Professor Christopher Finlay christopher.j.finlay@durham.ac.uk
Head of Department
Ethics, Force, and Power: on the Political Preconditions of Just War
Finlay, Christopher J.
Authors
Abstract
Benbaji and Statman’s contractarian ethics of war offers a powerful new philosophical defence of orthodox conclusions against revisionist criticism. I present a two-pronged argument in reply. First, contractarianism yields what I call ‘decent war theory,’ a theory in which war between de-cent states is paradigmatic. I argue, by contrast, that states should treat wars against indecent states as paradigmatic, resulting in a Rawlsian alternative that issues in an ethics closer to revi-sionism. The second prong argues that the symmetrical international distribution of power re-quired by contractarianism throws into doubt the viability of war as an instrument for securing just ends. But I argue that there is a very important lesson to take from Benbaji and Statman’s analysis here. Even if contractarianism is arguably weakened by its political assumptions, revi-sionists frequently fail to pay any attention to the vagaries of power and their effects in shaping the outcomes of different accounts of ethics. I therefore argue that just war theory in general ought to develop an ethics with sufficient versatility to respond to shifts and variations in the distribution of military power. In particular, philosophers must consider morally defensible ways in which decent states can challenge rising indecent powers.
Citation
Finlay, C. J. (2022). Ethics, Force, and Power: on the Political Preconditions of Just War. Law and Philosophy, 41(6), 717-740. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10982-022-09452-y
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Apr 17, 2022 |
Online Publication Date | Jun 20, 2022 |
Publication Date | 2022-12 |
Deposit Date | Nov 29, 2021 |
Publicly Available Date | Jan 17, 2023 |
Journal | Law and Philosophy |
Print ISSN | 0167-5249 |
Electronic ISSN | 1573-0522 |
Publisher | Springer |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 41 |
Issue | 6 |
Pages | 717-740 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1007/s10982-022-09452-y |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1220782 |
Files
Published Journal Article
(245 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Copyright Statement
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
You might also like
Political Violence: The Problem of Dirty Hands
(2023)
Journal Article
On canons and question marks: The work of women’s international thought
(2021)
Journal Article
Assisting Rebels Abroad: The Ethics of Violence at the Limits of the Defensive Paradigm
(2020)
Journal Article
Beyond the Killing Paradigm (Part of a Critical Exchange: How and Why to Do Just War Theory)
(2020)
Journal Article
Downloadable Citations
About Durham Research Online (DRO)
Administrator e-mail: dro.admin@durham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search