Since its earliest incarnations, just war theory has included the requirement that war must be initiated and waged by a legitimate authority. However, while recent years have witnessed a remarkable resurgence in interest in just war theory, the authority criterion is largely absent from contemporary discussions. In this paper I aim to show that this is an oversight worth rectifying, by arguing that the authority criterion plays a much more important role within just war theorising than is commonly supposed. As (...) standardly understood, the authority criterion provides a necessary condition for the justification of the resort to war, but has no bearing on the question of permissible conduct in war. In opposition, I argue for an alternative interpretation of the criterion, which attributes to it a fundamental role in assessing this latter question. With this revised interpretation in place, I then demonstrate its advantages by applying it to the practical issue of armed conflicts that are initiated and fought by non-traditional belligerents. While several theorists have recognised that this common feature of modern armed conflict poses a challenge to mainstream just war theory in general—and to the authority criterion in particular—I argue that existing discussions frequently misconstrue the nature of the challenge, since they assume the standard interpretation of the authority requirement and its role within the theory. I then show that the revised interpretation provides a clearer account of both the challenge posed by non-traditional belligerency and the kind of response that it requires. (shrink)

During the spring of 1981, students enrolled in James Childress’ University of Virginia seminar read a great many of the historic and contemporary treatments of just war and pacifist strands in Chr...

In the spirit of this group of articles commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Journal of Religious Ethics, dealing with tradition-based reasoning, this article takes up a passage from Deuteronomy 20 that allows the “fearful and faint-hearted” person not to participate in battle, as well as the rabbinic and medieval appropriations of this passage in the Jewish tradition. It argues that this verse gives primacy to affect in a way that complicates standard interpretations of the Jewish tradition on just war (...) and allows us to see the pliability of tradition. Finally, the article argues that scholars assessing the justice of conflicts need to attend to the circulation of affects in a reasoning community, as is currently happening on scholarship on moral injury. (shrink)

In his adoption of the Maimonidean guidelines for extreme humility, the king acts as the supreme existential model for imitatio dei. Imperial governance, when filtered through the prism of Maimonidean humility, results in a regime that most closely resembles a divine one. Using those who occupy the very bottom of the social and political hierarchy (slaves and orphans) as models, the king projects his own sense of "lowliness" to the people. The king thereby promotes their sense of autonomy, and inhibits (...) any anthropocentrism that would be fostered if he were to be viewed as an autocrat. His administration of the royal office is limited by the ethical and philosophical dictates of humility, thereby offering a window into the distinction between its common (anivut) and extreme (shefal ruah) manifestations. Maimonides does in fact define the parameters of this extraordinary humility, but he chooses to do so within the context of a distinct and concrete personality--that of the king. (shrink)

This article analyses and assesses the arguments opposing capital punishment put forward by Ján Kollár, a representative of Central European Evangelical/Lutheran Enlightenment rationalism, using the definition of criminal practice in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century as the basis. Consequently, the author pays attention to the movement for reform in criminal law and practices, initiated in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century by Cesare Beccaria, including his argumentation against capital punishment. In this context, the author (...) presents and investigates 13 arguments against capital punishment defined by Kollár in his 1815 diary. The author came to the conclusion that Kollár, in his arguments against capital punishment, followed, to a certain extent, the views of Beccaria and eighteenth -century adherents of the French Enlightenment; however, Kollár’s actual argumentation is rationalistically based on ethical values of humanity and justice with significant space also dedicated to utilitarian aspects of rejecting capital punishment adopted from reformists of criminal law. (shrink)

Warfare ideologies are as old as human civilization. By now, they have grown into an important and extended research field, including works analyzing the justification of war in ancient Indian epic...