Conviction Versus Convention

Abstract

This collection of essays is centred around the growing concern with the question of whether the laws of war should be changed to reflect the moral status of the combatants involved, or as David Rodin and Henry Shue put it in their introduction, ‘Can a soldier be held responsible for fighting in a war that is illegal or unjust?’ (1). However, there is perhaps a more intriguing question to be found herein. This project, the result of two two-day workshops held at Oxford University’s Programme on the Changing Character of War in the Spring of 2005, has running beneath its aforementioned aim the seemingly meta-theoretical question of whether philosophical theory still has any value in the ‘real world.’ To be more precise, it could be argued that what is really at stake here is whether philosophical arguments about such pressing issues as asymmetric warfare, terrorism, and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan can have any currency in international legal, political, and military debates that demand workable solutions that are more than abstract ideas based on unrealistic hypothetical scenarios. Jeff McMahan’s opening chapter not only initiates this tension between theory and practice, but is itself a microcosm of it. McMahan argues that, while the laws of war must treat all combatants equally regardless of the justness or lack thereof of their side, the ‘morality of war’ cannot disregard justice and therefore cannot treat combatants equally (19). In order to bring our evaluation of combatants into congruence with our evaluation of the everyday use of violence, and thus bring our moral reflections about war into harmony with our ‘basic morality’ (27), McMahan contends that the criterion for liability to harm in war should be changed from ‘posing a threat to others’ (21) to ‘being morally responsible for an unjust threat’ (22). Hence, as McMahan states, since we do not claim that an attacker has a right to defend himself