There is a regime of international law and international order, binding on all states, based on the UN Charter and subsequent resolutions and World Court decisions. In brief, the threat or use of force is banned unless explicitly authorized by the Security Council after it has determined that peaceful means have failed, or in selfdefense against "armed attack" (a narrow concept) until the Security Council acts.

In war a soldier behaving properly should take into account a universal requirement not to kill, to be applied strictly in dealing with civilians, but at the same time to support the exception of taking the life of enemy combatants as an act of selfdefense. This is the usual way to distinguish morally the proper treatment to soldiers and civilians. In this article the author criticizes it and outlines a different way to understand and justify the moral distinction mentioned.

I find myself in the awkward position – awkward, that is, for a commentator – of agreeing with virtually all aspects of Michael Doyle’s powerful critique of what international law and current US doctrine imply about preventive war, and with most of his constructive suggestions for a new set of laws, institutions, and policies for addressing threats to national and international security that seem both real and serious but are not imminent. Yet, although what he says is largely right, there (...) is more to be said. There is an important moral constraint on preventive war that he largely overlooks (though it is faintly indicated in his early reference to a “responsible party” condition for justified selfdefense), and that fails to appear in his list of criteria for justified preventive action. I propose to devote these brief remarks to supplying the condition that is omitted from his account but that needs to be included. (shrink)

In The Ends of Harm Victor Tadros develops an alternative to consequentialist, and non-consequentialist retributivist, accounts of the justifiability of punishment: the duty view. Crucial to this view is the claim that wrongdoers incur an enforceable duty to remedy their wrongs. They cannot undo them, but they can do something that is almost as good—namely, by submitting to appropriate punishment, which will deter potential wrongdoers in the future, reduce their victim’s risk of suffering similar wrongs again. Admittedly, this involves harming (...) wrongdoers as a means to an end, but according to Tadros the ‘means principle’ that we should not harm others as a means, properly construed, does not apply to cases where the victim has an enforceable duty to bear the kind of harm that he or she is being made to suffer. In this article, I shall express reservations about Tadros’ defense and interpretation of the means principle. In presenting his position, Tadros also sets out some interesting anti-retributivist considerations casting doubt on the idea that wrongdoers’ suffering is non-instrumentally good. I shall challenge these. Finally, I shall suggest that the duty view may have counterintuitive implications in relation to wrongs where the offender helps to lower the risk that victims will be subjected to similar wrongs in ways other than by being punished. (shrink)