Doing Away with “Legitimate Authority”

Journal of Military Ethics 18 (4):314-332 (2019)
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Abstract

I argue in this paper that traditional just war theory did allow private, indeed even individual war, and that arguments in support of a legitimate authority criterion, let alone in support of the “priority” of this criterion, fail. I further argue that what motivates the insistence on “legitimate authority” is the assumption that doing away with this criterion will lead to chaos and anarchy. I demonstrate that the reasoning, if any, underlying this assumption is philosophically profoundly confused. The fact of the matter is that wars need not necessarily be authorized by some higher authority (such as a king, president, or parliament) in order to be justified, and this moral fact does not need to chaos and anarchy. Accordingly, the criterion of legitimate authority cannot be relied on to delegitimate individual war, private war, guerrilla war, or even terrorism. Finally, I consider some other defenses of authorization and demonstrate that the “authorization” these accounts defend is either not needed for justification or already provided by other just war criteria or, indeed, entirely fictitious.

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Uwe Steinhoff
University of Hong Kong

References found in this work

Associative Duties and the Ethics of Killing in War.Seth Lazar - 2013 - Journal of Practical Ethics 1 (1):3-48.
Authorization and The Morality of War.Seth Lazar - 2016 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (2):211-226.
Just Cause and 'Right Intention'.Uwe Steinhoff - 2014 - Journal of Military Ethics 13 (1):32-48.
What Is War—And Can a Lone Individual Wage One?Uwe Steinhoff - 2009 - International Journal of Applied Philosophy 23 (1):133-150.

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