Just and Unjust Warriors

Can a soldier be held responsible for fighting in a war that is illegal or unjust? This is the question at the heart of a new debate that has the potential to profoundly change our understanding of the moral and legal status of warriors, wars, and indeed of moral agency itself. The debate pits a widely shared and legally entrenched principle of war - that combatants have equal rights and equal responsibilities irrespective of whether they are fighting in a war thatjust or unjust - against a set of striking new arguments. These arguments challenge the idea that there is a separation between the rules governing the justice of going to war (the jus ad bellum) and the rules governing what combatants can do in war (the jus in bello). If ad bellum and in bello rulesare connected in the way these new arguments suggest, then many aspects of just war theory and laws of war would have to be rethought and perhaps reformed.This book contains eleven original and closely argued essays by leading figures in the ethics and laws of war and provides an authoritative treatment of this important new debate. The essays both challenge and defend many deeply held convictions: about the liability of soldiers for crimes of aggression, about the nature and justifiability of terrorism, about the relationship between law and morality, the relationship between soldiers and states, and the relationship between the ethics of warand the ethics of ordinary life.This book is a project of the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War.

This volume is excellent. It is comprehensive and informative. Just and Unjust Warriors mostly delivers on its promise of tightly argued chapters that respond to each other. It gives us more to think about and is accessible to a wide audience. Even though it will be more interesting to those readers with some background in just war theory, it is also recommended for those who want simply to think seriously about the moral rules applicable to war., The quality of the contributions in Just and Unjust Warriors is universally high, and, unlike most edited volumes, in which the individual chapters stand more or less in isolation, in this instance there is continuous cross-referencing between the authors. This produces a volume that is unusually coherent and focussed for an edited work, a fact for which Rodin and Shue deserve congratulation., this volume provides essential interdisciplinary consideration of the whole range of questions raised by the novel threats and challenges posed to the international system by nonstate actors bent on mass attacks and/or threatening strikes of weapons of mass destruction. Its combination of historical perspective and philosophical theory, and its examination of the international system and of various policy options, makes it a deeply informed contribution to a very important contemporary debate.

David Rodin is Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Changing Character of War Program, University of Oxford, and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, the Australian National University. His research covers a wide range of topics in moral philosophy including the ethics of war and conflict, business ethics, and international justice. His is the author of War and Self-Defense (OUP 2002), which was awarded theAmerican Philosophical Association Sharp Prize, and is co-editor of The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions (Ashgate, 2006), and of Preemption (OUP 2007). Henry Shue is Senior Research Fellow Emeritus at Merton College, Oxford; from 2002-2007 he was Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. Best known for Basic Rights (Princeton, 1980; 2nd Ed., 1996), he has written a number of highly influential articles including "Torture " (1978), "Exporting Hazards " (1981), "Mediating Duties " (1988), "Subsistence Emissions and Luxury Emissions " (1993), "War " (2003), and "Limiting Sovereignty " (2004). Hecontinues to write on the ethical aspects of climate change and war, with a book called Limiting War currently in progress.