Lionel K. McPherson

Innocence and responsibility in war

Innocence is a notion that can prove controversial. Claims of innocence typically support not imposing burdens on the innocent when their conduct is relevantly unobjectionable. This paper examines innocence in the context of violent conflict between states or groups. Many thinkers about the morality of such violence want to establish a principle that would protect innocent civilians. Yet the common view in just war theory does not affirm the moral innocence of civilians. Similarly, the common view that soldiers have an equal right to kill does not affirm their equal moral culpability. Talk of innocence usually starts from the idea that a kind of moral appraisal makes sense. We assume that persons can be innocent or not by virtue largely of the choices they have made. I will accept this assumption and set aside metaphysical doubts about our capacity for freedom. There is, of course, no issue of moral innocence if in fact we cannot be morally responsible for our actions.

Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong

Many people, including philosophers, believe that terrorism is necessarily and egregiously wrong. I will call this “the dominant view.” The dominant view maintains that terrorism is akin to murder. This forecloses the possibility that terrorism, under any circumstances, could be morally permissible—murder, by definition, is wrongful killing. The unqualified wrongness of terrorism is thus part of this understanding of terrorism. I will criticize the dominant view. Some philosophers have argued that terrorism might not be impermissible on either a rights-based or a consequentialist analysis. But I will not pursue the question of whether terrorism could ever be justifiable. Rather, I will argue that the dominant view’s condemnatory attitude toward terrorism as compared to conventional war cannot be fully sustained. I propose that a version of the argument that terrorists do not have adequate authority to undertake political violence—and not the prominent argument that noncombatants should be immune from deliberate use of force against them—is the most plausible basis for finding terrorism objectionable. While the argument from authority does not show that terrorism is necessarily wrong, the argument does show that there is a distinctive sense in which terrorism can be wrong when it is wrong. By “distinctive” I do not mean unique; acts of political violence that might not count as terrorism, such as rebellions, can also be carried out by groups that might lack adequate authority. Yet the distinctive sense in which terrorism as compared to

The limits of the war convention

What is the relation between the rules of war covered by ‘the war convention’ and the source of their normative authority? According to Michael Walzer, these rules have normative authority by virtue of being widely established in theory and practice and conforming to our moral sensibilities. It is striking that his influential account of just war has a conventionalist grounding similar to his more scrutinized general theory of justice. Indeed, we should question whether a shared moral understanding is an adequate basis for morally obligating parties who might challenge the rules under the war convention. I argue that rules of war need the support of moral judgments whose normative authority is ultimately not conventional in nature. Reasonable objections to the war convention exert pressure to revise its standard principles or to admit that these principles lack general moral force. Such objections, inchoate though they may be in international political discourse, seem a source of commonly voiced skepticism of morality in international relations. Debate about the merits of alternative principles of just war has the advantage of engaging with this skepticism. This opens up the possibility that less powerful or more conscientious parties could play a constructive role in a public and more democratic discourse of just war.