Academic

Legal Theory Bookworm

By Lawrence Solum

The Legal Theory Bookworm recommends  Just and Unjust Warriors: The Moral and Legal Status of Soldiers, edited by David Rodin and Henry Shue.  Here is a description:

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 fi ghting in a war that is just 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 rules are 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 justifi ability of terrorism, about the relationship between law and morality, the relationship between soldiers and states, and the relationship between the ethics of war and the ethics of ordinary life.

And from the reviews:

"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."--Journal of Applied Philosophy

And here is the table of contents:

1. Introduction, David Rodin and Henry Shue
2. The Morality of War and the Law of War, Jeff McMahan
3. The Moral Inequality of Soldiers: Why Jus in Bello Asymmetry is Half Right, David Rodin
4. Fearful Symmetry, Christopher Kutz
5. Do We Need a "Morality of War"?, Henry Shue
6. How to Judge Soldiers Whose Cause in Unjust, Judith Lichtenberg
7. Moral Equality, Victimhood and the Sovereignty Symmetry Problem, Cheyney Ryan
8. The Status of Combatants, Tony Coady
9. Is the Independent Application of Jus in Bello the way to Limit War?, Anthony Coates
10. Just War and Regular War: Competing Paradigms, Gregory Reichberg
11. A Presumption of the Moral Equality of Combatants: a Citizen Soldier' Perspective, Dan Zupan
12. The Principle of Equal Application of the Laws of War , Adam Roberts

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on November 20, 2010 (boomark / email).