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Individual Liability in War: A Response to Fabre, Leveringhaus and Tadros

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2012

JEFF McMAHAN
JEFF McMAHAN*
Affiliation:
Rutgers [email protected]
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Abstract

This article is a response to commentaries on my book, Killing in War, by Cécile Fabre, Alex Leveringhaus and Victor Tadros. It discusses the implications of the approach I have defended for the morality of war for such issues as internecine killing in war, humanitarian intervention and the bases of individual liability to attack in war.

Type
Debate
Information
Utilitas , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , June 2012 , pp. 278 - 299
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 For an extended defence of the relevance of this consideration, see Tadros, V., The Ends of Harm: The Moral Foundations of Criminal Law (Oxford, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 For the distinction between opportunistic and eliminative forms of intentional harming, see Quinn, Warren S., ‘Actions, Intentions, and Consequences: The Doctrine of Double Effect’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 18 (1989), pp. 334–51, at 344Google ScholarPubMed.

3 I borrow this example from McMahan, Jeff and McKim, Robert, ‘The Just War and the Gulf War’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 23 (1993), pp. 501–41, at 514CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Quinn, ‘Actions, Intentions, and Consequences’, p. 344.

5 For an early example, see Foot, Philippa, ‘Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect’, originally published in 1967, reprinted in her Virtues and Vices (Oxford, 1978), pp. 19–32, at 26Google Scholar.

6 In an earlier article, I noted that, assuming that war involves killing (a contingent rather than necessary truth), ‘only aims that are sufficiently serious and significant to justify killing can be just causes. Beyond this, however, considerations of scale are irrelevant to just cause.’ See ‘Just Cause for War’, Ethics and International Affairs 19 (2005), pp. 1–21, at 11. I have since learned from recent conversations with Kieran Oberman that he has independently arrived at the same conclusion: that even a small-scale violation of human rights can constitute a just cause for a proportionally small-scale war.

7 Augustine's view is actually more complicated than many people suppose. His doubts about the permissibility of self-defence are confined to individual or private self-defence and do not apply to collective self-defence through war, which he treats as an instance of other-defence. He also holds that individual self-defence is impermissible only according to divine or natural law, not according to human law, which he concedes must permit it. I am indebted to Henrik Syse for clarification of Augustine's views.

8 I owe this suggestion to Uwe Steinhoff.

9 For examples that raise some of the same issues but are, for various reasons, less effective than Double Hit Man 2, see McMahan, Jeff, ‘Self-Defense and Culpability’, Law and Philosophy 24 (2005), pp. 751–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.