The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty's report, The Responsibility to Protect, argues that when a state is unable or unwilling to uphold its citizens? basic human rights, such as in cases of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, the international community has a responsibility to protect these citizens by undertaking humanitarian intervention. An essential issue, however, remains unresolved: which particular agent in the international community has the duty to intervene? In this article, I critically examine four ways (...) of assigning this duty. Although I highlight the benefits of institutionalising the responsibility to protect, I argue that we should adopt, in the short term at least, a consequentialist solution: humanitarian intervention should be the responsibility of the intervener that will be the most effective. (shrink)

This book considers who should undertake humanitarian intervention in response to an ongoing or impending humanitarian crisis. It develops a normative account of legitimacy to assess not only current interveners, but also the desirability of potential reforms to the mechanisms and agents of humanitarian intervention.

Recent discussions in Just War Theory have been framed by a polarising debate between “traditionalist” and “revisionist” approaches. This debate has largely overlooked the importance of an applied account of Just War Theory. The main aim of this essay is to defend the importance of this applied account and, in particular, a nonideal account of the ethics of war. I argue that the applied, nonideal morality of war is vital for a plausible and comprehensive account of Just War Theory. A (...) subsidiary aim of the essay is to show that once we appreciate the importance of the applied, nonideal account, it becomes clear that the positions proposed by revisionists and traditionalists are, in fact, much closer than often presumed. (shrink)

In this contribution, I defend the standard list of jus ad bellum principles. In The Ethics of War and the Force of Law: A Modern Just War Theory, Uwe Steinhoff endorses only three principles of jus ad bellum (right intention, just cause, and proportionality) and claims that the others are redundant. I argue that, although fundamentally all jus ad bellum principles can be reduced to proportionality, in practice it is vital to retain the main jus ad bellum criteria as separate (...) principles. (shrink)

Private military companies are taking over a growing number of roles traditionally performed by the regular military. This article uses the framework of just war theory to consider the central normative issues raised by this privatization of military force.

Recent work in the ethics of war has done much to challenge the collectivism of the convention-based, Walzerian just war theory. In doing so, it raises the question of when it is permissible for soldiers to resort to force. This article considers this issue and, in doing so, argues that the rejection of collectivism in just war should go further still. More specifically, it defends the ‘Individual-Centric Approach’ to the deep morality of war, which asserts that the justifiability of an (...) individual’s contribution to the war, rather than the justifiability of the war more generally, determines the moral acceptability of their participation. It then goes on to present five implications of the Individual-Centric Approach, including for individual liability to attack in war. (shrink)

This article considers the duty to undertake humanitarian intervention. It first examines the arguments for the duty to intervene and questions the possibility of supererogatory humanitarian intervention. It then considers the leading objections to this duty which, it is argued, are largely unpersuasive. In the final section, the article considers the duty to intervene in the context of the responsibility to protect doctrine, which provides the framework within which debates about humanitarian intervention now in large part occur.

If the resources used to wage wars could be spent elsewhere and save more lives, does this mean that wars are unjustified? This article considers this question, which has been largely overlooked by Just War Theorists and pacifists. It focuses on whether the opportunity costs of war lead to a form of pacifism, which it calls ‘Opportunity Costs Pacifism’. The article argues that Opportunity Costs Pacifism is, at the more ideal level, compelling. It suggests that the only plausible response to (...) Opportunity Costs Pacifism applies in highly nonideal circumstances. This has major implications for Just War Theory and pacifism since it is only at the highly nonideal level that war can be justified. (shrink)

The moral permissibility of the intervention in Libya largely turns on two fairly tricky assessments: whether the situation was sufficiently serious at the time the intervention was launched and what the predominant purposes of the intervention were.

Despite the popularity of arming rebels as a foreign policy option, there is very little, if any, detailed engagement with the ethical issues surrounding the practice. There is a growing literature on the ethical issues surrounding civil wars and, more specifically, the conditions for engaging in just rebellion; but the focus of this literature is largely on the question of the justifiability of the rebels themselves in engaging in civil war and their conduct when doing so, rather than the permissibility (...) of the arming of rebels by other agents. It is precisely this issue that I want to address here. Overall, I argue that the process should be generally eschewed. More specifically, this article seeks to establish that arming rebels is generally impermissible and only exceptionally morally permissible. The former, far more restrictive claim will be established in the first part of the article. The latter, more permissive claim will be established in the second part of the article. (shrink)

The current mechanisms and agents of humanitarian intervention are inadequate. As the crisis in Darfur has highlighted, the international community lacks both the willingness to undertake humanitarian intervention and the ability to do so legitimately. This article considers a cosmopolitan solution to these problems: the creation of a standing army for the United Nations. There have been a number of proposals for such a force, including many recently. However, they contain two central flaws: the force proposed would be, firstly, too (...) small and, secondly, too dependent on major states. Accordingly, I argue that, to be a substantial improvement on the current situation, such a force would need to be, firstly, much larger and, secondly, in the hands of cosmopolitan democratic institutions. This two-part solution would solve the problems faced by current interveners, but is unlikely to be realised soon. Accordingly, I argue that our immediate efforts should instead be concentrated on improving regional organisations' ability to intervene. (shrink)

The private military industry has been growing rapidly since the end of the Cold War. The Morality of Private War uses normative political theory to assess the leading moral arguments for and against the use of private military and security companies.

The legitimacy of the military is frequently overlooked in standard accounts of jus ad bellum. Accordingly, this paper considers how the military should be organized. It proposes a normative conception of legitimacy – the ‘Moderate Instrumentalist Approach’ – that outlines the qualities that a military should possess. It then assesses the three leading ways of organizing the military according to this approach: the use of private military and security companies (PMSCs), a conscripted force and the all-volunteer force (AVF). The paper (...) argues that the AVF, despite some notable problems, is the most legitimate way of organizing the military. (shrink)

This book examines the ethics of the alternatives to war. It assesses the moral case for each of the alternative in their own right, and provides an overall assessment of the alternatives to war.

This article explores the ethics of state borrowing to fulfil global responsibilities. Although borrowing may appear attractive in the face of budgetary pressures and an increased number of crises in a changing global order, the article argues that borrowing to fulfil global responsibilities is generally morally problematic. It presents two main objections to borrowing. First, borrowing is often likely to be unfair intergenerationally, violating the ‘Just Borrowing Principle’. Second, borrowing demonstrates a lack of sufficient commitment, violating the ‘Taking a Stand (...) Principle’, and therefore weakens the expressivist justification of measures to fulfil global responsibilities. (shrink)

The possibility of using private military and security companies to bolster the capacity to undertake intervention for human rights purposes has been increasingly debated. The focus of such discussions has, however, largely been on practical issues and the contingent problems posed by private force. By contrast, this article considers the principled case for privatising humanitarian intervention. It focuses on two central issues. First, does outsourcing humanitarian intervention to private military and security companies pose some fundamental, deeper problems in this context, (...) such as an abdication of a state's duties? Second, on the other hand, is there a case for preferring these firms to other, state-based agents of humanitarian intervention? For instance, given a state's duties to their own military personnel, should the use of private military and security contractors be preferred to regular soldiers for humanitarian intervention? (shrink)

The conflict in Ukraine indicates some of the features of a potential post-liberal order and raises several potential ethical issues that may arise for international interventions as the world changes. What types of interventions, if any, are justifiable in response to situations such as the one in Ukraine? Can interventions be permissible given the potential undermining of universalist claims that are often used to support them? How should states prioritize between situations if there is an even greater number of global (...) challenges in a post-liberal order? Three new books—Solferino 21 by Hugo Slim, Decolonizing Human Rights by Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim, and Promoting Justice across Borders by Lucia Rafanelli—can help to navigate these questions. Drawing on their insights, this essay argues that reform interventions can be justified to defend the liberal international order, that intervention can be defended from a relativist basis, and that socioeconomic rights should be given greater priority. (shrink)

Three central questions lie at the heart of this roundtable. First, what are the implications of Libya for the RtoP doctrine? Second, how should we judge the intervention in Libya morally and politically? Third, what is the likelihood of future action under RtoP?

Which harms and benefits should be viewed as relevant when considering whether to launch cyber-measures? In this article, we consider this question, which matters because it is central to determining whether cyber-measures should be launched. Several just war theorists hold a version of what we call the ‘Restrictive View’, according to which there are restrictions on the sorts of harms and benefits that should be included in proportionality assessments about the justifiability of going to war (whether cyber or kinetic). We (...) discuss two such views – the Just Cause Restrictive View and Rights-based Restrictive View – and find both wanting. By contrast, we defend what we call the ‘Permissive View’. This holds that all potential goods and bads should be included in proportionality decisions about cyber-measures, even those that appear to be trivial, and where the various harms and benefits are given different weights, according to their agent-relative and agent-neutral features. We argue further that accepting the Permissive View has broader implications for the ethical frameworks governing cyberwar, both in terms of whether cyberattack provide just cause for coercive responses, including kinetic warfare and cyber-responses, and whether cyber-measures should be governed by just war theory or a new theory for cyber-operations. (shrink)

James Pattison's argument for the assignment of a duty of humanitarian intervention is interesting and offers a new perspective in the humanitarian intervention debate. However, Pattison's argument suffers from three main problems, each increasingly serious: his definition of success is vague and raises questions about the content of a duty of humanitarian intervention; his consequentialist foundation raises problems of prospective and retrospective judgment; and his intentional omission of the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties leads to conceptual (...) difficulties. (shrink)

Former Google advertising strategist, now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams launches a plea to society and to the tech industry to help ensure that the technology we all carry with us every day does not distract us from pursuing our true goals in life. As information becomes ever more plentiful, the resource that is becoming more scarce is our attention. In this 'attention economy', we need to recognise the fundamental impacts of our new information environment on our lives in order (...) to take back control. Drawing on insights ranging from Diogenes to contemporary tech leaders, Williams's thoughtful and impassioned analysis is sure to provoke discussion and debate. Williams is the inaugural winner of the Nine Dots Prize, a new Prize for creative thinking that tackles contemporary social issues. This title is also available as Open Access. (shrink)

This is the first critical study of The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze's most important work on language and ethics, as well as the main source of his vital philosophy of the event.James Williams explains the originality of Deleuze's work with careful definitions of all his innovative terms and a detailed description of the complex structure he constructs. This reading makes connections to his ground-breaking work on literature, to his critical but also progressive relation to the sciences, and to (...) his controversial denial of the priority of standard logics, human values and 'meaning' in thinking.This book will open new debates and develop current ones around Deleuze's work in philosophy, politics, literature, linguistics, cultural studies and sociology. (shrink)

Why is American punishment so cruel? While in continental Europe great efforts are made to guarantee that prisoners are treated humanely, in America sentences have gotten longer and rehabilitation programs have fallen by the wayside. Western Europe attempts to prepare its criminals for life after prison, whereas many American prisons today leave their inhabitants reduced and debased. In the last quarter of a century, Europe has worked to ensure that the baser human inclination toward vengeance is not reflected by state (...) policy, yet America has shown a systemic drive toward ever increasing levels of harshness in its criminal policies. Why is America so short on mercy? In this deeply researched, comparative work, James Q. Whitman reaches back to the 17th and 18th centuries to trace how and why American and European practices came to diverge. Eschewing the usual historical imprisonment narratives, Whitman focuses instead on intriguing differences in the development of punishment in the age of Western democracy. European traditions of social hierarchy and state power, so consciously rejected by the American colonies, nevertheless supported a more merciful and dignified treatment of offenders. The hierarchical class system on the continent kept alive a tradition of less-degrading "high-status" punishments that eventually became applied across the board in Europe. The distinctly American, draconian regime, on the other hand, grows, Whitman argues, out of America's longstanding distrust of state power and its peculiar, broad-brush sense of egalitarianism. Low-status punishments were evenly meted out to all offenders, regardless of class or standing. America's unrelentingly harsh treatment of trangressors--this "equal opportunity degradation"-- is, in a very real sense, the dark side of the nation's much vaunted individualism. A sobering look at the growing rift between the United States and Europe, Harsh Justice exposes the deep cultural roots of America's degrading punishment practices. (shrink)

A revised, expanded and fully up-to-date critical introduction to Deleuze's most important work of philosophyBy critically analysing Deleuze's methods, principles and arguments, James Williams helps readers to engage with the revolutionary core of Deleuze's philosophy and take up positions for or against its most innovative and controversial ideas.

Patients -- Clients -- Welfare assessment -- Clinical choices -- Achieving animal welfare goals -- Beyond the clinic.

The Epicurean philosophical system has enjoyed much recent scrutiny, but the question of its philosophical ancestry remains largely neglected. It has often been thought that Epicurus owed only his physical theory of atomism to the fifth-century BC philosopher Democritus, but this study finds that there is much in his ethical thought which can be traced to Democritus. It also finds important influences on Epicurus in Democritus' fourth-century followers such as Anaxarchus and Pyrrho, and in Epicurus' disagreements with his own Democritean (...) teacher Nausiphanes. The result is not only a fascinating reconstruction of a lost tradition, but also an important contribution to the philosophical interpretation of Epicureanism, bearing especially on its ideal of tranquillity and on the relation of ethics to physics. (shrink)

The infant mortality rate in Liberia is 50 times higher than it is in Sweden, whilst a child born in Japan has a life expectancy at birth of more than double that of one born in Zambia. 1 And within countries, we see differences which are nearly as great. For example, if you were in the USA and travelled the short journey from the poorer parts of Washington to Montgomery County Maryland, you would find that ‘for each mile travelled life (...) expectancy rises about a year and a half. There is a twenty-year gap between poor blacks at one end of the journey and rich whites at the other’. (Marmot, 2004, p.2). There are two types of questions which it is important to ask about inequalities in health such as these. The first are social scientific questions about the extent of inequalities in health and the factors which are causally responsible for these inequalities. Examples of social scientific questions to ask might be: how do infant mortality rates in the UK differ according to social class? What is the difference in life expectancy between Japanese who emigrate to the US and those who remain in Japan? Why do civil servants in higher ranked jobs tend to live longer than civil servants in lower ranked jobs? The second type are normative questions about the reasons we have to care about inequalities in health. Important normative questions to answer are: which inequalities in health should we care about (all inequalities or merely some of them)? When is an inequality in health unjust? How should we weigh our concern for equality in health against other factors such as maximising the.. (shrink)

This article discusses some philosophical theories of causation and their application to several areas of science. Topics addressed include regularity, counterfactual, and causal process theories of causation; the causal interpretation of structural equation models and directed graphs; independence assumptions in causal reasoning; and the role of causal concepts in physics. In connection with this last topic, this article focuses on the relationship between causal asymmetries, the time-reversal invariance of most fundamental physical laws, and the significance of differences among varieties of (...) differential equations in causal interpretation. It concludes with some remarks about “grounding” special science causal generalizations in physics. (shrink)

In the UK, many fundamentally important policy decisions that are likely to affect the relationship between citizens and care services are now made at the sublegislative level and without adequate ethical consideration and scrutiny. This is well exemplified in the proposed guidance on the disclosure of information on children. A recent consultation paper by the UK government on the subject proposes an approach that seeks a simple technical solution to a complex problem, emphasising control and surveillance. This reflects pressure to (...) be seen to act. The document fails with regard to ethical reflection appropriate to the complexity of the issue, an appreciation of complex relationships of trust, and a proper sense of the richness and complexity of the public interest. Such policies would, if implemented, fundamentally change the relationships between citizens and their carers, and among carers and the law and the state. This and similar proposals require far more ethical scrutiny and consideration of the public interest in the widest sense. (shrink)

Linguistic anthropologists have studied emotion in societies around the world for several decades. This article defines the discipline, introduces its general relevance to emotion theory, then presents five of the most important contributions linguistic anthropology has made to the study of emotion.

Why battles matter -- Accepting the wager of battle -- Laying just claim to the profits of war -- The monarchical monopolization of military violence -- Were there really rules? -- The death of pitched battle.