The morality of freedom

This article examines the legitimacy of the use of force by armed nonstate actors resisting the imposition of state rule over territories they control. We focus on the rights of warlords: subnational strongmen who seek autonomy within geographically demarcated territories, but not secession or control of the state itself. We argue that behind the resistance to state-building lies a twofold question of legitimate authority: the authority of states to consolidate power within their own internationally recognized borders and the authority of warlords to resist that expansion, by force if necessary, when it threatens social order and the protection of basic rights. This article draws on just war theory to develop a set of conditions under which such resistance may be justified, explores the argument's practical implications for state-building under the tutelage of third parties (e.g., the United Nations), and demonstrates its empirical relevance through an application to Afghanistan.

On the Rights of Warlords: Legitimate Authority and Basic Protection in War-Torn Societies

This paper advances a novel account of part of what justifies killing in war, grounded in the duties we owe to our loved ones to protect them from the severe harms with which war threatens them. It discusses the foundations of associative duties, then identifies the sorts of relationships, and the specific duties that they ground, which can be relevant to the ethics of war. It explains how those associative duties can justify killing in theory — in particular how they can justify overriding the rights to life of some of those who must be killed to win a war. It then shows how these duties can be operationalised in practice: first, showing how soldiers who fight on behalf of their community can act on reasons that apply to the members of that community; second, showing that the argument from associative duties does not prove too much — in particular, that it does not license the intentional killing of noncombatants in war.

Associative Duties and the Ethics of Killing in War

This article examines the neglected category of functional actor in securitisation processes. I argue that functional actors are a useful analytical category only if such actors are functionally di...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/21624887.2020.1827590

Securitisation and the function of functional actors

In his paper "Role Obligations," Michael Hardimon defends an account of the nature and justification of institutional obligations that he takes to be clearly superior to the "standard" voluntarist view. Hardimon argues that this standard view presents a "misleading and distorted" picture of role obligations (and of morality generally); and in its best form he claims this view still "leaves out" of its understanding of even contractual role obligations an "absolutely vital factor". I argue against Hardimon that a related version of this "standard view" of institutional obligations is "standard" for a very good reason - namely, that it is true.

External Justifications and Institutional Roles

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.

/pdf/liability-community-and-just-conduct-in-war-4ozzx5cx4y.pdf

Liability, community, and just conduct in war

Over the last two decades, the ethics of defensive harm has become a leading area in applied philosophy. Much of the debate has focussed on the relationship between individual self-defence and the ...

Shooting to kill: the ethics of police and military use of lethal force

The vast majority of work on the ethics of war focuses on traditional wars between states. This chapter aims to show that this is an oversight worth rectifying. The strategy is largely comparative, assessing whether certain claims often defended in discussions of interstate wars stand up in the context of civil conflicts and whether there are principled moral differences between the two types of case. Firstly, the chapter argues that thinking about intrastate wars may help us make progress on important theoretical debates in recent just war theory. Secondly, it considers whether certain kinds of civil wars are subject to a more demanding standard of just cause, compared to interstate wars of national defence. Finally, it assesses the extent to which having popular support is an independent requirement of permissible war and whether this renders insurgencies harder to justify than wars fought by functioning states.

/pdf/civil-war-and-revolution-4tgcj39wsc.pdf

Civil War and Revolution

Law and Morality at War offers a broadly instrumentalist defense of the authority of the laws of war: these laws serve combatants by helping them come closer to doing what they have independent mor...

/pdf/instrumental-authority-and-its-challenges-the-case-of-the-1ytqm8rpuv.pdf

Instrumental authority and its challenges: the case of the laws of war

This paper argues that certain common views about, respectively, the justification of harm and the moral limits of legitimate authority require revision. It defends two main claims. The first concerns agents who are commanded to inflict serious harm on others. It is argued that agents can be morally required to obey such commands, including in (at least some) cases where harming would be morally prohibited in the absence of the command. The argument thus defends a novel ‘authority-based’ justification for harm. The second claim concerns the permissibility of using defensive force against ‘authorized threateners’. It is argued that an agent’s possessing an authority-based justification does not, in itself, raise the justificatory burden on defensively harming them. In doing so, an alternative explanation is provided of why resisting authorized agents is often intuitively impermissible, which holds that authoritative commands can also impose constraints on causing harm, in addition to creating justifications.

Authority and Harm

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