Kant and the Law of War

The past two decades have seen renewed scholarly and popular interest in the law and morality of war. Positions that originated in the late Middle Ages through the seventeenth century have received more sophisticated philosophical elaboration. Although many contemporary writers draw on ideas that figure prominently in Kant’s moral philosophy, his explicit discussions of war have not been brought into their proper place within these discussions and debates. Kant argues that a special morality governs the permissible use of force because of war’s distinctive immorality. He characterizes war as barbaric, because in war, might makes right—which side prevails does not depend on who is in the right. The very thing that makes war wrongful also provides the appropriate standard for evaluating the conduct of war, and the only basis for law governing war.

Rules for Wrongdoers

Ripstein’s lectures, which constitute the central texts of this book, focus on the two bodies of rules governing war: the ius ad bellum, which regulates resort to armed force, and the ius in bello, which sets forth rules governing the conduct of armed force and applies equally to all parties. The lectures argue that both sets of rules constitute prohibitions rather than permissions, and that recognizing them as distinctive prohibitions can reconcile the seeming tension between them. By understanding that the central wrong of war is that war is the condition which force decides, Ripstein contends that the law and morality of war are in fact aligned; the rules governing the conduct of hostilities must apply equally to parties in the right and parties in the wrong in an armed conflict, because the prohibitions outlined in the rules governing war are prohibitions that restrain war. Ripstein’s method of analysis and the substantive argument he puts forward offer an opportunity for rigorous critical engagement in subsequent essays by commentators Hathaway, Kutz, and McMahan, followed by a response from Ripstein.

Religious Pacifism

This chapter argues that pacifism is not merely an applied ethic—a narrow approach to the particular moral problem of war—but rather a comprehensive ethical theory. The same is true of just war theory, the other main approach to the morality of war. The chapter looks at several pacifist traditions, beginning with the Radical Reformation or Anabaptist stream within Christianity. It also explores the pacifist thought of Martin Luther King Jr., who emphasized the relationship between means and ends, a theme that is also central to the thought of Mohandas K. Gandhi. Gandhi insisted that practices are not just tools for achieving predetermined goals, however, but shape the ways we conceive of those ends and of the possibilities and obstacles we face in achieving them. This offers a novel way of conceiving not just of means and ends but of ethics generally, in which practices are central from start to finish

To Do, To Die, To Reason Why

To Do, To Die, To Reason Why is concerned with a wide range of issues about the ethics of war and the legal regulation of war. It is especially concerned with the conduct of individuals, including whether they are required to follow orders to go to war, what moral constraints there are on killing in war, what makes people liable to be killed in war, and the extent to which the laws of war ought to reflect the morality of war. It defends a largely anti-authority view about the morality of war, and defends familiar moral constraints on killing in war, such as the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing and a version of the Doctrine of Double Effect. However, it argues that a much wider range of people are liable to be harmed or killed in war than is normally thought to be the case, on grounds of both causal involvement and fairness, and it argues that the laws of war should converge much more closely with the morality of war than is currently the case.

Humanizing War

This chapter introduces issues in the ethics of war by considering the Vietnam War. It describes the main aim of the book as to totalize the humanitarian impulse in the moral assessment of war. By that it means to understand the morality of war by understanding the significance of each human life in war, and to regulate our actions in accordance with this significance. It widens the focus to the relationship between state responsibility for war. and individual responsibility for wrongdoing. It then outlines the main themes of the book.

The Morality of Harm

The methodological debate about the morality of war has tended to confuse different questions. It has led to a polarization, where on the one hand people see the morality of war as a primarily collectivist and institutionalized subject and on the other simply as a matter of questions of individual responsibility. These are not the only options, and we need a more nuanced approach. Rejecting the existence and significance of collective agency, or the authority of the commands of unjust states to go to war, should not incline us to ignore other facts about relationships between individuals that are morally important.

Amoral realism or just war morality? Disentangling different conceptions of necessity

This paper addresses a misconception in the popular contrast between amoral realism and just war theory and clarifies the linguistic source of the misconception by disentangling the two interpretations of necessity. First, we can, and should, distinguish the Thucydidean “causal” conception of necessity, which is the basis for just war thinkers when they attack realist thought, from the Machiavellian “telic” conception. The paper, then, proceeds to reconsider the relationship between realism and morality through a textual analysis of representative contemporary realist theories and clarifies that their necessity judgments contain both causal and telic meanings. According to those supporting the moral view, the pursuit of national interest and security can be interpreted as emerging from their sense of moral duty. Realists are, even if partially, in line with just war theorists in evaluating the moral appropriateness of a war in itself and its methods. Finally, the paper explores the substantive disagreement between the two camps regarding the principle of discrimination, to demonstrate why they should still be assumed to have separate theories. In conclusion, their difference lies in not whether they place importance on the necessity judgment, among other considerations on the morality of war, but the extent to which they do so.

The Morality of War: A Review and Research Agenda

What is judged as morally right and wrong in war? I argue that despite many decades of research on moral psychology and the psychology of intergroup conflict, social psychology does not yet have a good answer to this question. However, it is a question of great importance because its answer has implications for decision-making in war, public policy, and international law. I therefore suggest a new way for psychology researchers to study the morality of war that combines the strengths of philosophical just-war theory with experimental techniques and theories developed for the psychological study of morality more generally. This novel approach has already begun to elucidate the moral judgments third-party observers make in war, and I demonstrate that these early findings have important implications for moral psychology, just-war theory, and the understanding of the morality of war.