David Rodin

War and self-defense

Introduction 1. RIGHTS 2. A Model of Defensive Rights 3. Consequences and Forced Choice 4. Grounding Self-Defense in Rights 5. INTERNATIONAL LAW 6. Defense of Persons 7. The Common Life 8. War, Responsibility and Law Enforcement 9. Conclusion: Morality and Realism Bibliography

Terrorism Without Intention

If we are to be engaged in a “war on terrorism,” then we had better get clear about what terrorism is. Until we achieve a clear and coherent understanding of what the morally relevant features of terrorism are, we cannot hope to develop an appropriate moral response to the “war on terrorism” now being prosecuted by the United States and its allies— its proper aims, scope, limitations, and potential exceptional permissions. In this article, I present a unified way of understanding the moral significance of terrorism. I begin by briefly identifying four different strategies for defining terrorism. I then introduce a definition of terrorism which locates its moral significance in the object of attack— terrorism is given its distinctive moral character by the fact that it uses force against those who should not have force used against them. In the idiom of the just war theory, it uses force against noncombatants. It has sometimes been claimed that certain military actions of key Western powers such as the Unites States, NATO, and Israel are properly described as acts of terrorism because they cause the death of a large number of noncombatants. This is a counterintuitive claim. But by examining the doctrine of double effect and contrasting it with the categories of reckless and negligent harming, I will argue that there are good reasons for thinking that these claims may sometimes be correct. Some harms inflicted unintentionally on noncombatants—so called collateral damage—may indeed be properly categorized as terrorist. I will conclude by briefly indicating some of the implications which this analysis has for our thinking about the ethics of war.

Toward a Global Ethic

We are one humanity, but seven billion humans. This is the essential challenge of global ethics: how to accommodate the tension between our universal and particular natures. This tension is, of course, age-old and runs through all moral and political philosophy. But in the world of the early twenty-first century it plays out in distinctive new ways. Ethics has always engaged twin capacities inherent in every human: the capacity to harm and the capacity to help. But the profound set of transformations commonly referred to as globalization—the increasing mobility of goods, labor, and capital; the increasing interconnectedness of political, economic, and financial systems; and the radical empowerment of groups and individuals through technology—have enabled us to harm and to help others in ways that our forebears could not have imagined. What we require from a global ethic is shaped by these transformative forces; and global ethics—the success or failure of that project—will substantially shape the course of the twenty-first century.

The War Trap: Dilemmas of jus terminatio*

Important moral dilemmas arise in the context of what I have called jus terminatio and Darrel Moellendorf has called jus ex bello—the norms governing the termination of war. I discuss three dilemmas, showing how they also illuminate proportionality and jus ad bellum: (1) morally accounting for new costs that arise during the course of a war; (2) two variants of the “sunk-cost dilemma” in which an agent is permitted to contribute to a project that is all things considered morally unjust, when that project is morally justified on a forward-looking basis; and (3) the problem of moral hazard in peace negotiations.