Uwe Steinhoff Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007, vii+160pp., £ 30, ISBN: 978-0199217373

This intriguing and timely book takes on the topic of current just war theory in five chapters. These five chapters highlight some well-known aspects of just war thinking, which is addressed in a forthright and critical manner. Chapter one deals with ‘legitimate authority’; chapter two looks at just cause (including sub-criteria) and right intention; chapter three addresses innocents, ‘double effect’ and proportionality; the fourth chapter looks at non-combatant immunity and the definition of innocence (and ‘non-innocence’); and the fifth chapter looks closely at the ethics of terrorism. The author comes up with some surprising conclusions. This indicates that the book is far from being a run-of-the-mill account of just war theory.

The author tells us in the introduction that ‘when it comes to ethical questions of some importance’ such as war and terrorism ‘one is well advised to advance philosophical analysis against common points of view and to question pre-existing, socially established frameworks of discussion and prejudices’. (p. 1) He certainly does that. In the five chapters the author exhibits a highly sceptical attitude towards many facets of contemporary just war theory and partially in the concluding chapter offers a moral defence of acts of terrorism in certain defined circumstances (p. 135).

The author is very exercised by what he regards as the double standards or hypocrisy of stronger powers. They and their subjects will rail against the isolated outbreaks of terrorist activity on the part of marginal and often weak groups while turning a blind eye to the large-scale commission of acts of terrorism by large states. We should make clear at this stage that the author regards President Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as one such act of terrorism, similarly the prolonged war that the United States engaged in against Communist North Vietnam falls under suspicion. The author rejects pacifism on the grounds that, in certain instances, it may lead to the needless loss of large numbers of innocent lives, and acts of terrorism are, in his view, permissible under certain specific circumstances. I shall try to spell those out here although there is no certainty that I shall get it entirely right, as those apparent circumstances are highly complex. What may justify acts of terrorism is where they are perpetrated by individuals that constitute a significantly less threatening power than the group or groups they are faced with. Those individuals have not to be in a position where they can constitute an existential threat to the whole of their opposing power. The weaker society has therefore not to be in a situation where it can deter perceived acts of aggression by the more powerful society. The object of this terrorism has also to be to protect the lives of a large number of innocents in their own society (p. 135). The author stresses that these life or death calculations always have to be undertaken in a concrete manner in the light of events. He rightly offers no easy rules for the appropriate deployment of terrorist tactics, and draws the salutary conclusion that ‘terrorism is not at all the instrument of the weak, as is often claimed, but rather the routinely employed instrument of the strong, and usually only the final resort of the weak’ (p. 137).

Despite its timeliness and provocative nature, I found this a difficult book to gain a grasp of and follow. On the one hand, it criticises in a refreshing way many of the shibboleths of just war theory, such as the ‘double-effect’ argument and the concept of legitimate authority but, on the other, an overall line of argument is difficult to trace. There is a thesis that emerges at the end, namely, that today's international terrorists have just as much right as states to avail themselves of just war arguments in deploying force, and taken from his perspective, a great deal of conventional western thinking can be portrayed as embodying double standards. This thesis seems to me though not to be sustained throughout the book, so what in effect we are presented with is a series of essays about just war thinking. As such, it is a most welcome intervention. I agree with the author that there is room for scepticism about present-day just war theory: many of its advocates remain the ‘sorry comforters’ that Kant took to task. They deplore the violence of the international system while inadvertently adding to it with their codices for the appropriate use of military force. However, Steinhoff's approach endangers his own cause by being over polemical and by its confusing deployment of both seemingly deontological arguments and consequentialist reasoning. On my reading – which of course may be deficient – it is difficult to tell whether or not Steinhoff embraces fully or partially rejects rule-utilitarianism (pp. 103, 135) although I have the impression that it is nonetheless the centrepiece of the moral argument.