This article analyzes the moral and political implications of strong moral character for political action. The treatment provides reason to hold that strong moral character should play a role in a robust normative account of political leadership. The case is supported by empirical findings on character dispositions and the political viability of the account’s normative prescriptions.

Those of us who are not pacifists face an obvious challenge. Common-sense morality contains a stringent constraint on intentional killing, yet war involves homicide on a grand scale. If wars are to be morally justified, it needs be shown how this conflict can be reconciled. A major fault line running throughout the contemporary just war literature divides two approaches to attempting this reconciliation. On a ‘reductivist’ view, defended most prominently by Jeff McMahan, the conflict is largely illusory, since such killing (...) can be justified by aggregating individuals’ ordinary permissions to use force in self- and other-defence. In opposition, a rival ‘nonreductivist’ approach holds that these considerations are insufficient for the task. One prominent version of non-reductivism grounds the permission to kill in combatants’ membership in certain kinds of group or association. The key claim is that participation in certain morally important relationships can provide an independent source of permission for killing in war. This paper argues that non-reductivism should be rejected. It does so by pushing a dilemma onto non-reductivists: if they are successful in showing that the relevant relationships can generate permissions to kill in war, they must also jettison the most intuitive restrictions on conduct in war—the constraint on intentionally killing morally innocent non-combatants most saliently. Since this conclusion is unacceptable, non-reductivism should be rejected. (shrink)

For hundreds of years procedural rights such as habeas corpus have been regarded as fundamental in the Anglo-American system of jurisprudence. In contemporary international law, fundamental norms are called jus cogens. Jus cogens norms are rights or rules that can not be derogated even by treaty. In the list that is often given, jus cogens norms include norms against aggression, apartheid, slavery, and genocide. All of the members of this list are substantive rights. In this paper I will argue that (...) some procedural rights, crucial for the fair functioning of criminal proceedings, such as habeas corpus, should also have the status of jus cogens norms. I will begin by explaining what it means for a right to have jus cogens status. And I will follow this with a defense of having procedural rights like habeas corpus added to the list of jus cogens norms. I will then rehearse some of the debates about the jus cogens status of procedural rights in the European Commission on Human Rights. At the end of this paper, I will look at the attempts to deal with the abuses at Guantanamo by the American Commission on Human Rights, and by the US and Australian courts, as a way to understand why there needs to be a stronger support for habeas corpus than is today provided by regional courts. (shrink)

In his recent book Killing in War, McMahan develops a powerful argument for the view that soldiers on opposite sides of a conflict are not morally on a par once the war has started: whether they have the right to kill depends on the justness of their war. In line with just war theory in general, McMahan scrutinizes the ethics of killing the enemy. In this article, I accept McMahan's account, but bring it to bear on the entirely neglected, but (...) nevertheless interesting, issue of what the military call killings or, as I refer to such acts here, internecine war killings. I focus on the case of the soldier who is ordered by his officer, at gunpoint, to go into action or to kill innocent civilians, and who kills his officer in self-defence. I argue that, at the bar of McMahan's account of the right to kill in self-defence, the officer lacks a justification for attacking the soldier as a means of enforcing his order, and the soldier thus sometimes (but not always) has the right to kill his officer should the latter so act. (shrink)

This paper argues that there is a default presumption that punishment has some deterrent effect, and that the burden of proof is upon those who allege that the costs of any particular penal system are insufficient to offset its deterrent benefits. This burden of proof transmits to the discussion of international law, with the conclusion that it is those who oppose international jurisdiction, rather than their opponents, who must prove their position. This they have so far failed to do.

Robert Graves's First World War story in his autobiography Goodbye to All That, narrating his refusal to kill an enemy soldier bathing naked on the battlefield, has been made famous in the field of military ethics by Michael Walzer in his Just and Unjust Wars. The story raises the issue of whether soldiers should be granted immunity when behaving in an ‘un-warlike’ manner. It also relates to the growing understanding in military ethics that only soldiers who pose a direct threat (...) should be attacked and killed. This paper concludes that the traditional legal understanding that all soldiers are liable to be attacked and to be killed is the stronger argument. (shrink)

This paper examines the recent actions by the United States in Iraq in the light of just war principles, and sets forth a program for holding accountable those most responsible for war crimes in Iraq.

This paper’s aim is to provide overview of the punishment of war crimes. It considers first the rationale of the law of war, the identification and scope of war crimes, and proceeds to consider the justification of punishing war crimes, arguing for a consequentialist view with side-constraints. It then considers the alternative of reconciliation.