War Ethics

A variety of ethical objections have been raised against the military employment of uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs, drones). Some of these objections are technological concerns
over UAVs abilities’ to function on par with their inhabited counterparts. This paper sets such concerns aside and instead focuses on supposed objections to the use of UAVs in principle. I examine several such objections currently on offer and show them all to be wanting. Indeed, I argue that we have a general duty to protect an agent engaged in a justified act from harm to the greatest extent possible, so long as that protection does not interfere with the agent’s ability to act justly. UAVs can afford precisely such protection. Therefore, we are obligated to employ UAV weapon systems for a justified mission if it can be shown that their use does not significantly reduce a warfighter’s operational capability. Of course, if a given military action is unjustified to begin with, then carrying out that act via UAVs is wrong, just as it would be with any weapon. But the point of this paper is to show that there is nothing wrong in principle with using a UAV and that, other things being equal, using
such technology can be, in fact, obligatory.

The current paper examines the issue of medieval war ethics from the perspective of the Byzantine case-study. The starting-point is a critical approach to the theoretical understanding and the methodological employment of modern analytical concepts, such as ‘war ideology’ and ‘holy war’, in the study of war ethics in the late antique, early and high medieval period. The main goal is to circumscribe the modern theoretical distinction between ‘just war’ and ‘holy war’ and to demonstrate the applicability and the limits of its heuristic employment in the analysis of medieval source material. The first part contains a discussion of theoretical approaches to the terms ‘war ideology’, ‘just war’ and ‘holy war’. The second part is subdivided in two chapters: The first chapter attempts a historical re-evaluation of the religious discourse of the Byzantine sources through the prism of the proposed theoretical model. The second chapter contains an analysis of the socio-political role of peace discourse in the justification of imperial war policies.

NOTE: this paper is a penultimate draft accepted for publication. The finalized version of it has been published in the Proceedings of the ACPA.

Aquinas held that lying is always a sin, an evil action (ST II-II, Q110, A3).  In later terminology it falls under what would be called an intrinsically evil action.  Under no circumstances can it be a good action.  Following Augustine, Aquinas held that even if others must die, one must still never tell a lie (ST II-II, Q110, A3, ad 4, DM Q15, A1, ad 5).  Yet when it comes to self-defense and capital punishment Aquinas’s reasoning seems at odds with itself.  One may kill a man in self-defense (ST II-II, Q64, A7).  Similarly, just as a diseased limb may be cutoff for the sake of the good of the whole, so too may an evildoer who is dangerous to the community be killed for the sake of the good of the whole community (ST II-II, Q64, A2).  Herein lies the tension:  why does Aquinas hold that it is licit to kill in self-defense or in capital punishment on account of the common good, but that one may never tell a lie on account of the common good?  I argue Aquinas does indeed have a consistent account.  Killing and lying are not analogous, despite the prima facie temptation to lump them together.

A cornerstone of traditional just war theory is that combatants on both sides of any conflict are legitimate targets of attack. This is not because they are engaged in wrongdoing but because they pose a threat to others. So long as they follow the jus in bello rules of proportionality and discrimination, those who fight for an unjust cause and those who fight for a just cause are moral equals: both may permissibly kill and both may permissibly be killed. This is the doctrine of the ‘moral equality of combatants’ (MEC) and it has long been the standard view. A revisionist challenge, however, argues that one is not liable to be killed if one fights for a just cause. People have a presumptive right against being killed, after all, so why should a soldier fighting for a just cause lose that right for posing a justified threat against an unjust enemy? Jeff McMahan makes the case for this revisionist view in Killing in War. He explicitly rejects the MEC and instead endorses an asymmetric view of the morality of combatants. Critics object that this revision makes just war impossible because without the MEC it is impossible to justify our convictions about legitimate and illegitimate targets. In this article, I defend the revisionist view against this objection. My defence, in turn, leads me to propose a new and more adequate account of enemy status.

In this paper, the ethical and spiritual aspects of the trolley problem are discussed in connection with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. First, I show that the dropping of atomic bombs was a typical example of the events that contained the logic of the trolley problems in their decision-making processes and justifications. Second, I discuss five aspects of " the problem of the trolley problem; " that is to say, " Rarity, " " Inevitability, " " Safety Zone, " " Possibility of Becoming a Victim, " and " Lack of Perspective of the Dead Victims Who Were Deprived of Freedom of Choice, " in detail. Third, I argue that those who talk about the trolley problem are automatically placed in the sphere of the expectation of response on the spiritual level. I hope that my contribution will shed light on the trolley problem from a very different angle, which has not been made by our fellow philosophers.