as a legitimate form of interpersonal conflict. Second, the author queries whether Ripstein’s focus in Lecture I on the wrong of perfidy causes him to place too much emphasis on the specific value of a negotiated peace, as opposed to further, intrinsic concerns with the breach of trust and lack of honor. And third, the author questions whether formal features of an aggressor’s intention can make any difference to the (im)permissibility of killing civilians. Last, the author strongly endorses Ripstein’s conception of the ethics of war as grounded in politics, not individual, interpersonal morality.

E-4 Participation of Muslim Females in Defense (A Sharia Judgment)

Society has two basic elements for its buildings; man and women, both are most important pillars for society’s roots to grow and development, same as both are responsible to save the society which they made on the cost of their blood and sacrifices. For the survival of society these sacrifices can be performed in normal life and for defense too presenting them as an effective and responsible entity. In the light of Sharia's obligations on the top the list and sometime crucial for Elman and Kufr is ''Defense''. When some non-Muslims Attacks on Muslim Government or Muslim community its obligatory for Muslim Ummah to stand up for their Defense, that attack can be from every angle and category of life now going on each level. Make strategy for fight as the attackers made. In this context for achieving the national aims of defense, females participations matters a lot. People who are destroying the natural rights of nations, if there would be no proper setup to cope down with them then there would be no life of Dominating nations in the world. So it’s good to adopt small evil to end the great evil. It’s a law of nature, permanent rule and act of life too. Current time is effecting all fields of life same as the war Dimensions, its compulsory to Judge the current participation and need of Muslim females (the most important and huge part of nation) in defense along with men according to Shariah. Moreover, it consists introduction, methodology, data interpretation, conclusion and bibliography.

Death

Reflection on death gives rise to a variety of philosophical questions. One of the deepest of these is a question about the nature of death. Typically, philosophers interpret this question as a call for an analysis or definition of the concept of death. Plato, for example, proposed to define death as the separation of soul from body. However, this definition is not acceptable to those who think that there are no souls. It is also unacceptable to anyone who thinks that plants and lower animals have no souls, but can nonetheless die. Others have defined death simply as the cessation of life. This too is problematic, since an organism that goes into suspended animation ceases to live, but may not actually die. Death is described as ‘mysterious’, but neither is it clear what this means. Suppose we cannot formulate a satisfactory analysis of the concept of death: in this respect death would be mysterious, but no more so than any other concept that defies analysis. Some have said that what makes death especially mysterious and frightening is the fact that we cannot know what it will be like. Death is typically regarded as a great evil, especially if it strikes someone too soon. However, Epicurus and others argued that death cannot harm those who die, since people go out of existence when they die, and people cannot be harmed at times when they do not exist. Others have countered that the evil of death may lie in the fact that death deprives us of the goods we would have enjoyed if we had lived. On this view, death may be a great evil for a person, even if they cease to exist at the moment of death. Philosophers have also been concerned with the question of whether people can survive death. This is open to several interpretations, depending on what we understand to be people and what we mean by ‘survive’. Traditional materialists take each person to be a purely physical object – a human body. Since human bodies generally continue to exist after death, such materialists presumably must say that we generally survive death. However, such survival would be of little value to the deceased, since the surviving entity is just a lifeless corpse. Dualists take each person to have both a body and a soul. A dualist may maintain that at death the soul separates from the body, thereby continuing to enjoy (or suffer) various experiences after the body has died. Some who believe in survival think that the eternal life of the soul after bodily death can be a good beyond comparison. But Bernard Williams has argued that eternal life would be profoundly unattractive. If we imagine ourselves perpetually stuck at a given age, we may reasonably fear that eternal life will eventually become rather boring. On the other hand, if we imagine ourselves experiencing an endless sequence of varied ‘lives’, each disconnected from the others, then it is questionable whether it will in fact be ‘one person’ who lives eternally. Finally, there are questions about death and the meaning of life. Suppose death marks the end of all conscious experience – would our lives be then rendered meaningless? Or would the fact of impending death help us to recognize the value of our lives, and thereby give deeper meaning to life?

Last Resort and Proportionality

Justified warfare requires far more than a just cause. The multiple necessary conditions to be satisfied before the inevitable deaths, wounds, and destruction of war, many inflicted wrongfully on combatants on both sides and on civilians, can be justified as a lesser evil also minimally include reasonable prospect of success, last resort, and proportionality of resort. Only a great evil to be resisted can constitute a just cause, and it must be empirically the case that military action has a reasonable prospect of stopping the resisted evil and is also necessary in being the least evil means of resistance, which is the meaning of last resort. Proportionality of resort, which is importantly different from proportionality in the conduct of war, can be assessed only by examining several questions concerning the evils created by the proposed war, including whose evils (only one’s own or predictable others) and which evils (which harms count).

Is God (almost) a consequentialist? Swinburne's moral theory

Swinburne offers a greater-goods defence to the problem of evil within a deontological framework. Yet deontologists characteristically hold that we have no right to inflict great evil on any individual to bring about the greater good. Swinburne accepts that humans generally do not have that right, but argues that God, as the supreme care-giver, does. I contend that Swinburne's argument that care-givers have such a right is flawed, and defend the classical deontological objection to imposing evils that good may come.