The Morality of Defensive War

by Cécile Fabre (Editor), Seth Lazar (Editor)

Overview

Most of us take it for granted that wars in defence of one's political community are the quintessential just wars. Indeed, while in recent years philosophers have subjected all of our other assumptions about just war theory to radical revision, this principle has emerged largely unscathed. But what underpins the morality of defensive war? In this book, leading moral and political philosophers both show the profoundly challenging nature of that question, and advance novel answers to it. The first part exposes the deep tension between the individualist foundations of much contemporary philosophy and plausible conclusions about the morality of defensive war. The second part offers an individualist attempt to resolve that tension, while the third seeks to justify defensive war by appeal to more collectivist values.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191022708
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	02/20/2014
Series:	Mind Association Occasional Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Cécile Fabre is currently Professor of Political Philosophy at Oxford University, and Fellow in Philosophy at Lincoln College. She has published extensively on rights, justice, and war--her latest monograph, Cosmopolitan War, came out with OUP in 2012. Seth Lazar is a continuing research fellow at the School of Philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences, and the Australian National university. He writes on war and killing, and has published in the premier international journals in moral and political philosophy.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
1. Introduction, Cecile Fabre and Seth Lazar
2. National Defence, Self-Defence, and the Problem of Political Aggression, Seth Lazar
3. Understanding the Political Defensive Privilege, Patrick Emerton and Toby Handfield
4. The Myth of National Self-Defence, David Rodin
5. Cosmopolitanism and Wars of Self-Defence, Cecile Fabre
6. What Rights may be Defended by Means of War?, Jeff McMahan
7. Distributive Justice, Human Rights, and Territorial Integrity: A Contractarian Account of the Crime of Aggression, Yitzhak Benbaji
8. Collective Self-Determination, Institutions of Justice, and Wars of National Defence, Margaret Moore
9. Territorial Rights and National Defence, Anna Stilz
10. Democracy, Defence, and the Threat of Intervention, Christopher Kutz
Index