Supreme Emergency Research Articles

Rawls and War

The purpose of the present article is to explicate John Rawls's views on war as they are scattered across several of his writings. Three claims are made: (1) Rawls is generally a just war theorist who usually argues against the view of war; (2) Under the influence of Michael Walzer, however, Rawls ends up making an ill-advised concession to the realist view concerning conditions of supreme emergency; and (3), despite Rawls's blend of just war theory/ realism, the logic of his theory of justice and his political liberalism should push him in the opposite direction toward a blend of just war theory/pacifism.

The Law of Peoples

The Law of Peoples

The Morality of Nuclear Deterrence: Obstacles on the Road to Coherence

AbstractThis essay critically assays four recent attempts to furnish a moral justification for nuclear deterrence: the success thesis, the just war thesis, the argument from the “supreme emergency,” and the exceptionalist thesis. By entering into critical dialogue with representatives of these arguments I hope to show that the current confidence in the morality of nuclear deterrence is ill-conceived. Chief among the logical and practical difficulties plaguing these arguments are the following. (1) The success thesis rests on the fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning. Nor does the assertion of the past success of deterrence furnish guarantees of future effectiveness. (2) Representatives of the just war thesis either establish conditions for accepting deterrence that are incoherent with their judgments about use (e.g., U.S. Catholic bishops) or develop a theory of deterrence that cannot be morally institutionalized (e.g., David Hollenbach). (3) The argument for the supreme emergency eclipses moral convention in the nuclear age. (4) The attempt to salvage the supreme emergency according to a classical theory of community rests on a fundamental disanalogy between the Aristotelian polis and modern nation-states. Moreover, it opens the door for a double standard to evaluate the methods of war.

A Contractarian Defense of Nuclear Deterrence

Previous articleNext article No AccessA Contractarian Defense of Nuclear DeterrenceChristopher W. MorrisChristopher W. Morris Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 95, Number 3Apr., 1985Special Issue: Symposium on Ethics and Nuclear Deterrence Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/292655 Views: 11Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1985 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: by Daniel Statman Supreme Emergencies Revisited Statman, Ethics 117, no.11 (Jul 2015): 58–79.https://doi.org/10.1086/508037