War is about individuals maiming and killing each
other, and yet, it seems that it is also irreducibly
collective, as it is fought by groups of people and more
often than not for the sake of communal values such as
territorial integrity and national self-determination.
Cecile Fabre articulates and defends an ethical account
of war in which the individual, as a moral and rational
agent, is the fundamental focus for concern and
respect--both as a combatant whose acts of killing need
justifying and as a non-combatant whose suffering also
needs justifying. She takes as her starting point a
political morality to which the individual, rather than
the nation-state, is central, namely cosmopolitanism.
According to cosmopolitanism, individuals all matter
equally, irrespective of their membership in this or
that political community. Traditional war ethics already
accepts this principle, since it holds that unarmed
civilians are illegitimate targets even though they
belong to the enemy community. However, although the
traditional account of whom we may kill in wars is
broadly faithful to that principle, the traditional
account of why we may kill and of who may kill is
not.Cosmopolitan theorists, for their part, do not
address the ethical issues raised by war in any depth.
Fabre's Cosmopolitan War seeks to fill this gap, and
defends its account of just and unjust wars by
addressing the ethics of different kinds of war: wars of
national defence, wars over scarce resources, civil
wars, humanitarian intervention, wars involving private
military forces, and asymmetrical wars. |
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