One of the most profound interactions that can occur between people, apologies have the power to heal humiliations, free the mind from deep-seated guilt, remove the desire for vengeance, and ultimately restore broken relationships. With On Apology, Aaron Lazare offers an eye-opening analysis of this vital interaction, illuminating an often hidden corner of the human heart. He discusses the importance of shame, guilt, and humiliation, the initial reluctance to apologize, the simplicity of the act of apologizing, the spontaneous generosity (...) and forgiveness on the part of the offended, the transfer of power and respect between two parties, and much more. Readers will not only find a wealth of insight that they can apply to their own lives, but also a deeper understanding of national and international conflicts and how we might resolve them. The act of apologizing is quite simply immensely fulfilling. On Apology opens a window onto this common occurrence to reveal the feelings and actions at the heart of this profound interaction. (shrink)

Deontologists have long been upbraided for lacking an account of justified decision- making under risk and uncertainty. One response is to develop a deontological decision theory—a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for an act’s being permissible given an agent’s imperfect information. In this article, I show that deontologists can make more use of regular decision theory than some might have thought, but that we must adapt decision theory to accommodate agent- centered options—permissions to favor or sacrifice our own interests, (...) when doing so is overall morally worse. Accommodating options requires more than just amend- ing the decision-theoretic ‘value function’. We must change the decision rule as well. (shrink)

I argue that riskier killings of innocent people are, other things equal, objectively worse than less risky killings. I ground these views in considerations of disrespect and security. Killing someone more riskily shows greater disrespect for him by more grievously undervaluing his standing and interests, and more seriously undermines his security by exposing a disposition to harm him across all counterfactual scenarios in which the probability of killing an innocent person is that high or less. I argue that the salient (...) probabilities are the agent’s sincere, sane, subjective probabilities, and that this thesis is relevant whether your risk-taking pertains to the probability of killing a person or to the probability that the person you kill is not liable to be killed. I then defend the view’s relevance to intentional killing; show how it differs from an account of blameworthiness; and explain its significance for all-things-considered justification and justification under uncertainty. (shrink)

Wars are large-scale conflicts between organized groups of belligerents, which involve suffering, devastation, and brutality unlike almost anything else in human experience. Whatever one’s other beliefs about morality, all should agree that the horrors of war are all but unconscionable, and that warfare can be justified only if we have some compel- ling account of what is worth fighting for, which can justify contributing, as individu- als and as groups, to this calamitous endeavour. Although this question should obviously be central (...) to both philosophical and politi- cal discussion about war, it is at the forefront of neither. In recent years, philosophical discussion of warfare has bloomed, but the debate has focused on whom we may kill, on the assumption that our aims are justified.1 Political debate, meanwhile, is more concerned with matters of prudence, international law, and public justification, than with reassessing what is worth fighting for. For wars of intervention to halt or prevent massive humanitarian crises, this gap is not so troubling. When warfare is the only means to prevent the mass killing or enslavement of the innocent, the purposes of military force are clear enough (though undoubtedly many other problems remain). The problem is more pressing, how- ever, for the justification of national defence.3 Although common-sense morality and international law view national defence as the paradigm case of justified warfare, grounding this consensus is surprisingly difficult.4 We typically believe that any state is justified in using lethal force to protect its territory against any form of uninvited military incursion by any other state. And yet we lack a good argument to explain why this should be so. In this chapter, I explain why one familiar and otherwise plausible approach to the justification of killing in war cannot adequately ground common-sense views of permissible national defence.5 Reductionists believe that justified warfare reduces to an aggregation of acts that are justified under ordinary principles of interpersonal morality.6 The standard form of reductionism focuses on the principles governing killing in ordinary life, specifically those that justify intentional killing in self- and other-defence, and unintended but foreseen (for short, collateral) killing as a lesser evil. Justified warfare, on this view, is no more than the coextension of multiple acts justified under these two principles. Reductionism is the default philosophical approach to thinking through the ethics of killing in war. It makes perfect sense to ask what principles govern permissible kill- ing in general, before applying them to the particular context of war. If it cannot deliver a plausible set of conclusions about when national defence is permitted, then we must either revise our beliefs about which conclusions count as plausible, or else face the significant challenge of developing a different theoretical model for justifying war- fare—an exceptionalist model, which views war as an exception to the regular moral landscape, to which principles apply which apply to nothing else but war.7 We must show, in other words, that there is something worth fighting for in wars of national defence, which is not engaged when we use force in any other context. The chapter proceeds as follows. Section 2.2 sets out the argument against reduc- tionism.8 Section 2.3 considers and rebuts one common response to the argument, which has often been thought sufficient grounds to disregard its conclusion. Section 2.4 then asks whether a modified reductionism would survive unscathed by the argu- ment. Finally, section 2.5 sets out some desiderata on a plausible exceptionalist alterna- tive. Section 2.6 concludes. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that using lethal or otherwise serious force in self-defense is justified only when three conditions are satisfied: first, there are some grounds for the defender to give priority to his own interests over those of the attacker (whether because the attacker has lost the protection of his right to life, for example, or because of the defender’s prerogative to prefer himself to others); second, the harm used is proportionate to the threat thereby averted; third, the harm (...) is necessary to avert that threat. The first and second conditions have been exhaustively discussed, but the third has been oddly neglected. Meanwhile a prominent school of thought has arisen, in the ethics of war, which seeks to ground the justification of killing in war in principles of individual self-defense. They too have failed to offer any substantive analysis of necessity, while at the same time appealing to it when it suits them to do so. In this paper, I attempt a detailed analysis of the necessity constraint on defensive force, and explore the implications of that analysis for the attempt to transpose principles of individual self-defense into the context of warfare. (shrink)

How does a subject who is competent to detect the irrationality of a belief that p, form her belief against weighty or even conclusive evidence to the contrary? The phenomenon of self-deception threatens a widely shared view of beliefs according to which they do not regularly correspond to emotions and evaluative attitudes. Accordingly, the most popular answer to this question is that the belief formed in self-deception is caused by an intention to form that belief. On this view, the state (...) of self-deception is taken to be a calculated outcome involving a person's intentional manipulation of her own thoughts. I argue that this answer is false and forms an impediment towards making sense of self-deception. I show that, contrary to philosophical prejudice, emotions and desires exert vast and systematic effects on the formation of beliefs. In this, and other, sections of the article, the results of experimental work are brought forward. Self-deception is portrayed here as resembling numerous instances of belief formation which are regularly affected by motivational factors. I argue that self-deceptive beliefs are direct expressions of the subject's wishes, fears and hopes. Qua beliefs which mostly correspond to such factors (rather than to evidence), self-deceptive states are a kind of fantasy. (shrink)

Killing in War presents the Moral Equality of Combatants with serious, and in my view insurmountable problems. Absent some novel defense, this thesis is now very difficult to sustain. But this success is counterbalanced by the strikingly revisionist implications of McMahan’s account of the underlying morality of killing in war, which forces us into one of two unattractive positions, contingent pacifism, or near-total war. In this article, I have argued that his efforts to mitigate these controversial implications fail. The reader (...) is left stranded: to reach plausible conclusions, Walzer deployed an implausible conception of our rights to life; McMahan’s more rigorous account of those rights generates untenable conclusions. Absent new developments, it seems that the prospects for grounding the ethics of war in individual rights are poor: any theory of our rights to life that is sufficiently indiscriminate to work in the chaos of war is not discriminating enough to be a plausible theory of our rights to life. Perhaps by rejecting the ideal of the rights-respecting war altogether we might develop an alternative theory of justified warfare, which marries theoretical soundness with conclusions that we can more confidently support. (shrink)

Many of us believe (1) Saving a life is more important than averting any number of headaches. But what about risky cases? Surely: (2) In a single choice, if the risk of death is low enough, and the number of headaches at stake high enough, one should avert the headaches rather than avert the risk of death. And yet, if we will face enough iterations of cases like that in (2), in the long run some of those small risks of (...) serious harms will surely eventuate. And yet: (3) Isn't it still permissible for us to run these repeated risks, despite that knowledge? After all, if it were not, then many of the risky activities that we standardly think permissible would in fact be impermissible. Nobody has yet offered a principle that can accommodate all of 1-3. In this paper, I show that we can accommodate all of these judgements, by taking into account both ex ante and ex post perspectives. In doing so, I clear aside an important obstacle to a viable deontological decision theory. (shrink)

this paper advances a novel account of part of what justifies killing in war, grounded in the duties we owe to our loved ones to protect them from the severe harms with which war threatens them. It discusses the foundations of associative duties, then identifies the sorts of relationships, and the specific duties that they ground, which can be relevant to the ethics of war. It explains how those associa- tive duties can justify killing in theory—in particular how they can (...) justify overrid- ing the rights to life of some of those who must be killed to win a war. It then shows how these duties can be operationalised in practice: first, showing how soldiers who fight on behalf of their community can act on reasons that apply to the members of that community; second, showing that the argument from associative duties does not prove too much—in particular, that it does not license the intentional killing of noncombatants in war. (shrink)

People often think that their special relationships with family, friends, comrades and compatriots, can ground moral reasons. Among these reasons, they understand some to be duties – pro tanto requirements that have genuine weight when they conflict with other considerations. In this paper I ask: what is the underlying moral structure of associative duties? I first consider and reject the orthodox Teleological Welfarist account, which first observes that special relationships are fundamental for human well-being, then claims that we cannot have (...) these relationships, if we do not recognise associative duties, before concluding that we should therefore recognise associative duties. I then introduce a nonteleological alternative, grounded in the Appropriate Response approach to ethical theory. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest, among both philosophers, legal scholars, and military experts, on the ethics of war. Due in part due to post 9/11 events, this resurgence is also due to a growing theoretical sophistication among scholars in this area. Recently there has been very influential work published on the justificaton of killing in self-defense and war, and the topic of the ethics of war is now more important than ever as a discrete field. -/- The (...) 28 commissioned chapters in this Handbook will present a comprehensive overview of the field as well as make significant and novel contributions, and collectively they will set the terms of the debate for the next decade. Lazar and Frowe will invite the leading scholars in the field to write on topics that are new to them, making the volume a compilation of fresh ideas rather than a rehash of earlier work. The volume will be divided into five sections: Method, History, Resort, Conduct, and Aftermath. The contributors will be a mix of junior and senior figures, and will include well known scholars like Michael Walzer, Jeff McMahan, and David Rodin. (shrink)

I try to show that agent responsibility is an inadequate basis for the attribution of liability, by discrediting the Risk Argument and showing how the Responsibility Argument in fact collapses into the Risk Argument. I have concentrated on undermining these as philosophical theories of self-defense, although I at times note that our theory of self-defense should not be predicated on assumptions that are inapplicable to the context of war. The potential combatant, I conclude, should not look to the agency view (...) to ease his conscience about the killing he will do in war. If he is to fight without violating rights, then he will need a different theory of self-defense; if there are no more defensible theories, then he must either accept pacifism—which I think is a live possibility—or seek to identify stronger countervailing reasons, which can override the great force of his victims’ rights to life. (shrink)

Associative duties are non-contractual duties owed in virtue of a valuable relationship. They hold between lovers, family members, friends, and perhaps compatriots. General duties, by contrast, are owed to people simply in virtue of their humanity: they are grounded in each person’s great and equal moral worth. In this paper, I ask what should be done when we can perform either an associative duty or a general duty, but not both.

Contemporary just war theory is divided into two broad camps: revisionists and traditionalists. Traditionalists seek to provide moral foundations for something close to current international law, and in particular the laws of armed conflict. Although they propose improvements, they do so cautiously. Revisionists argue that international law is at best a pragmatic fiction—it lacks deeper moral foundations. In this article, I present the contemporary history of analytical just war theory, from the origins of contemporary traditionalist just war theory in Michael (...) Walzer's work to the revisionist critique of Walzer and the subsequent revival of traditionalism. I discuss central questions of methodology, as well as consider the morality of resorting to war and the morality of conduct in war. I show that although the revisionists exposed philosophical shortcomings in Walzer's arguments, their radical conclusions should prompt us not to reject the broad contemporary consensus, but instead to seek better arguments to underpin it. (shrink)

Killing civilians is worse than killing soldiers. Although this principle is widely affirmed, recent military practice and contemporary just war theory have undermined it. This article argues that killing an innocent person is worse the likelier it was, when you acted, that he would be innocent: riskier killings are worse than less risky killings. In war, killing innocent civilians is almost always riskier than killing innocent soldiers. So killing innocent civilians is worse than killing innocent soldiers. Since almost all civilians (...) are innocent in war, and since killing innocent civilians is worse than killing liable soldiers, killing civilians is worse than killing soldiers. (shrink)

Many of us think we have agent-centred options to act suboptimally. Some of these involve favouring our own interests. Others involve sacrificing them. In this paper, I explore three different ways to accommodate agent-centred options in a criterion of objective permissibility. I argue against satisficing and rational pluralism, and in favour of a principle built around sensitivity to personal cost.

Suppose that you are trying to pursue a morally worthy goal, but cannot do so without incurring some moral costs. At the outset, you believed that achieving your goal was worth no more than a given moral cost. And suppose that, time having passed, you have wrought only harm and injustice, without advancing your cause. You can now reflect on whether to continue. Your goal is within reach. What's more, you believe you can achieve it by incurring—from this point forward—no (...) more cost than it warranted at the outset. If you now succeed, the total cost will exceed the upper bound marked at the beginning. But the additional cost from this point is below that upper bound. And the good you will achieve is undiminished. How do the moral costs you have already inflicted bear upon your decision now? (shrink)

This commentary concentrates on two flaws in Mele's account. The first is Mele's attempt to account for self-deception by appealing to a desire to believe, together with an instrumental belief concerning the means of satisfying this desire. Contrary to Mele, it is argued that such an account requires a recognition on the part of agents that their actions instantiate these means. Second, Mele misidentifies the most essential – and flawed – ingredient of the standard approach to self-deception, the agent's desire (...) to form the belief (the belief that is undermined by the evidence). This ingredient is retained in Mele's own account of self-deception. (shrink)

This paper asks whether we can defend associative duties to our compatriots that are grounded solely in the relationship of liberal co-citizenship. The sort of duties that are especially salient to this relationship are duties of justice, duties to protect and improve the institutions that constitute that relationship, and a duty to favour the interests of compatriots over those of foreigners. Critics have argued that the liberal conception of citizenship is too insubstantial to sustain these duties — indeed, that it (...) gives us little reason to treat compatriots any differently from how we treat foreigners, with all the practical consequences that this would entail. I suggest that on a specific conception of liberal citizenship we can, in fact, defend associative duties, but that these extend only to the duty to protect and improve the institutions that constitute that relationship. Duties of justice and favouritism, I maintain, cannot be particularised to one's compatriots. (shrink)

In this paper, I ask how – and whether – the rectification of injury at which corrective justice aims is possible, and by whom it must be performed. I split the injury up into components of harm and wrong, and consider their rectification separately. First, I show that pecuniary compensation for the harm is practically plausible, because money acts as a mediator between the damaged interest and other interests. I then argue that this is also a morally plausible approach, because (...) it does not claim too much for compensation: neither can all harms be compensated, nor can it be said when compensation is paid that the status quo ante has been restored. I argue that there is no conceptual reason for any particular agent paying this compensation. I then turn to the wrong, and reject three proposed methods of rectification. The first aims to rectify the wrong by rectifying the harm; the second deploys punitive damages; the third, punishment. After undermining each proposal, I argue that the wrong can only be rectified by a full apology, which I disaggregate into the admission of causal and moral responsibility, repudiation of the act, reform, and, in some cases, disgorgement and reparations, which I define as a good faith effort to share the burden of the victim’s harm. I argue, further, that only the injurer herself can make a full apology, and it is not something that can be coerced by other members of society. As such, whether rectification of the wrong can be a matter of corrective justice is left an open question. (shrink)

This is the first collection to bring together well-known scholars writing from feminist perspectives within critical discourse analysis. The theoretical structure of CDA is illustrated with empirical research in Eastern and Western Europe, New Zealand, Asia, South America and the US, demonstrating the complex workings of power and ideology in discourse in sustaining particular gender(ed) orders. These studies deal with texts and talk in domains ranging from parliamentary settings, news and advertising media, the classroom, community literacy programs and the workplace.

Vivian Liska, German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy, Bloomington, University of Indiana Press, 2017 Lazar Atanasković.

This paper explicates a conception of injury as right-violation, which allows us to distinguish between setbacks to interests that should, and should not, be the concern of theories of justice. It begins by introducing a hybrid theory of rights, grounded in (a) the mobilisation of our moral equality to (b) protect our most important interests, and shows how violations of rights are the concern of justice, while setbacks where one of the twin grounds of rights is defeated are not. It (...) then looks more closely at the substantive moral components of injury, namely harm—damage to one’s interests—and wrong—disrespect for one’s moral equality. It argues that, on the hybrid conception of rights, harm and wrong are individually necessary and jointly sufficient components of injury, and the disvalue of neither is reducible to the other—in particular, it is a mistake to construe the disrespect identified by wrong as another damaged interest. Finally, it distinguishes between the public and private dimensions of harm and wrong, and makes some preliminary suggestions as to whether the remedy for these different dimensions should lie in criminal, distributive, or corrective justice. (shrink)

Q 1: How is it possible for a competent subject to detect the irrationality of a belief that p, to form and maintain his belief that not-p against weighty or conclusive evidence to the contrary?

The burgeoning literature on jus post bellum has repeatedly reaffirmed three positions that strike me as deeply implausible: that in the aftermath of wars, compensation should be a priority; that we should likewise prioritize punishing political leaders and war criminals even in the absence of legitimate multilateral institutions; and that when states justifiably launch armed humanitarian interventions, they become responsible for reconstructing the states into which they have intervened – the so called “Pottery Barn” dictum, “You break it, you own (...) it.” Against these common positions, this chapter argues that compensation should be subordinate to reconstruction, with resources going where they are most needed and can do the most good, rather than to the most aggrieved. Just punishment, meanwhile, presupposes just multilateral institutions – the victor cannot be trusted to mete out punishment fairly. And just interveners, who have already taken on such a heavy burden, are entitled to expect the international community to contribute to reconstruction after they have made the first and vital steps. After presenting each of these objections in greater depth, the chapter proceeds to draw some tentative inferences from the threads running through each, and suggest that they illustrate a distinctive flaw in the way in which jus post bellum is addressed by many just war theorists, who not only see the war as the grounds of post bellum duties, but also take it to specify their content: Specifically, they take the rights violations with which wars are imbued to be the basis for post-war action, but take the content of post-war duties to be focused on rectifying those rights violations, rather than the more forward-looking goal of establishing a lasting peace. This backward-looking orientation unduly confines these theorists to making attributions of fault, to a limited palette of normative concepts, and to a focus on the belligerents rather than the international community as a whole. Undoubtedly warfare creates a distinctive normative relationship between belligerent states (though we must question how much of this devolves to the citizens of those states). War does generate grounds for post-war duties – but there are other grounds for those duties too, moreover the grounds should not determine the content. It of course matters that the citizens of two states harmed one another in violation of their rights. But when the war is done, peacebuilding should be the priority, not raking over the wrongs of both sides. Sections 2–4 present the objections, Section 5 offers the tentative analysis and proposes a shift in focus toward an ethics of peacebuilding, and Section 6 concludes. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:The antiutopian effect of Game of Thrones (GoT) is examined as a form of mass entertainment. The first part of this article approaches GoT from the standpoint of dialectical contradiction between Fantasy and Realism peculiar to GoT’s eclectic nature. The second part puts forward a hypothesis about the social basis of GoT horizons, taking into account the fragmented and niched state of contemporary TV audiences.

Interest in just war theory has boomed in recent years, as a revisionist school of thought has challenged the orthodoxy of international law, most famously defended by Michael Walzer [1977]. These revisionist critics have targeted the two central principles governing the conduct of war (jus in bello): combatant equality and noncombatant immunity. The first states that combatants face the same permissions and constraints whether their cause is just or unjust. The second protects noncombatants from intentional attack. In response to these (...) critics, some philosophers have defended aspects of the old orthodoxy on novel grounds. Revisionists counter. As things stand, the prospects for progress are remote. In this paper, we offer a way forward. We argue that exclusive focus on first-order moral principles, such as combatant equality and noncombatant immunity, has led revisionist and orthodox just war theorists to engage in “proxy battles.” Their first-order moral disagreements are at least partly traceable to second-order disagreements about the nature and purpose of political theory. These deeper disputes have been central to the broader discipline of political theory for several years; we hope that bringing them to bear on the ethics of war will help us move beyond the present impasse. (shrink)

À l’heure où la pratique de la médecine est soumise à des impératifs techniques et biopolitiques qui suscitent une (bio)éthique défensive, il est essentiel de revivifier les dimensions éthiques du soin au cœur même de la clinique, pour redonner sens à la responsabilité morale qui l’habite. Cette contribution cherche à relever ce défi en puisant aux ressources anthropologiques, épistémologiques et éthiques des travaux de Viktor von Weizsäcker, de Georges Canguilhem, de Paul Ricœur et d’Emmanuel Lévinas, dont les recherches ont ouvert, (...) dès le milieu du XXe siècle, la voie d’une anthropologie clinique qui pose les jalons d’une éthique de responsabilité propre à l’exercice de la médecine. À la lumière de ces recherches, où médecine et philosophie se nourrissent mutuellement, cette étude propose une éthique du soin qui contribue à maintenir vivants les liens unissant éthique et médecine. (shrink)

The revisionist critique of conventional just war theory has undoubtedly scored some important victories. Walzer’s elegantly unified defense of combatant legal equality and noncombatant immunity has been seriously undermined. This critical success has not, however, been matched by positive arguments, which when applied to the messy reality of war would deprive states and soldiers of the permission to fight wars that are plausibly thought to be justified. The appeal to law that is sought to resolve this objection by casting it (...) as a practical concern, a pragmatic worry about implementation, which while germane to debates over the laws of war, need not undermine our convictions in the fundamental principles the revisionists advocate. This response is inadequate. Revisionists have not shown that soldiers should obey the laws of war, in practice, when they conflict with their other moral reasons – our worries about application remain intact. Moreover, a theory of war that offers only an account of the laws of war, and a set of fundamental principles developed in abstraction from feasibility constraints, is radically incomplete. We need to know how to apply those fundamental principles, and whether, when applied, they lead to defensible conclusions. Only two options seem to remain. Perhaps the revisionists’ arguments for their chosen fundamental principles are sufficiently compelling that we should stick with them, and accept their troubling conclusions – in other words, accept pacifism. Alternatively, we need to revise our fundamental principles, so that when applied they yield conclusions that we can more confidently endorse. -/- Though it does not save the revisionist view from the responsibility dilemma and cognate objections, the appeal to law does raise an important, and previously inadequately theorized, question – or, rather, resurrects a neglected topic, discussed in depth by historical just war theorists such as Grotius and Vattel. There are good grounds for distinguishing the laws of war from the morality of war, and for adjusting the former to accommodate predictable noncompliance, that should not impact on our account of the latter. Nonetheless, I have argued that there are some profound moral insights underlying both combatant legal equality and noncombatant immunity: specifically, we cannot infer from a combatant’s side having not satisfied jus ad bellum that he may not justifiably use lethal force; and other things equal, it is more wrongful to harm a nonliable noncombatant than to harm a nonliable combatant. (shrink)

Optimism about our ability to enhance societal decision‐making by leaning on Machine Learning (ML) for cheap, accurate predictions has palled in recent years, as these ‘cheap’ predictions have come at significant social cost, contributing to systematic harms suffered by already disadvantaged populations. But what precisely goes wrong when ML goes wrong? We argue that, as well as more obvious concerns about the downstream effects of ML‐based decision‐making, there can be moral grounds for the criticism of these predictions themselves. We introduce (...) and defend a theory of predictive justice, according to which differential model performance for systematically disadvantaged groups can be grounds for moral criticism of the model, independently of its downstream effects. As well as helping resolve some urgent disputes around algorithmic fairness, this theory points the way to a novel dimension of epistemic ethics, related to the recently discussed category of doxastic wrong. (shrink)

The principle of non-combatant immunity protects non-combatants against intentional attacks in war. It is the most widely endorsed and deeply held moral constraint on the conduct of war. And yet it is difficult to justify. Recent developments in just war theory have undermined the canonical argument in its favour – Michael Walzer's, in Just and Unjust Wars. Some now deny that non-combatant immunity has principled foundations, arguing instead that it is entirely explained by a different principle: that of necessity. In (...) war, as in ordinary life, harms to others can be justified only if they are necessary. Attacking non-combatants, the argument goes, is never necessary, so never justified. Although often repeated, this argument has never been explored in depth. In this article, I evaluate the necessity-based argument for non-combatant immunity, drawing together theoretical analysis and empirical research on anti-civilian tactics in interstate warfare, counterinsurgency, and terrorism. (shrink)

Consider the following claim: given the choice between saving a life and preventing any number of people from temporarily experiencing a mild headache, you should always save the life. Many moral theorists accept this claim. In doing so, they commit themselves to some form of ‘moral absolutism’: the view that there are some moral considerations that cannot be outweighed by any number of lesser moral considerations. In contexts of certainty, it is clear what moral absolutism requires of you. However, what (...) does it require of you when deciding under risk? What ought you to do when there is a chance that, say, you will not succeed in saving the life? In recent years, various critics have argued that moral absolutism cannot satisfactorily deal with risk and should, therefore, be abandoned. In this paper, we show that moral absolutism can answer its critics by drawing on—of all things—orthodox expected utility theory. (shrink)

Modern analytical just war theory starts with Michael Walzer's defense of key tenets of the laws of war in his Just and Unjust Wars. Walzer advocates noncombatant immunity, proportionality, and combatant equality: combatants in war must target only combatants; unintentional harms that they inflict on noncombatants must be proportionate to the military objective secured; and combatants who abide by these principles fight permissibly, regardless of their aims. In recent years, the revisionist school of just war theory, led by Jeff McMahan, (...) has radically undermined Walzer's defense of these principles. This essay situates Walzer's and the revisionists’ arguments, before illustrating the disturbing vision of the morality of war that results from revisionist premises. It concludes by showing how broadly Walzerian conclusions can be defended using more reliable foundations. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss the potential of wearable structures to provide effective social commentaries and address the political representation of refugees, migrants, and nomads. We take Lucy Orta’s Refuge Wear as an occasion to address a series of socio-political considerations around wearables, textiles, communication, and technology, as well as the role of urban and social environments in determining architectures of mobility. Finally, we provide a critique of framing concepts such as relational aesthetics, heterotopias, nomadology, or deterritorialization—to propose a rethinking (...) of wearables based on the idea of critical habitats and responsible resource-based philosophies. (shrink)

A green philosopher's peripeteia.--Physics and metaphysics of music.--The roots of arithmetic.--Critique of new geometrical abstractions.--The philosophical value of science.

In 1922, Cartan introduced in differential geometry, besides the Riemannian curvature, the new concept of torsion. He visualized a homogeneous and isotropic distribution of torsion in three dimensions (3d) by the “helical staircase”, which he constructed by starting from a 3d Euclidean space and by defining a new connection via helical motions. We describe this geometric procedure in detail and define the corresponding connection and the torsion. The interdisciplinary nature of this subject is already evident from Cartan’s discussion, since he (...) argued—but never proved—that the helical staircase should correspond to a continuum with constant pressure and constant internal torque. We discuss where in physics the helical staircase is realized: (i) In the continuum mechanics of Cosserat media, (ii) in (fairly speculative) 3d theories of gravity, namely (a) in 3d Einstein-Cartan gravity—this is Cartan’s case of constant pressure and constant intrinsic torque—and (b) in 3d Poincaré gauge theory with the Mielke-Baekler Lagrangian, and, eventually, (iii) in the gauge field theory of dislocations of Lazar et al., as we prove for the first time by arranging a suitable distribution of screw dislocations. Our main emphasis is on the discussion of dislocation field theory. (shrink)

Killing civilians is worse than killing soldiers. If any moral principle commands near universal assent, this one does. Few moral principles have been more widely and more viscerally affirmed. And yet, in recent years it has faced a rising tide of dissent. Political and military leaders seeking to slip the constraints of the laws of war have cavilled and qualified. Their complaints have been unwittingly aided by philosophers who, rebuilding just war theory from its foundations, have concluded that this principle (...) is at best a useful fiction. Sparing Civilians aims to turn this tide, and to vindicate international law, and the ruptured consensus. In doing so, Seth Lazar develops new insights into the morality of harm, relevant to everyone interested in normative and applied ethics. (shrink)