The traditional theory of the just war comprises two sets of principles, one governing the resort to war (jus ad bellum) and the other governing the conduct (...) of war (jus in bello). One of the central pillars of the traditional theory is that the two set of principles are, in Michael Walzer’s words, “logically independent. It is perfectly possible for a just war to be fought unjustly and for an unjust war to be fought in strict.. (shrink)
I am greatly honored that these four distinguished moral and legal theorists, who have all made substantial and important contributions to our understanding of the problems with which I am concerned in my book, have been willing to engage themselves so constructively with my arguments. The published book will be significantly better, or less bad, as a result of my having had to address their challenges. I find myself in substantial agreement with much of what each commentator has to say (...) and concede that on some points they have proven me wrong. But I am obstinate by nature, and perhaps a little obtuse, and thus am prepared to resist some of their suggestions, however sensible they may seem. (shrink)
I find myself in the awkward position – awkward, that is, for a commentator – of agreeing with virtually all aspects of Michael Doyle’s powerful critique of what international law and current US doctrine imply about preventive war, and with most of his constructive suggestions for a new set of laws, institutions, and policies for addressing threats to national and international security that seem both real and serious but are not imminent. Yet, although what he says is largely right, there (...) is more to be said. There is an important moral constraint on preventive war that he largely overlooks (though it is faintly indicated in his early reference to a “responsible party” condition for justified selfdefense), and that fails to appear in his list of criteria for justified preventive action. I propose to devote these brief remarks to supplying the condition that is omitted from his account but that needs to be included. (shrink)
Most of us accept that all persons have a right not to be killed, unless they forfeit or, perhaps, waive it. According to the currently dominant understanding of the just war, civilians retain the protection of this right in conditions of war but combatants do not. On one view, combatants forfeit the right by posing a threat to others; on another view, they waive it when they accept combatant status, which requires that they identify themselves visually and in other ways (...) as legitimate targets. Yet people who fight in a just war (“just combatants”) and fight only by permissible means, are simply defending themselves and other innocent people against a wrongful attack or some other serious wrong. They do not, it seems, either forfeit their right not to be killed or grant their enemies permission to try to kill them. I believe, therefore, that the blanket permission that those who fight without a just cause (“unjust combatants”) have to kill just combatants is a legal permission only, not a moral permission. The law of war, I suggest, diverges quite radically on this issue from the morality of war. Although just combatants retain their moral right not to be killed, and although their right is seldom overridden, it is nonetheless best, for a variety of contingent and largely pragmatic reasons, not to hold unjust combatants legally liable for killing them. The moral right of just combatants not to be killed is not protected by a legal right in wartime. This is, however, not the common view of the permissibility of killing just combatants in war. Most people, including most moral theorists in the just war tradition, believe that the morality of war and the law of war coincide on this point. They believe, 2 as I noted, that all combatants lose their moral right not to be killed by enemy combatants in conditions of war. But what is the reason for thinking that the right they have in peacetime no longer protects them in war? I have argued at length elsewhere against the view that just combatants forfeit their right not to be killed by posing a lethal threat to others, as well as against the view that they consent to become legitimate targets and thus waive their right not to be killed.1 If my arguments are right, we must, if we wish to preserve the traditional view, explore other possible ways of defending it.. (shrink)
soon without an organ transplant. One organ becomes available. It is a perfect match for both people, one of whom can therefore be saved. It is virtually certain that no other organ will become available in time to save both. How ought the choice between the two people to be made? There are indefinitely many distributive principles that might be followed. The organ could, for example, be sold to the highest bidder. Or it could be given to the person whose (...) need was manifest first: first come, first served. Many people believe that both possible recipients should have an equal chance of being selected. They may think that the decision should therefore be made randomly—for example, by flipping a coin. Both of these last two proposals seek to avoid being discriminatory. They appeal to considerations that are essentially arbitrary and irrelevant. By refusing to distinguish between the two potential recipients on substantive grounds, they seek to treat both people as equals— though it is worth noting that because these criteria do not require any exercise of judgment, they also enable those in charge of the distribution of organs to avoid any sense of responsibility for the outcomes of the selection procedure. (shrink)
How does one explain an interest in ethics? In my case the interest has never been “intellectual” or “academic.” I have never been drawn to metaethics. Rather, I have always been aware that there’s a lot wrong in the world and I have wanted to do what I could to help put it right. I grew up in the American south during the years of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. That gave me a lot to think about. (...) I still have a poster that I took o¤ a telephone pole near where I lived in rural South Carolina that reads “Don’t be half a man, join the Klan.”. (shrink)
There is a general presumption that the law should be congruent with morality – that is, that the prohibitions and permissions in the law should correspond to the prohibitions and permissions of morality. And indeed in most areas of domestic law, and perhaps especially in the criminal law, the elements of the law do in general derive more or less directly from the requirements of morality. I will argue in this essay, however, that this correspondence with morality does not and (...) at present cannot hold in the case of the international law of war. For various reasons, largely pragmatic in nature, the law of war must be substantially divergent from the morality of war. (shrink)
The following commentaries are responses to the rough drafts of six lectures — the Hourani Lectures—that I delivered at the University of Buffalo in November of 2006. This draft manuscript is being extensively revised and expanded for publication by Oxford University Press as a book called The Morality and Law of War. Even though in January 2007 the book was still both unpolished and incomplete, David Enoch at that time generously organized a workshop at the Law School of the Hebrew (...) University of Jerusalem to discuss its ideas and arguments. George Fletcher chaired the meeting and Re’em Segev, Yuval Shany, and Noam Zohar all presented superb commentaries. The following papers have all grown out of that memorable occasion. (shrink)
The United Nations Charter prohibits states to use force against other states except in ‘individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs’.1 In the past, it may have seemed reasonable to insist that permissible defence must await the actual occurrence of an armed attack. Because war is usually disastrous for all concerned and to be avoided if at all possible, and because successful defence has often been at least possible against a military attack, it may not be imprudent for (...) a state threatened with attack by another state to make every effort to avoid war by diplomatic means and thus to defer military action until its adversary actually strikes the first blow. It is also possible to deter the attack by threatening the potential aggressor both with military defeat and with the destruction, if war occurs, of assets that the aggressor values – for example, in the case of a tyrannical regime, military assets on which it depends for control of its own population. (shrink)
Suppose that there are human beings whose overall psychological capacities and potential are comparable to or lower than those characteristic of the higher orders of nonhuman animals, such as chimpanzees. And suppose that the limited cognitive capacities of at least some of these human beings are congenital and resulted because the genes that coded for the growth of their brains were different, or operated differently, from those that code for the development of the brain in other human beings. I refer (...) to these human beings as the ‘radically cognitively limited’—though for brevity I will often use the abbreviated term the ‘cognitively limited’.¹ None of the.. (shrink)
Those of us who oppose torture, and who are acutely conscious of the grave wrongs being committed in our name by our present government, had better be clear and convincing about the basis of our opposition. While I admire the spirit of Ben Juratowitch’s essay, I cannot accept its arguments.i I believe that the case against torture cannot plausibly take an absolutist form and that effective opposition to torture is illserved by appeals to unexplicated and ultimately unserviceable notions such as (...) that torture violates the victim’s human dignity and undermines the perpetrator’s humanity. We fail to take the problem of torture sufficiently seriously if we treat it as a simple matter of civilization versus barbarism, or a choice between respect for human dignity and a collapse into moral degradation and defilement. (shrink)
Lucretius wrote: “Look back at the eternity that passed before we were born, and mark how utterly it counts to us as nothing. This is a mirror that Nature holds up to us, in which we may see the time that shall be after we are dead. Is there anything terrifying in the sight – anything depressing – anything that is not more restful than the soundest sleep?”1 The argument is repeated, a couple of millennia later, by Vladimir Nabokov, who (...) opens his memoir with the observation that “our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).”. (shrink)
Doctrines of the just war predate formulations of the law of war by many centuries. Yet classical accounts of the just war are presented as matters of law – not positive law or law devised by human beings, but natural law, or law that is inherent in the nature of things. War, like other human activities that raise moral issues, was held by the classical just war theorists to be governed by immutable moral laws that were part of the natural (...) order, no less real or objective than the laws of nature. This early presentation of morality as a matter of law prefigured, or perhaps inaugurated, the recurring tendency to blur the distinction between the morality of war and the law of war, a tendency that persists to this day. (shrink)
There is a general presumption that the law should be congruent with morality— that is, that the prohibitions and permissions in the law should correspond to the prohibitions and permissions of morality. And indeed in most areas of domestic law, and perhaps especially in the criminal law, the elements of the law do in general derive more or less directly from the requirements of morality. I will argue in this chapter, however, that this correspondence with morality does not and, at (...) present, cannot hold in the case of the international law of war. For various reasons, largely pragmatic in nature, the law of war must be substantially divergent from the morality of war.1 Our understanding of the morality of war has for many centuries been shaped by a tradition of thought known as the theory of the just war. In its earliest manifestations in ancient and medieval thought, this theory emerged from a synthesis of Christian doctrine and a natural law conception of morality. Its tendency was to understand the morality of war as an adaptation to problems of group conflict of the moral principles governing relations among individuals and to see just warfare as a form of punishment for wrongdoing. Its concern was with a rather pure conception of right and wrong that made few concessions to pragmatic considerations and was unwilling to compromise matters of principle for the sake of considerations of consequences. During this classical phase in the history of the theory, the principles of the just war were quite different from the laws of war in their current form. Later, beginning in the sixteenth century but principally during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some juridical writers, seeking to develop a workable account of the law of nations, began to argue for principles governing the practice of war that were more ‘realistic’ in character. These principles were formulated in ways that were more sensitive to pragmatic concerns. This shift in thinking about the normative dimensions of war helped to lay the groundwork for the development and institutionalization of the international law of war from the late nineteenth century to the present.. (shrink)
The U.S. military has now occupied Iraq for more than five years. This is a long time for one state to impose a military occupation on another. But of course the American occupation of Iraq seems almost momentary by comparison with Israel’s fortyone-year occupation of Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza. Considering how controversial both these occupations have been, one would expect them to have elicited a substantial body of thought about the moral dimensions of the practice of (...) occupation. But such an expectation would be disappointed. There is, of course, a body of law governing the practice of occupation, but the moral foundations of that law have suffered the same neglect by moral and political theorists that the practice of occupation itself has. As I prepared my remarks for the conference from which this symposium issue is derived, I was surprised to be unable to recall having read or even seen any philosophical discussions of occupation. I own most of the books that have been written on the theory of the just war over the past half century or so, but a search through their indexes turned up only a few entries on occupation, none of which proved, on investigation, to offer significant illumination. I have not, however, had to conjure up a theory de novo. Occupation involves both the threat of military force and, usually, the use of military force; hence it is akin to, and indeed often overlaps with, war (as the alternating references to the occupation of Iraq and the war in Iraq attest). There should therefore be continuities between the morality of war and the morality of.. (shrink)
The issue I will discuss can best be introduced by sketching a range of cases involving a character I will call the Negligent Physician. The First Preconception Variant A couple are considering having a child but suspect that one of them may be the carrier of a genetic defect that causes moderately severe mental retardation or cognitive disability. They therefore seek to be screened for the defect. The physician who performs the screening is negligent, however, and assures the couple that (...) there is no risk when in fact the man is a carrier of the defect. As a result, the couple conceive a child with moderately severe cognitive impairments. Had the screening been performed properly, a single sperm from the man would have been isolated and genetically altered to correct the defect. The altered sperm would then have been combined in vitro with an egg drawn from the woman and the resulting zygote would have been implanted in the woman's womb, with the consequence that she would later have given birth to a normal child. Notice, however, that the probability is vanishingly small that the sperm that would have been isolated and altered would have been the very same sperm that in fact fertilized the egg during natural conception. And let us suppose that the egg that would have been extracted for in vitro fertilization would also have been different from the one that was fertilized during natural conception. In that case the child who would have been conceived had the screening been done properly would have developed from a wholly.. (shrink)
Most of us agree that terrorism is always, or almost always, wrong, which is hardly surprising, since the word is generally used to express disapproval. If an act of which we approve has features characteristic of terrorism, we will be careful to deny that it is in fact an act of terrorism. For example, those who believe that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were morally justified tend to deny that they were instances of terrorism. So while we agree that (...) terrorism is almost always wrong, we sometimes disagree about what it is we are condemning. To avoid misunderstanding, I will say at the outset what I understand terrorism to be. Acts of terrorism are intentional efforts to kill or seriously harm innocent people as a means of affecting other members of a group with which the immediate victims are identified.1 Usually the aim is to terrorize and intimidate the other members as a means of achieving some political or broadly ideological goal, though the aim might be different: it might, for example, be to punish or achieve vengeance against the group as a whole. Although the group against which terrorism is directed is usually political in nature, it need not be. It might, for example, be the group of doctors who perform abortions. Because the term `terrorism' is normatively loaded and therefore tends to be used by people to describe their enemies whatever their enemies may do, there is no definition that can capture all the many ways in which the term is ordinarily used. But the.. (shrink)
To avoid misunderstanding, I will say at the outset what I understand terrorism to be. Acts of terrorism are intentional efforts to kill or seriously harm innocent people as a means of affecting other members of a group with which the immediate victims are identified.i Usually the aim is to terrorize and intimidate the other members as a means of achieving some political or broadly ideological goal, though the aim might be different: it might, for example, be to punish or (...) achieve vengeance against the group as a whole. Although the group against which terrorism is directed is usually political in nature, it need not be. It might, for example, be the group of doctors who perform abortions. (shrink)
Most people are skeptical of the claim that the expectation that a person would have a life that would be well worth living provides a reason to cause that person to exist. In this essay I argue that to cause such a person to exist would be to confer a benefit of a noncomparative kind and that there is a moral reason to bestow benefits of this kind. But this conclusion raises many problems, among which is that it must be (...) determined how the benefits conferred on people by causing them to exist weigh against comparable benefits conferred on existing people. In particular, might the reason to cause people to exist ever outweigh the reason to save the lives of existing people? (shrink)
Ethics and Humanity pays to tribute to Jonathan Glover, a pioneering figure whose thought and personal influence have had a significant impact on applied ...
We defend the view that we are not identical to organisms against the objection that it implies that there are two subjects of every conscious state one experiences: oneself and one’s organism. We then criticize animalism—the view that each of us is identical to a human organism—by showing that it has unacceptable implications for a range of actual and hypothetical cases of conjoined twinning: dicephalus, craniopagus parasiticus, and cephalopagus.
There is a nonabsolute or “contingent” form of pacifism that claims that war in contemporary conditions inevitably involves the killing of innocent people on a scale that is too great to be justified. Some contingent pacifists argue that war always involves a risk that virtually everyone that one might kill is innocent – either because one can never be sure that one’s cause is just or because even most of those who fight in wars that lack a just cause are (...) nevertheless not culpable and are therefore innocent in the relevant sense. Others argue that there is no just cause for war that is sufficiently important to justify the large-scale killing of innocent civilians that is unavoidable in war. I seek to refute contingent pacifism by arguing that its theoretical presuppositions are untenable. (shrink)
However much one may wish for nonviolent solutions to the problems of unjust and unrestrained human violence that Glover explores in Humanity, some of those problems at present require violent responses. One cannot read his account of the Clinton administration’s campaign to sabotage efforts to stop the massacre in Rwanda in 1994 – a campaign motivated by fear that American involvement would cost American lives and therefore votes – without concluding that Glover himself believes that military intervention was morally required (...) in that case. Military intervention in another state that is intended to stop one group within that state from brutally persecuting or violating the human rights of members of another group is now known as “humanitarian intervention.” Those against whom the intervention is directed are almost always the government and its supporters, though this is not a necessary feature of humanitarian intervention. It is, however, a conceptual condition of humanitarian intervention that it does not occur at the request or with the consent of the government. The use of force within another state with the consent of the government counts as assistance rather than intervention. The principal reason that humanitarian intervention is contentious is that it seems to violate the target state’s sovereign right to control its own domestic affairs. Because humanitarian intervention is a response to human rights violations within the target state, it is regarded as altogether different from wars of defense against aggression. Indeed, since aggression is normally understood to be war against a state that.. (shrink)
According to liberal egalitarian morality, all human beings are one another's moral equals. Nonhuman animals, by contrast, are not considered to be our moral equals. This essay considers two challenges to the liberal egalitarian view. One is the ``separation problem,'' which is the challenge to identify a morally significant intrinsic difference between all human beings and all nonhuman animals. The other is the “equality problem,” which is to explain how all human beings can be morally equal when there are some (...) human beings whose psychological capacities (and, in some cases, their psychological potentials as well) are no higher than those of certain nonhuman animals. The focus throughout is on the ethics of killing but the arguments are of broader relevance. The essay reaches a skeptical conclusion about our ability to meet these challenges. (shrink)
It is sometimes suggested that if a moral theory implies that infanticide can sometimes be permissible, that is sufficient to discredit the theory. I argue in this article that the common-sense belief that infanticide is wrong, and perhaps even worse than the killing of an adult, is challenged not so much by theoretical considerations as by common-sense beliefs about abortion, the killing of non-human animals, and so on. Because there are no intrinsic differences between premature infants and viable fetuses, it (...) is difficult to accept that an abortion performed after the point of viability can be permissible while denying that infanticide can be permissible for a comparably important reason. This and other challenges to the consistency of our intuitions exert pressure on us either to accept the occasional permissibility of infanticide or to reject liberal beliefs about abortion. (shrink)
The main objection to human embryonic stem cell research is that it involves killing human embryos, which are essentially beings of the same sort that you and I are. This objection presupposes that we once existed as early embryos and that we had the same moral status then that we have now. This essay challenges both those presuppositions, but focuses primarily on the first. I argue first that these presuppositions are incompatible with widely accepted beliefs about both assisted conception and (...) monozygotic twinning. I then argue that we never existed as embryos. If this last claim is right, killing an embryo does not kill someone like you or me but merely prevents one of us from existing. (shrink)
Michael Walzer suggests that our common beliefs about individual responsibility and liability become largely irrelevant in the conduct of war. In conditions of war, everything is changed. Political realists have claimed that war eliminates morality; Walzer claims that war collectivizes it. I believe that conditions of war change nothing at all; they simply make it more difficult to ascertain relevant facts. This is not to say that the principles and laws that do or should govern the activity of war are (...) identical to those governing relations among individuals. Just as domestic law cannot simply restate the principles of individual morality, because the declaration and enforcement of laws have effects that must be taken into account in the formulation of the law, so too the principles, conventions, and laws of war cannot simply restate the principles of individual or international morality. The rules of war have to accommodate our epistemic limitations and to be formulated with a regard for the ways in which their announcement is likely to affect people’s behavior. But they should otherwise reflect as closely as possible the.. (shrink)
There is much to admire in Michael Walzer’s discussion of terrorism and just war. I particularly applaud his insistence that liability to attack is a matter of action rather than membership or collective identity. “It is,” he writes, “the extension of violence or the threat..
THERE’S a well-known scene in Shakespeare’s Henry V in which the King, disguised as an ordinary soldier, is conversing with some of his soldiers on the eve of the battle of Agincourt. Hoping to find or inspire support among them, he remarks: “Methinks I could not die anywhere so contented as in the King’s company, his cause being just and his quarrel honorable.” One soldier replies: “That’s more than we know,” whereupon a second says: “Ay, or more than we should (...) seek after; for we know enough if we know we are the King’s subjects: if his cause be wrong, our obedience to the King wipes the crime of it out of us.”. (shrink)
Many people who believe that abortion may often be justified by appeal to the pregnant woman’s interests also believe that a woman’s infliction of significant but nonlethal injury on her fetus can seldom be justified by appeal to her interests. Yet the second of these beliefs can seem to cast doubt on the first. For the view that the infliction of prenatal injury is seriously morally objectionable may seem to presuppose a view about the status of the fetus that challenges (...) the permissibility of abortion. The fear of being interpreted as implicitly endorsing such a view has thus led some defenders of abortion to be reluctant for tactical reasons to condemn the infliction of prenatal injury. In this they are encouraged by those who exploit the issue of prenatal injury in their campaign against abortion. When, for example, the House and Senate in 2004 passed legislation recognizing two victims of an assault against a pregnant woman, many viewed this as a tactic in a larger strategy to restrict access to abortion. This tactic is potentially effective. For people may find it compelling to infer that, if injuring a fetus is seriously objectionable, abortion must be even more objectionable, since killing is normally more seriously objectionable than merely injuring. (shrink)
This paper argues that certain central tenets of the traditional theory of the just war cannot be correct. It then advances an alternative account grounded in the same considerations of justice that govern self-defense at the individual level. The implications of this account are unorthodox. It implies that, with few exceptions, combatants who fight for an unjust cause act impermissibly when they attack enemy combatants, and that combatants who fight in a just war may, in certain circumstances, legitimately target noncombatants (...) who bear a significant degree of moral responsibility for a wrong, when the prevention or rectification of that wrong constitutes a just cause for war. (shrink)
Attempts to determine or to select what kind of person or people to bring into existence are controversial. This is particularly true of “negative selection” or “selecting against” a certain type of person—that is, the attempt to prevent a person of a certain type, or people of that type, from existing. Virtually everyone agrees that some instances of negative selection are objectionable—for example, that selection against healthy people would be wrong, particularly if this were combined with positive selection of people (...) with serious diseases. But some people believe that all negative selection is objectionable and therefore that all “selection for existence,” whether positive or negative, is objectionable. For if negative selection is objectionable, it seems to follow that positive selection is as well, since the attempt to bring a person of a certain type into existence is simultaneously an attempt not to bring into existence a person who is not of that type. In short, positive selection is implicitly negative as well. (shrink)
which I will argue must ultimately be ment that there be a good or compelling assessed by reference to the moral plausireason to go to war—and then to observe bility both of these implications and of that, at least until quite recently, contemthe larger understanding of a just war in porary just war theory and international which the conception is embedded. As I law have recognized only one just cause..
This paper defends “moral individualism” against various arguments that have been intended to show that membership in the human species or participation in our distinctively human form of life is a sufficient basis for a moral status higher than that of any animal. Among the arguments criticized are the “nature-of-the-kind argument,” which claims that it is the nature of all human beings to have certain higher psychological capacities, even if, contingently, some human beings lack them, and various versions of the (...) idea that there is a special form of life that all human beings share but of which no animal can be a full participant. The paper concludes that none of these arguments succeeds in demonstrating that there are moral reasons to permit animals to be treated less well than members of our own species whose psychological capacities and potential are no higher than those of the animals. (shrink)
Moral agents sometimes have to act on the basis of beliefs that are reasonable in the context but are in fact false. In these circumstances, agents often act in ways that would be right if their beliefs were true but that they would recognize as wrong if they could see that their beliefs were false. Sometimes our tendency is to think that what these agents do is justified – for example, in the case discussed by Ferzan in which one person, (...) Defender, kills another, Threatener, who has loaded one bullet into a revolver, spun the chambers, pointed the gun at Defender’s head, and started to squeeze the trigger.1 We think that Defender was justified in killing even if we discover that the chamber was in fact empty. (Let us refer to this as the ‘‘Roulette case.’’) We accept, however, that if Apparent Defender had known with certainty that the chamber was empty and that Apparent Threatener would (or could) have pulled the trigger only once, it would have been pointless and therefore wrong to kill her. (shrink)
There may be circumstances in which it is morally justifiable intentionally to kill a person who is morally innocent, threatens no one, rationally wishes not to die, and does not consent to be killed. Although the killing would wrong the victim, it might be justified by the necessity of averting some disaster that would otherwise occur. In other instances of permissible killing, however, the justification appeals to more than consequences. It may appeal to the claim that the person to be (...) killed has acted in such a way that to kill him would neither wrong him nor violate his rights, even if he has not consented to be killed or to be subjected to the risk of being killed. In these cases, I will say that the person is liable to be killed. Although I borrow the notion of liability from legal theory, and although much of what I say will be informed by the literature on liability in both tort law and criminal law, my concern in this article is with moral rather than legal liability. (shrink)
The traditional theory of the just war comprises two sets of principles, one governing the resort to war ( jus ad bellum) and the other governing the conduct of war ( jus in bello). The two sets of principles are regarded, in Michael Walzer’s words, as “logically independent. It is perfectly possible for a just war to be fought unjustly and for an unjust war to be fought in strict accordance with the rules.”1 Let us say that those who fight (...) in a just war are “just combatants,” while those who fight in a war that is unjust because it lacks a just cause are “unjust combatants.” (A just cause is an aim that can contribute to the justification for war and that may permissibly be pursued by means of war.)2 The most important implication of the idea that jus in bello is independent of jus ad bellum is that.. (shrink)
This magisterial work is the first comprehensive study of the ethics of killing, where the moral status of the individual is uncertain or controversial. Drawing on philosophical notions of personal identity and the immorality of killing, McMahan looks carefully at a host of practical issues, including abortion, infanticide, the killing of animals, assisted suicide, and euthanasia.
The Doctrine of Double Effect has been challenged by the claim that what an agent intends as a means may be limited to those effects that are precisely characterized by the descriptions under which the agent believes that they are minimally causally necessary for the production of other effects that the agent seeks to bring about. If based on so narrow a conception of an intended means, the traditional Doctrine of Double Effect becomes limitlessly permissive. In this paper I examine (...) and criticize Warren Quinn's attempt to reformulate the Doctrine in such a way that it retains its force and plausibility even if we accept the narrow conception of an intended means. Building on Quinn's insights, I conclude by offering a further version of the Doctrine that retains the virtues of Quinn's account but avoids the objections to it. I The key element in the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) is the claim that there is a stronger presumption against action that has harm to the innocent as an intended effect than there is against otherwise comparable action that causes the same amount of harm to the innocent as a foreseen but unintended effect. Since it is relatively uncontroversial that, except perhaps in cases involving desert, it is wrong to cause harm as an end in itself, the DDE is normally invoked to distinguish morally between harm that is intended as a means and harm that is considered a merely foreseen side-effect. (shrink)
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Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
