At this writing, late in 2023 and on the eve of 2024, we are approaching the seventy-fifth anniversary of George Orwell’s 1984 and its many quotable passages such as “WAR IS PEACE.” Like 1949, the...

Given the portion of his life spent at military schools, it is striking that Ender and his peers apparently never study military ethics. The ethical lessons Ender and his peers might have learned are so obviously relevant to operations against the buggers that you cannot help but ask how the I.F.'s leadership could have failed to teach military ethics at all. This chapter presents some highlights of Western thinking on the ethics of war and analyzes Ender's education and actions in (...) light of those moral traditions. Ender's Game teaches powerful lessons for students of just war theory and the just war tradition because it asks questions that matter to everyone, from national decision‐makers all the way down to individual soldiers. Genocide and xenocide are extreme in their quantity of killing, but not necessarily in their moral magnitude. (shrink)

Do just war principles allow resort to war, or require it? For those who feel the force of the question, the ongoing war in Ukraine has provided an urgent case study.A video shot in late February 2...

“Fear and I were born twins together,” said Hobbes, alluding to the Spanish armada-borne scare of 1588. The year 2001 birthed a similarly synergistic pair, the attacks of 9/11 and this journal, Jou...

A few years ago, this page of the Journal of Military Ethics offered Martin Cook’s and Henrik Syse’s penetrating essay about the nature of military ethics. That piece continues...

Volume 17, Issue 4, December 2018, Page 240-242.

Polish roles in the First World War take center stage in a special section of this issue of JME. Although not a nation on maps of the time, many Poles considered themselves united as a people even...