Ethics of War and Peace

Warfare ideologies in Europe basically changed in the Early Modern period. This period  is  the  age  of  Reformation,  of  which  Desiderius  Erasmus  was  one  of  the earliest  prominent  thinkers.  Concerning  warfare,  Erasmus  can  be  understood  as a  representative of pacifism, but at the same time, it can be argued that he was the first reformer with a specific theory of justification of war. In this respect, Erasmus had several followers from every part of Europe, including Hungary. This
Hungarian “apprentice” was István Magyari, who was also the first representative of  Hungarian  military  science.  This  paper  uncovers  and  examines  the  common points of Erasmus and Magyari in their theory of justification of war, and Magyari’s divergence from Erasmus’ thinking.

A prominent conception of terrorism, held by Igor Primoratz, Stephen Nathanson, C. A. J. Coady, Uwe Steinhoff, and Jeff McMahan, claims that it (i) is gravely and distinctively wrong, compared to other forms of violence; and (ii) necessarily harms those who are not responsible for, or morally innocent of, the terrorists’ grievance. Moreover, the conception holds that these two views preserve and explain the conventional moral judgment that terrorism is almost always wrong. This paper challenges that against-moral-innocents (AMI) conception. I argue that AMI, unlike other terrorism-conceptions, incentivizes lay non-philosophers adhering to it to see all terrorists as radically evil agents who pose an existential threat. But if so, then those layfolk will have reasons, provided by the AMI conception, for engaging in morally regrettable deliberation about how to respond to terrorism. That, the paper argues, provides a reason for doubting such conceptions. In making that argument, the paper analyzes the nature of conventional-morality-capturing conceptions like AMI, distinguishes AMI from other terrorism-conceptions, examines four prima facie wrongs which AMI-viewed terrorism will be seen to do, compares these to the fewer prima facie wrongs which other terrorism-conceptions take terrorism to do, and considers how lay people’s seeing AMI-viewed terrorism as radically evil figured in the response to the recent Boston Marathon bombings and in the War on Terror.

A penultimate version is available for download. Please cite the published version, available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/phil.12021/abstract

A variety of ethical objections have been raised against the military employment of uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs, drones). Some of these objections are technological concerns
over UAVs abilities’ to function on par with their inhabited counterparts. This paper sets such concerns aside and instead focuses on supposed objections to the use of UAVs in principle. I examine several such objections currently on offer and show them all to be wanting. Indeed, I argue that we have a general duty to protect an agent engaged in a justified act from harm to the greatest extent possible, so long as that protection does not interfere with the agent’s ability to act justly. UAVs can afford precisely such protection. Therefore, we are obligated to employ UAV weapon systems for a justified mission if it can be shown that their use does not significantly reduce a warfighter’s operational capability. Of course, if a given military action is unjustified to begin with, then carrying out that act via UAVs is wrong, just as it would be with any weapon. But the point of this paper is to show that there is nothing wrong in principle with using a UAV and that, other things being equal, using
such technology can be, in fact, obligatory.

This paper assesses the impact of the current changes in international conflicts on the ethics of war. It shows how the fact that interstate wars tend to be superseded by irregular wars is both a moral and political challenge that democracies now have to face. The effects of the changes in international law on the ethics of war will also be analysed. The "Grotian" law of war, based on the theory of the just war inherited from ancient times, initially put limits to resorting to strength while considering the war death toll. The armed conflicts law, which is a specific part of the international humanitarian law, regards war as a pathology which may justify military intervention if it is motivated by humanitarian reasons. Two logics are here confronted : they correspond to two different definitions of the just war. According to the classic approach which was developed by Grotius, the war is just when it complies to a number of normative criteria, and implies a conflict waged according to set rules between states which recognise one another as lawful entities. In the new approach, the war is just if it means an intervention where human rights and democracy are under threat. The armies of democratic states gradually have to adjust to this new state of affairs. The traditional soldier's ethics, which used to be grounded in the chivalry ideal and the virtue-theory now competes with a deontology applied to the war-waging profession, according to which moral dilemmas are solved by a discourse on professional competence.

Just war theorists have recently introduced the category of jus ad vim to join the traditional categories of jus ad bellum and jus in bello. As the 'just resort to force,' proponents of jus ad vim argue that this category is conceptually distinct from the issues of a just resort to full-scaled war and the just means of fighting war. Since many military engagements today fall short of full-scaled war, the question of what is a just resort to military measures short of war (MMSoW) is a pressing question for both just war theory and international law. At a basic level, what is of controversy is whether a distinct set of principles is needed for judging MMSoW or whether the extant principles of jus ad bellum and jus in bello simply need to be interpreted and applied in light of the apparent novelties of MMSoW taken up against either states or nonstate actors. One might suspect, however, that this basic controversy is primarily a semantic one. After all, what hangs in the balance of whether one claims the need for a new ethical category like jus ad vim or the need for new interpretations of the traditional jus ad bellum and jus in bello categories? As it turns out, there is more than semantics hanging in the balance. The advocates of jus ad vim view the novelty of this ethical category as important for establishing a distinct alternative to both the war and law enforcement paradigms. These two paradigms are the traditional legal and moral frameworks used to analyze the permissibility of a state's resort to lethal force. 1 The stated hope of jus ad vim advocates is that the principles withJust war theorists have recently introduced the category of jus ad vim to join the traditional categories of jus ad bellum and jus in bello.  As the ‘just resort to force’, proponents of jus ad vim argue that this category is distinct from the issues of a just resort to full-scaled war and the just means of fighting war.  Since many military engagements today fall short of full-scaled war, the question of what is a just resort to military measures short of war (MMSoW) is a pressing question for both just war theory and international law.  At a basic level, what is of controversy is whether a distinct set of principles is needed for judging MMSoW or whether the extant principles of jus ad bellum and jus in bello simply need to be interpreted and applied in light of the apparent novelties of MMSoW taken up against either states or nonstate actors.  It had been proposed by some (Walzer; Brunstetter & Braun) that a more permissive set of principles is appropriate for jus ad vim due to the precision in which such limited force can be deployed—whether by means of drones or other contemporary military technology.  In this paper, I will examine two recent proposals to adopt a more permissive set of distinct jus ad vim principles and I will propose several reasons for being skeptical of this move.  These two attempts focus, in turn, upon making a resort to MMSoW more permissible for preventive strikes and defensive force. I argue that neither of these approaches supports the adoption of novel jus ad vim principles that are conceptually distinct from those contained in jus ad bellum and jus in bello.  Though the introduction of precision technologies used in MMSoW may potentially have an effect on proportionality calculations, they do not in themselves alter the conditions of just cause, proper authority, necessity, or right intention.  Even though I argue that jus ad vim does not stand as a paradigm distinct from that of war, I agree that the war paradigm may not always be a perspicuous lens for analyzing much recent counterterrorist MMSoW, e.g. targeted killings.  I will conclude by briefly considering why a law enforcement framework comes much closer to highlighting the most salient moral features of these MMSoW and what further work needs to be done to clarify how to assess their justice.

This talk claims that the most fundamental question raised by non-Constantinian theologies such as John Howard Yoder's is the precise relation between Christian ontology and Christian ethics. Yoder's critique is not essentially an historical, but a theological one: Christ has revealed that God is nonviolent, and so the use of violence is a failure to participate in divine being, to be like God. Some trends in Radical Orthodoxy are also briefly observed, as they serve to exacerbate the question here identified and commended as worthy of theological attention.

In the international arena with increasing the differentiation between groups in terms of politics, economics and ideologies, people began to try to reflect their own culture, language and so on in specific region which was they lived area. In the mid-20 th century, the term " ethnicity " as it is used today replacing terminology of " races " or " nations " used for the concept of in the 19 th century. Especially in the post-Cold War period has witnessed a number of ethnically-informed secessionist movements, predominantly within the former communist states. After the decline of Soviet Union, numbers of the multi-ethnic societies increased within different nations and then we began to see differentiations as a term of ethnic conflict that escalated to violence and civil war. In this study, my paper will focus on the term of " Ethnic Conflict " and the case of conflicts between South Caucasus and Abkhaz.

Francisco Suárez SJ (1548-1617) was a leader of Iberian silver-age scholastic natural law thinking. If natural law is, in the times of Suárez, to be understood as a theological system of natural rights and obligations, this classification will be in principle correct. Though, we have to consider that in the 16 th century, the old paradigms of world order had begun to change, so that a too strong term of natural law (in the sense of concludent, logical) was no longer useful. While the (European) medieval unity of sacerdotium and imperium, carried by a closed Christian society (respublica christiana), had been abandoned and replaced by political and religious pluralism, the whole conception of the world totally changed for the reason of the new world's discovery. In consequence, the political ethics was challenged by new questions that required more differentiate answers than the previous natural law theory could give, and asked for a new language of natural rights. Especially the problem of particular subjective rules of action led to a moral casuistry which raised doubts about the importance of general moral principles. In order to guarantee both, the general norm and its singular case, Suµrez layed-within a Thomistic framework-new stress on virtue as a regulative of political action. While on the one side, morality consists in an external obedience against law, it demands on the other side, that the prescribed good is also done in a good manner.

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Often associated with peace, mid-Byzantine diplomacy also deserves a special attention for its relations to war. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that diplomatic encounters and their actors were at the heart of politic interests which, while promoting peace, also attempted to avoid or prepare war. If Byzantine imperial ideology attached great value to the peace, war was never far from realities ambassadors had to deal with. Even in the Great Palace, some official receptions were marked by the presence of high military officials and dignitaries. Envoys were also sent when the emperors were leading military campaigns. Their frequent dealings with the authorities they met had military dimension. Furthermore, official envoys could also act, just before or after their mission, as soldiers or military men. Not only at the crossroads of peace and war, diplomacy was both a tool for the former, and somehow a kind of weapon for the latter.

摩西律法中「不可殺人」的誡命(出20:13)，並非指無論在任何情況下都不可殺人，而是指「不可謀殺」。因為在摩西律法中不僅記載「不可殺人」的誡命，也記載了對於某一類的罪必須執行死刑的刑罰。所以很自然，神所禁止的「殺人」，不是指任何情況下都不允許殺人，乃是不允許惡意的「謀殺」。然而今天世俗的人文主義思想更看重的，卻是所謂的生命的素質(quality of life)。因此無論是墮胎問題或安樂死問題，爭論的焦點都是集中在「生命的神聖性」或「生命的素質」孰重孰輕？在世風日下、道德快速滑坡的當代社會，基督徒需要挺身而立成為中流砥柱，以捍衛寶貴的生命。

Jurists primarily dealt with jihād as one of the obligations of the Muslim ruler and of his Muslim subjects in the context of external relations with non-Muslim polities. The law of nations or international law (siyar) as an integral part of Islamic law developed early due to this pragmatic
juridical concern for the intricacies of political relations with the broader non-Muslim world, as well as with religious minorities within Islamic realms. Within legal-administrative contexts, jihād is therefore primarily military in nature. Realpolitik understandably colored legal treatments of jihād and allowed for distinctive—and contested—juridical perspectives to emerge on this topic, shaped by the historical and political contingencies in which they were progressively formulated.  As a result, juridical construals of the purview of the military jihād often dramatically veered away from Qur’ānic depictions of the military aspects of jihād, as will become evident in this essay.

In den letzten Jahrzehnten äußerte die militärethische Diskussion immer stärker Kritik an der klassischen Bellum-Iustum-Lehre. Dabei wurde zunehmend ein Perspektivenwechsel gefordert: Das Augenmerk sollte nicht auf die Frage des Krieges an sich gelegt werden, sondern auf die des Friedens. Die Friedensdenkschrift der EKD (2007) gibt der friedensethischen Diskussion neue Impulse. Alte Paradigmen werden verändert.

This paper presents and partly argues for a non-ideal theoretic approach to the ethics of humanitarian intervention, focusing particularly on the cases of Rwanda and Kosovo.  Such an approach, it is argued, involves empirically scrutinizing two ideal-theoretic assumptions that dominate the philosophical literature on humanitarian intervention.  First, in states where humanitarian intervention is being considered, there are two easily identified groups: ‘bad guys’ committing human rights abuses; and innocents who are being targeted.  Second, external to the target state in question there are suitably qualified ‘good guys’ –prospective interveners who possess both the power and moral integrity to carry out a successful humanitarian intervention. The guiding idea behind the non-ideal approach defended here is that if the two ideal assumptions look to be badly mistaken when measured against the available evidence, then it is highly unlikely that the relevant intervention is (or would be) morally justified.

This essay introduces "ecologies of violence" as a problem for Christian ethics. Understanding the links between violence and the natural environment will be critical to the pursuit of justice, peace, and sustainability in the twenty-first century. Yet these links often evade political action and escape moral attention because they do not fit comfortably within any of the fields requisite to address them. In most cases, the available resources for confronting these issues-"environmental issues" and "peace and conflict issues"-exist in separate toolkits, and no single discourse has developed resources to address their progressively merging spheres of concern. The essay outlines four types of ecological violence, examines recent work in Christian ethics relevant to them, and then argues for a dialogical method of ethics to confront them. Doing Christian ethics at the intersections of violence and environmental issues will require careful attention to environmental ethics as well as to the ethics of violence. More than that, it will require judicious efforts to navigate between them within case-based and place-based ethical analyses. Ecologies of violence invite Christian ethics to develop possibilities of ethical discernment and reparative action that do justice to the deep entanglement of ecological and sociopolitical systems.

בשיתוף אוניברסיטת חיפה. קובץ מחקרים הדן במושגי השלום והמלחמה בתרבות היהודית במשמעותם הרחבה, מתוך גישה רב-תרבותית ורב-תחומית. המאמרים עוסקים גם בביטויים של השלום והמלחמה בנפשו של האדם פנימה, בתחומי המשפחה, במישור החברתי, בסוגיית היחס לכוח והשימוש בו, ובסוגיית ההקרבה, הקרבן והשכול.


Peace and War in Jewish Culture. Jerusalem: Zalman Sahzar Center, 2006. 363 pages, Hebrew

This paper sets out to answer the question of whether callousness is critical to the vocation of soldiering.  It will most notably achieve this by taking into consideration the accounts given in war memoirs and novels.  It will answer this question in the affirmative, putting forward three arguments supporting the view that soldiers must become hardened to participate.  Specifically, becoming calloused allows soldiers to do their job, provides the wherewithal to continue and acts as a kind of psychological armour against trauma.  However, I will propose that while becoming inured to violence may help soldiers in the short run, over the longer term there is a high psychological cost to becoming numbed.  Next I will argue that it is a slippery moral slope from being calloused to, given the right conditions, participating in monstrous cruelty, such as that carried out in My Lai.  Finally, the paper will consider the post bellum effects on soldiers, their family and friends and wider society.  High rates of domestic violence, violent crime and suicide in returning soldiers is a cause for concern and the paper will recognise how soldiers’ actions during combat can affect them when they are home from battle.  The paper will conclude by offering some suggestions for how the military and society as a whole can better help prevent soldiers’ psychological scars or help heal them when they do occur.

Dominant normative theories of armed conflict orientate themselves around the ultimate goal of peace. Yet the deployment of these theories in the international sphere appears to have failed in advancing toward this goal. In this paper, we argue that one major reason for this failure is these theories' use of essentially contested concepts-that is, concepts whose internally complex character results in no principled way of adjudicating between rival interpretations of them. This renders the theories susceptible to manipulation by international actors who are able to pursue bellicose policies under the cover of nominally pacific frameworks, and we show how this happened historically in a case study of the Korean War of 1950-1953. In order to better serve the goals of peace, we suggest, the rules of war should be reframed to simpler, but more restrictive, normative principles.

A cornerstone of traditional just war theory is that combatants on both sides of any conflict are legitimate targets of attack. This is not because they are engaged in wrongdoing but because they pose a threat to others. So long as they follow the jus in bello rules of proportionality and discrimination, those who fight for an unjust cause and those who fight for a just cause are moral equals: both may permissibly kill and both may permissibly be killed. This is the doctrine of the ‘moral equality of combatants’ (MEC) and it has long been the standard view. A revisionist challenge, however, argues that one is not liable to be killed if one fights for a just cause. People have a presumptive right against being killed, after all, so why should a soldier fighting for a just cause lose that right for posing a justified threat against an unjust enemy? Jeff McMahan makes the case for this revisionist view in Killing in War. He explicitly rejects the MEC and instead endorses an asymmetric view of the morality of combatants. Critics object that this revision makes just war impossible because without the MEC it is impossible to justify our convictions about legitimate and illegitimate targets. In this article, I defend the revisionist view against this objection. My defence, in turn, leads me to propose a new and more adequate account of enemy status.

Even before the Second Republic in Nigeria, Muslim leaders within and outside govt have been trying to change our Constitution and our legal system and upgrade the status of Sharia law in it.  This study looks at all the efforts made so far and the progress made in that direction by different governments sympathetic to the Islamic cause.

La justificación de la Guerra del Paraguay ha sido un tema altamente controversial, para la generación de la guerra y para las sucesivas generaciones que se han ocupado de reflexionar sobre este tema. Diversas interpretaciones se han desarrollado sobre las causas de la guerra desde el punto de vista económico y político.
Sin embargo, la justificación de la guerra desde el punto de vista moral ha recibido escasa atención. En esta ponencia se analizan las posibles justificaciones para la guerra deflagrada por el Paraguay desde la perspectiva ética, y se concluye que no puede justificarse moralmente desde el punto de vista de una guerra preventiva para hacer frente a una amenaza generada por la ruptura del equilibrio regional, como consecuencia de la guerra del Brasil contra el Uruguay. Sin embargo, el Paraguay tuvo una justificación moral para desencadenar una guerra defensiva, en defensa de otros, en este caso del Uruguay, víctima de una agresión injusta por parte del Brasil. Desde esta perspectiva, el conflicto bélico fue iniciado por el Brasil con una guerra de agresión contra el Uruguay, que fue respondido con una guerra del Paraguay en defensa del Uruguay.

From a transnational feminist perspective, this essay studies the genocide of civilians during the Korean War and prostitution around U.S. bases in South Korea as the legacy of the war. By examining the Korean military prostitutes' social activism, the chapter also offers a feminist theo-ethical discourse on peace and war.

This essay briefly presents the theory of dediscoursification as a theory of one of the major causes of war. Its key claim reads that discursive attitudes, such as lying, self-contradicting, and promise-breaking, ought to be theorized as causes directly contributory to the emergence of the state of war. The essay also explains the sense in which the theory implies a view of language as a generator of the virtual collective body. Thirdly, the essay draws on the Peloponnesian war as an empirical evidence in support of the dediscoursification theory and explains why the theory cannot be reconciled with the just war tradition of theorizing on war. Lastly, some ethical, epistemological, and political implications are spelled out to clarify here the theory's wider commitments to the extent possible.

original description by TV3 CCMA: Andreu Ginestet és un mediador per la pau català instal·lat a Alemanya que intervé en alguns dels principals conflictes del món. Hem aprofitat per parlar amb ell de com es veu el procés català a les altres instàncies mundials, del conflicte entre Rússia i Ucraïna, per Ginestet "el que més preocupa en aquest moment", i també s'ha referit a l'organització Estat Islàmic.

Description by Andreu Ginestet: In this film on Catalan State television we concentrate on the Catalonia versus Spain conflict, Ukraine, IS, Iraq and the mesh of conflicts and interests. Conflicts are explained as connected net-works of conflict that are overlaid by networks of interests.