Abstract

This paper defends revisionism against a challenge: that it cannot convincingly hold that many instances of killing in war are morally wrong but should nonetheless remain legally permissible. The paper argues that we should view the relationship between the morality of war and the laws of war as analogous to the relationship between fundamental principles and rules of regulation in debates about theories of justice. This yields a fresh justification for the law’s divergence from morality, which absolves revisionism from the twofold charge of being at once irrelevant and incoherent. It also helps clarify persisting ambiguities concerning the contrast between war and ‘ordinary life,’ the contested notion of a ‘deep morality’ of war, and revisionism’s relationship to ideal and non-ideal theory.