1 00:00:01,720 --> 00:00:05,560 So we will start by talking about 30 minute presentation. 2 00:00:06,580 --> 00:00:17,820 And then as you go in, I will kick off the discussion with each of us, maybe 25 to 10 minutes, and then we'll open up to lots of things. 3 00:00:19,300 --> 00:00:23,710 David Roden Who can't be here today, unfortunately. 4 00:00:24,340 --> 00:00:30,370 Wanted to have a session that would be devoted to the issue. 5 00:00:31,240 --> 00:00:42,160 Where do we go from here in just war theory? That is, what are what direction should just war theorists be looking to go in in the coming years? 6 00:00:43,090 --> 00:00:52,630 I took this to mean both. What are some of the theoretical problems that may be most interesting or most difficult or most important? 7 00:00:53,230 --> 00:01:03,370 And also, in what ways might we make practical progress in influencing both the military and international lawyers? 8 00:01:03,640 --> 00:01:09,459 So that was the the brief, the last email exchange we had. 9 00:01:09,460 --> 00:01:17,500 David seemed to want me to say quite a bit about what I thought some of the more 10 00:01:17,500 --> 00:01:25,930 important theoretical issues might be what might be high on the research agenda. 11 00:01:26,890 --> 00:01:33,790 Some of these I have views about and others I don't have views about or haven't thought about very much. 12 00:01:34,340 --> 00:01:42,820 Let me mention a couple of the topics I put them at the end because I have really almost nothing to say about them, 13 00:01:43,000 --> 00:01:53,770 but I think are going to be issues that people expect just war theorists to have something to say about. 14 00:01:54,880 --> 00:02:01,270 And one of them is cyber war, which just war things really have not said very much about. 15 00:02:04,720 --> 00:02:09,370 This raises, I think, just familiar issues about side effect harms to civilians, 16 00:02:09,370 --> 00:02:14,170 but harms of a different form from the kind that we've seen in the past. 17 00:02:15,040 --> 00:02:26,050 Cyber war threatens innocent bystanders with infrastructure failure. 18 00:02:26,260 --> 00:02:30,820 Loss of computer data. Economic disruption. 19 00:02:31,450 --> 00:02:43,690 Disruption of the stock markets. That kind of thing might pose some physical threats if water supplies, 20 00:02:44,020 --> 00:02:50,770 sewage treatment facilities stop working as a result of interference with the computers that are involved in running those things. 21 00:02:50,770 --> 00:02:55,360 But it's an it's an unexplored area. 22 00:02:58,480 --> 00:03:05,140 To the extent that the moral problem with cyber warfare is a problem of side effect harm to civilians, 23 00:03:05,920 --> 00:03:15,040 it resembles this problem that I call the problem of lesser aggression in military war rather than cyber war. 24 00:03:15,040 --> 00:03:24,610 Namely, the use, the side effect harms of cyber warfare are likely to be lesser, 25 00:03:24,700 --> 00:03:31,240 more minor harms to individuals than, you know, having a drop bomb dropped on them or something like that. 26 00:03:32,020 --> 00:03:33,670 But they're going to be very widespread. 27 00:03:34,150 --> 00:03:42,760 That is to say the harms themselves may be comparatively small, but the number of victims may be very, very large. 28 00:03:43,480 --> 00:03:48,160 And that phenomenon raises a lot of interesting issues. 29 00:03:48,210 --> 00:03:55,120 And that's actually what I'll be talking about in my master lecture on Thursday night. 30 00:03:55,120 --> 00:04:04,480 I'm going to discuss this problem of lesser aggression where you have military aggression that threatens certain lesser rights or lesser values. 31 00:04:07,330 --> 00:04:14,800 Another issue that I think we're going to be called upon to deal with that we haven't dealt with very well up till now, 32 00:04:15,370 --> 00:04:21,609 is the use of robots and automated technologies in war fighting, 33 00:04:21,610 --> 00:04:32,350 where more of the decision making that that's in quotation marks will be done by machines rather than by persons. 34 00:04:33,100 --> 00:04:43,630 So this is going to raise a lot of questions about responsibility and liability, both in morality and in law. 35 00:04:45,100 --> 00:04:53,500 So when the. When some robotic technology destroys some facility and lots of innocent people are killed 36 00:04:54,430 --> 00:04:57,639 and they know who we're going to want to know who's responsible for that under law, 37 00:04:57,640 --> 00:05:04,629 what kind of constraints should be imposed on this technology. But I actually had very little to say about these issues. 38 00:05:04,630 --> 00:05:09,640 I mentioned them because David said this is, you know, what should we be thinking about? 39 00:05:09,650 --> 00:05:18,370 Well, we're going to have to think about that, because these are imperatives that the technology is going to be imposing on us as just war theorists. 40 00:05:21,460 --> 00:05:25,210 Stepping back a bit to some things that I've thought a bit more about. 41 00:05:27,790 --> 00:05:34,509 I think one of the more important issues is going to be how we think about these very theoretically, 42 00:05:34,510 --> 00:05:41,620 very difficult issues of proportionality and necessity, both at vellum and in Bella. 43 00:05:43,030 --> 00:05:57,399 The reason that this is a problem is that. According to the revisionist understanding just war theory that I try to defend unjust combatants. 44 00:05:57,400 --> 00:06:09,370 That is, people who fight without a just cause, who are in the wrong in the war can very seldom satisfy any of the in below constraints. 45 00:06:09,610 --> 00:06:16,509 And it's very seldom going to be able to satisfy the requirement of discrimination properly understood or by properly understood, 46 00:06:16,510 --> 00:06:21,399 I mean that the requirement of discrimination holds that one must not intentionally attack people 47 00:06:21,400 --> 00:06:26,500 who are illegitimate targets and confine one's attacks only to people who are legitimate targets. 48 00:06:27,010 --> 00:06:35,020 And on the revisionist view, people who are fighting in a just war by permissible means aren't morally legitimate, legitimate targets. 49 00:06:37,510 --> 00:06:47,710 So it seems to me that at least one side in most wars is not going to be able to respect the requirement of discrimination. 50 00:06:48,640 --> 00:06:55,030 Understood as the revisionists. Just war theory understands that this is a huge problem for international law. 51 00:06:55,090 --> 00:07:04,780 We need to know and just for practical concerns, we want to constrain people who are fighting in an unjust war, 52 00:07:05,230 --> 00:07:09,340 and we want to subject them to requirements of discrimination and proportionality. 53 00:07:10,780 --> 00:07:18,069 But if the revisionist approach to just war theory is right, they just are very, 54 00:07:18,070 --> 00:07:28,030 very seldom going to be able to satisfy the morally correct requirements of discrimination and proportionality. 55 00:07:31,090 --> 00:07:43,659 So the law has to be formulated in such a way as to try to constrain them with respect to legitimate targets and with respect to proportionality. 56 00:07:43,660 --> 00:07:52,990 But whatever the law comes up with there very unlikely to coincide at all closely with what morality requires. 57 00:07:55,690 --> 00:07:57,970 So there are general questions here, it seems to me. 58 00:07:58,810 --> 00:08:11,290 Can the legal rules be in any way asymmetrical between just and unjust combatants, or do they have to remain neutral rules? 59 00:08:14,950 --> 00:08:16,090 That's an important question. 60 00:08:16,990 --> 00:08:25,630 With respect to the requirement of discrimination, you should ask whether the legal rules could ever permit unjust combatants to attack, just combat. 61 00:08:25,660 --> 00:08:33,940 It seems that they have to. At least it seems that they can't make mere participation in an unjust war criminal. 62 00:08:34,300 --> 00:08:38,410 That's a highly counterproductive idea. 63 00:08:40,520 --> 00:08:46,820 So what do we do? What should the law say about attacks by unjust combatants on just combatants? 64 00:08:47,030 --> 00:09:00,290 What should the law say about attacks by just combatants insofar as they can ever be identified on civilians in the country that's fighting unjustly, 65 00:09:00,290 --> 00:09:07,190 who may actually be liable to some forms of harm as a result of their complicity in their country's action? 66 00:09:08,120 --> 00:09:18,920 Can the law ever take account of liability on the part of non-combatants in the country that is fighting unjustly? 67 00:09:18,950 --> 00:09:21,829 Does so to a slight extent already, 68 00:09:21,830 --> 00:09:32,690 I think in that we acknowledge that civilians in a country that has fought a war unjustly may be responsible for some share 69 00:09:32,690 --> 00:09:39,020 of the reparations that needs to be paid to the country that has been wrongfully attacked or people wrongfully harmed. 70 00:09:39,710 --> 00:09:46,640 We accept that civilians in a society that has gone to war unjustly may be liable to accept some of the 71 00:09:46,640 --> 00:09:52,250 burdens of occupation or some of the burdens of economic sanctions that during the course of a war. 72 00:09:53,180 --> 00:10:01,010 So the idea of civilian liability to certain forms of sanction or harm isn't utterly alien. 73 00:10:02,150 --> 00:10:09,920 But there's a question about whether that can be extended to military harm, militarily imposed as well. 74 00:10:13,190 --> 00:10:16,160 One question that we might want to think about in this connection is whether 75 00:10:17,150 --> 00:10:24,590 anything might be gained by seeking to redefine the notion of a combatant. 76 00:10:25,740 --> 00:10:33,860 It's already a rather blurry notion at the edges morally, at any rate, particularly in just war theory, 77 00:10:33,860 --> 00:10:40,879 where you find that authors do say there are combatants and then there are non-combatants 78 00:10:40,880 --> 00:10:45,350 and these are mutually exclusive categories and they're pretty well defined and so forth. 79 00:10:45,830 --> 00:10:53,120 But then when you push on it a little bit and you ask just war theorists about munitions manufacturers, 80 00:10:53,120 --> 00:10:56,660 for example, they tend to say things that are rather strange. 81 00:10:56,870 --> 00:11:04,069 So they say things like this Munitions factory workers may be attacked while they're at work in the factory, 82 00:11:04,070 --> 00:11:10,130 but they're unlike combatants in that they may not be attacked and attacked when they're sleeping or when they're away from the factory. 83 00:11:11,000 --> 00:11:14,000 And I take it that what that means is that when they're working in the factory, 84 00:11:14,000 --> 00:11:20,719 they're not they don't have the exact same moral status as other civilians or other non-combatants. 85 00:11:20,720 --> 00:11:27,920 It's not that the justification for killing munitions factory workers when they're in the process of making weapons is just that. 86 00:11:27,920 --> 00:11:36,500 These are side effect harms to innocent bystanders, that their status is not that of an innocent bystander when they're at work, 87 00:11:36,890 --> 00:11:43,910 but when they leave work and go home, they're then have full civilian immunity. 88 00:11:45,020 --> 00:11:51,530 So it looks like what some just war theorists are saying is that there is a status that's actually intermediate between combatant and non-combat, 89 00:11:52,310 --> 00:11:57,430 that munitions workers are neither one or the other. They don't have the exact same status as either. 90 00:11:58,230 --> 00:12:07,310 And that raises the possibility that there may be gradations of status that could be distinguished both in morality and in law, 91 00:12:07,700 --> 00:12:15,620 particularly in law, so that we could we could we could have a richer array of categories than just combatants, non-combat. 92 00:12:17,030 --> 00:12:18,290 That's one possibility. 93 00:12:20,330 --> 00:12:30,860 Another problem that is both practical and theoretical is this How should we formulate a plausible in Bello proportionality requirement, 94 00:12:32,510 --> 00:12:42,530 taking now proportionality in the conduct of war to be concerned solely with side effect harms to innocent bystanders? 95 00:12:43,040 --> 00:12:47,700 That's the way it's commonly understood, as I'll mention in a little while. 96 00:12:47,720 --> 00:12:58,700 I think another issue that we need to think about is just war. Here is the proportionality constraint on harms that may be done to enemy combatants, 97 00:13:00,350 --> 00:13:05,840 an issue that is not recognised in just war theory or international law. 98 00:13:06,320 --> 00:13:09,110 I think that's something that we need to take up as stress a years, 99 00:13:09,530 --> 00:13:16,670 but for the moment just think about proportionality in the conduct of war as concerned only with side effect harms to civilians. 100 00:13:19,040 --> 00:13:23,630 How can we formulate a proportionality rule for that purpose? 101 00:13:24,710 --> 00:13:35,050 The existing rule that you find in protocol one of the 77 Geneva protocols says that the 102 00:13:35,090 --> 00:13:39,110 harm to civilians and damage to civilian objects should not be excessive in relation. 103 00:13:39,220 --> 00:13:42,580 Is a concrete military advantage expected from the attack. 104 00:13:44,620 --> 00:13:54,100 I've argued in various places that that rule is actually incoherent in its application to unjust combatants. 105 00:13:55,480 --> 00:13:59,500 It's incoherent because it harms to innocent people. 106 00:14:00,640 --> 00:14:05,560 Really are bad things. They are that's that's morally objectionable to harm innocent people. 107 00:14:06,100 --> 00:14:10,000 If that's going to be justified, it has to be weighed against something that has real value. 108 00:14:11,260 --> 00:14:14,860 Military advantage is not something that in and of itself has any value. 109 00:14:15,820 --> 00:14:21,100 Military advantage has value only in relation to the ends that it serves the military. 110 00:14:21,100 --> 00:14:28,090 The value of military advantage is entirely instrumental. And if the goals that are being sought are wrongful goals, 111 00:14:29,560 --> 00:14:34,190 then there's nothing good to be weighed against the harms that you're going to be causing to innocent people. 112 00:14:34,220 --> 00:14:39,550 So it seems to me that in its application to the action that people who are fighting in an unjust war, 113 00:14:39,780 --> 00:14:46,000 the the portion of the rule that we find in the Geneva Conventions, just makes no sense. 114 00:14:47,050 --> 00:14:53,020 But I can't think of anything plausible to replace it. 115 00:14:58,860 --> 00:15:01,920 There are lots of possibilities here. I could run through them, perhaps. 116 00:15:02,010 --> 00:15:05,129 How long have I been going? 10 minutes left. Oh, really? 117 00:15:05,130 --> 00:15:13,020 I've got it. You don't have to. Okay, well, so I won't run through what some of the options are and what the objections to them are. 118 00:15:13,440 --> 00:15:20,909 Perhaps you can just take my word for it. I've got a I've got a paper on war crimes that will be coming up at some point 119 00:15:20,910 --> 00:15:25,830 or other that that discusses this problem of proportionality and how you can 120 00:15:26,400 --> 00:15:36,400 how you can get a rule of proportionality that can actually be operationalised and followed by people on both sides that has any moral content at all. 121 00:15:36,420 --> 00:15:47,760 It's a very difficult problem. Related problem, I think, is how we should think about the notion of a war crime, both morally and legally. 122 00:15:48,300 --> 00:15:52,620 If the revisionist approach to just war is correct. 123 00:15:52,980 --> 00:15:57,870 And by that I mean an approach to war that is asymmetrical between morally asymmetrical, 124 00:15:57,870 --> 00:16:00,960 between the people who are fighting justly and the people who are fighting unjustly. 125 00:16:02,640 --> 00:16:10,980 Then, as I suggested earlier, when I said that unjust combatants can scarcely ever respect a proper requirement of discrimination, 126 00:16:11,420 --> 00:16:21,180 a requirement of formality in the conduct of war. It follows from that that most acts of war by people who are fighting for an unjust cause, 127 00:16:21,180 --> 00:16:29,399 or at least in the absence of a just cause, are going to be morally impermissible, given that that's the case. 128 00:16:29,400 --> 00:16:34,890 And given that it's implausible to say that everything that an unjust combatant does in war is a war crime. 129 00:16:35,340 --> 00:16:42,210 We're going to need to formulate a notion of a war crime that has some fight that's plausibly legally enforceable. 130 00:16:42,660 --> 00:16:45,840 It's not going to be unduly restrictive on unjust combatants, 131 00:16:45,840 --> 00:16:53,550 but isn't going to be unduly permissive with respect to sorry isn't going to be unduly restrictive with respect to just combatants, 132 00:16:53,790 --> 00:16:58,050 but isn't going to be excessively permissive with respect to unjust combatants. 133 00:16:58,920 --> 00:17:04,950 So this is really the fundamental problem of criminalisation, of action in war, 134 00:17:05,490 --> 00:17:10,710 in the light of moral, genuine moral criteria, genuine moral standards. 135 00:17:11,220 --> 00:17:18,030 We want acts that we criminalise and treat as punishable to be acts that really are morally wrong. 136 00:17:18,360 --> 00:17:22,950 We don't want to be punishing people for doing things that are permissible, but also we don't want the law. 137 00:17:23,670 --> 00:17:30,540 Ideally, we don't want to the law to permit people to do things that are horribly immoral or impermissible. 138 00:17:31,800 --> 00:17:33,720 So you've got a problem with the notion of a war crime. 139 00:17:33,750 --> 00:17:42,140 Can it be revised in certain ways to bring it into closer conformity with our notion of what genuine wrongdoing in war is? 140 00:17:42,350 --> 00:17:52,770 Is one of the questions that some people ask is this is there really any difference morally between killing 141 00:17:53,550 --> 00:18:00,330 somebody who is fighting by permissible means in a just war and killing innocent civilians on that person's side? 142 00:18:01,740 --> 00:18:05,340 Salazar and a number of other people think that there is there's just got to be. 143 00:18:05,520 --> 00:18:12,360 That's a datum. But that's not at all clear to me. 144 00:18:12,500 --> 00:18:18,959 So imagine imagine that there's a man who's going to murder a child and a Good 145 00:18:18,960 --> 00:18:27,690 Samaritan shows up and is going to prevent the murderer from murdering the child, 146 00:18:28,140 --> 00:18:32,970 but may have to kill him or badly injuring or wounded remain him or something in the process. 147 00:18:33,660 --> 00:18:39,480 And so what happens is the the murderer, instead of murdering the Chavez's, only got one bullet. 148 00:18:39,570 --> 00:18:46,110 He shoots and kills the Good Samaritan instead. You know, the Samaritan is the analogue of the just combatant. 149 00:18:47,400 --> 00:18:54,510 Has the murder actually done anything less seriously wrong by killing the man who came to stop him from killing the innocent victim? 150 00:18:55,530 --> 00:18:58,680 In that case, it seems to me the answer is no. 151 00:18:59,790 --> 00:19:08,270 It's not in any way less. Seriously wrong to kill somebody who's doing something noble and good to try to protect the innocent. 152 00:19:08,900 --> 00:19:15,620 Same may be true of just combatants. So that's something to think about. 153 00:19:16,640 --> 00:19:20,360 Is there really any moral difference there? What's the relevance? 154 00:19:20,630 --> 00:19:22,700 The answer to that question for law. 155 00:19:24,350 --> 00:19:33,290 I mentioned earlier that I think another important theoretical issue was that practical minded people aren't going to have any particular interest in, 156 00:19:33,290 --> 00:19:36,860 but is clearly, I think, very clearly a problem of theory. 157 00:19:37,310 --> 00:19:44,090 And that is what are the proportionality constraints on the killing of combatants even, 158 00:19:44,090 --> 00:19:47,570 and perhaps most especially on the killing of unjust combatants. 159 00:19:49,800 --> 00:19:55,070 There are bound to be limits to what it is permissible to do to people who are fighting in an unjust war. 160 00:19:56,480 --> 00:20:04,730 You can. You can. You can. And imagine a case. 161 00:20:05,310 --> 00:20:08,500 I'll actually be talking about this in my talk on Thursday night. 162 00:20:08,550 --> 00:20:11,540 So I anticipate a kind of hypothetical example. Like you said, 163 00:20:11,540 --> 00:20:18,499 imagine a hypothetical version of the Falklands War where Britain would have had to kill 100,000 Argentine 164 00:20:18,500 --> 00:20:25,340 combatants in order to preserve British sovereignty over the islands where there were 1800 human inhabitants. 165 00:20:26,510 --> 00:20:32,990 That must have been disproportionate. I mean, as it was, they killed and wounded a number of Argentine combatants. 166 00:20:33,650 --> 00:20:36,560 Some people may think that was disproportionate. Others may think it wasn't. 167 00:20:36,860 --> 00:20:41,929 But if they had had to kill 100,000 Argentine combatants to preserve sovereignty of those barren, 168 00:20:41,930 --> 00:20:46,610 desolate islands in the South Atlantic, would that really have been morally proportionate? 169 00:20:46,940 --> 00:20:54,409 To me, that's inconceivable. So there is an issue here, and I do claim that the Argentine combatants were unjust combatants. 170 00:20:54,410 --> 00:21:00,400 They were engaged in unjust aggression. There's a limit to what you can do to people, even when they're engaged in unjust aggression, 171 00:21:00,410 --> 00:21:03,010 because that's obvious in the case of individual self-defence. 172 00:21:03,560 --> 00:21:09,709 But if I can protect myself from being punched in the nose only by killing somebody, I just have to accept the punch in the nose. 173 00:21:09,710 --> 00:21:15,380 I can't kill even a malicious attacker just to prevent myself from being punched in the nose. 174 00:21:15,380 --> 00:21:24,680 That some people may disagree. Two final issues, both rather large. 175 00:21:25,670 --> 00:21:29,570 And I've got till 132 right here this morning. Okay. 176 00:21:30,410 --> 00:21:33,650 Two final issues that I think that we need to think more about. 177 00:21:36,710 --> 00:21:40,790 One, which I've discussed with Cheney in the past, and that is conscientious objection. 178 00:21:44,150 --> 00:21:47,870 Morally, what should the options for conscientious objection be? 179 00:21:48,290 --> 00:21:56,760 Legally, what should the options for conscientious objection be? How should we resolve the trade-offs between the moral and, I think, 180 00:21:56,810 --> 00:22:08,120 legal imperative to avoid inflicting terrible punishments on people who perhaps rightly 181 00:22:08,600 --> 00:22:14,960 protest that they are refusing to engage in activity that would be highly morally wrong for. 182 00:22:16,370 --> 00:22:19,970 What kind of provisions can we make for them and what are the trade-offs between what we can 183 00:22:19,980 --> 00:22:26,420 allow there and the maintenance of military efficiency and the preservation of national security? 184 00:22:27,050 --> 00:22:35,120 There is a worry that the more permissive, the provisions for conscientious objection by active duty serving military personnel are, 185 00:22:35,660 --> 00:22:44,930 the weaker the chain of command is going to be, the less efficient the military forces are going to be. 186 00:22:46,580 --> 00:22:48,540 So I think that's a that's a major problem. 187 00:22:48,560 --> 00:22:58,760 It looks to me as if the revisionist approach to just war theory, if it has any really significant practical tendency, 188 00:22:58,760 --> 00:23:03,910 that is what good could ever come of the revisionist approach to just war theory. 189 00:23:03,940 --> 00:23:09,889 That good will be that soldiers who are being asked to fight in a war that is in fact an unjust 190 00:23:09,890 --> 00:23:17,510 war will be encouraged by the theory and its proponents and its effect on the culture to resist. 191 00:23:19,530 --> 00:23:22,080 Orders to fight in a war that is, in fact, unjust. 192 00:23:22,410 --> 00:23:30,360 That's the kind of practical moral payoff, as I see it, of the revisionist just war theory that theoretically we want to get it right. 193 00:23:30,690 --> 00:23:33,730 But what of real moral significance can come from this? 194 00:23:33,750 --> 00:23:44,459 That's the main thing. So taking taking the question about conscientious objection further and how it can actually be worked into policy and more is, 195 00:23:44,460 --> 00:23:51,540 I think, a really important part of fulfilling the agenda of the revisionist project. 196 00:23:53,160 --> 00:23:59,580 The final thing that I think we want to think about is how to deal with terrorism and what the 197 00:23:59,580 --> 00:24:04,680 revisionist approach to just war theory might say about terrorism and anti-terrorist action. 198 00:24:05,520 --> 00:24:19,080 This is going to require us to think about what defensive legal paradigm terrorism and anti-terrorism fit into. 199 00:24:22,110 --> 00:24:25,200 The Bush administration very clearly wanted to say. 200 00:24:27,510 --> 00:24:31,560 Anti-Terrorist action is war. It's a war on terror. 201 00:24:32,040 --> 00:24:36,760 And it should be governed by the war convention. Norms of war. 202 00:24:37,570 --> 00:24:40,660 More than that, of course, terrorists aren't really combatants. 203 00:24:40,660 --> 00:24:44,170 They're unlawful combatants. So they are neither criminals and they don't then. 204 00:24:44,220 --> 00:24:47,950 So they don't have the rights of criminals, nor are they really combat have the rights of combatants. 205 00:24:48,550 --> 00:24:56,410 How nice. They have no rights whatsoever. We can do anything we want to to them and to people we suspect of being terrorists as well. 206 00:24:57,940 --> 00:25:12,460 The Obama administration also often presents its arguments within the war paradigm and treats anti-terrorist action as wartime action. 207 00:25:12,820 --> 00:25:19,780 But then various representatives of the Obama administration say things that make it seem that some of their anti-terrorist 208 00:25:19,780 --> 00:25:26,500 actions should be understood within the law enforcement paradigm where anti-terrorist action is really police action. 209 00:25:27,100 --> 00:25:32,170 Remember what Obama said right after bin Laden was killed? 210 00:25:32,530 --> 00:25:37,240 Justice has been done. That's what you say when criminals have been prosecuted. 211 00:25:38,590 --> 00:25:42,850 That's not what you say when you win a battle or something like that in a war. 212 00:25:43,360 --> 00:25:47,709 And there are many other occasions in which they have said things that make it seem 213 00:25:47,710 --> 00:25:53,050 as if they might be willing to conceptualise anti-terrorist action as police action. 214 00:25:53,770 --> 00:25:57,430 Which is the way I instantly think it ought to be understood. 215 00:25:58,390 --> 00:26:13,030 And I think there are there's even a perfectly plausible justification for some instances of targeted killing within the law enforcement paradigm. 216 00:26:15,100 --> 00:26:24,159 So they could. They could do that. Another is another position that people, myself included, have taken here is that in anti-terrorist action, 217 00:26:24,160 --> 00:26:29,560 both of the available frameworks and available normative frameworks are inadequate. 218 00:26:30,100 --> 00:26:35,110 That anti-terrorist action is really neither war nor ordinary police work, and I think that's actually right. 219 00:26:35,830 --> 00:26:37,090 It's somewhere in between. 220 00:26:37,420 --> 00:26:49,220 And maybe we need entirely new legal norms for addressing the threat from decentralised, dispersed, unrepresentative terrorist organisations. 221 00:26:50,140 --> 00:26:52,060 A new legal framework for thinking about that. 222 00:26:52,480 --> 00:27:01,840 But it's one of the tasks of just war theory to help think about the morality of that kind of action in order to help. 223 00:27:04,100 --> 00:27:07,650 Set the kind of moral limits on what the legal framework should look. 224 00:27:10,440 --> 00:27:13,650 Okay. Half an hour. I'm done. Thank you. 225 00:27:14,220 --> 00:27:21,000 Thank you so much for this very rich account or broad research agenda being so scattershot. 226 00:27:21,000 --> 00:27:29,370 Kind of. So I'm going to talk a little bit about what this might mean for the law and who is going to put it in 227 00:27:29,370 --> 00:27:35,370 context a little bit with this practical expertise on your iPhone to actually introduce us to skin clauses, 228 00:27:35,370 --> 00:27:41,000 because you have to understand you can be an expert on all kinds of issues arising in war, 229 00:27:42,130 --> 00:27:46,080 how you build the Gulf, head of the Department of Politics, member of the board. 230 00:27:47,430 --> 00:27:52,739 So I also got the memo by David that we should talk about where to go from here. 231 00:27:52,740 --> 00:27:58,620 And I'm going to look at the Gulf, but also take up a couple of the parts to specifically articulated below. 232 00:27:59,010 --> 00:28:04,170 And maybe it's sort of outlined where I think it would be difficult or impossible for us to actually address them. 233 00:28:04,710 --> 00:28:13,110 If we start from the assumption that no social system ultimately will function or survive without a mechanism for the legitimate use of violence, 234 00:28:13,740 --> 00:28:20,040 we have a fundamental problem in international system because in the domestic context we of course rely on the monopoly of use of force. 235 00:28:20,040 --> 00:28:24,419 And if being expressed in some sort of police force in the international system, 236 00:28:24,420 --> 00:28:28,469 the only legitimate mechanism for the use of force we currently have is war. 237 00:28:28,470 --> 00:28:35,190 And it is legitimate or legally speaking, legitimate if it is backed by either a Security Council member or the right to self-defence. 238 00:28:35,790 --> 00:28:38,639 Now, war is about breaking things and killing people, 239 00:28:38,640 --> 00:28:47,310 and hardly anyone would contest the observation that we can't really wage war without infringing individuals rights on a large scale. 240 00:28:49,150 --> 00:28:52,959 That dilemma that on the one hand, we need war to uphold order, 241 00:28:52,960 --> 00:29:00,610 sometimes to render justice and preserving human rights on the one hand, yet never use that tool without actually infringing. 242 00:29:01,510 --> 00:29:13,240 Well, we do rely on international humanitarian law to solve that to a certain extent, to make that blunt tool of war acceptable in a very basic way. 243 00:29:14,680 --> 00:29:15,100 Now, 244 00:29:15,970 --> 00:29:23,950 I think or maybe one of the sort of baselines for where we go from here is the acceptance that we are probably mistaken to do that to a large extent, 245 00:29:24,010 --> 00:29:27,100 to rely on law to solve our dilemma about war, 246 00:29:28,300 --> 00:29:32,860 because international humanitarian law or the laws of war follow conventional just war theory, 247 00:29:33,970 --> 00:29:42,820 permitting the killing of combatants and the incidental harming of civilians regardless of their status, regardless of their liability and actions. 248 00:29:43,770 --> 00:29:44,550 So basically, 249 00:29:44,940 --> 00:29:53,610 contrary to the revisionist accounts that death proponents of international humanitarian law does not safeguard individual rights of war. 250 00:29:53,610 --> 00:30:03,569 It regulates war not in light of preserving the individual and its status to which is entitled, but basically just distinguishes or sorts. 251 00:30:03,570 --> 00:30:09,840 Individuals and one large groups rendering every combatant, regardless of their individual moral stature, 252 00:30:09,840 --> 00:30:15,810 is liable to attack and thereby fighting impunity, at least relative impunity for the rest of society. 253 00:30:17,720 --> 00:30:28,160 I believe we have attempted and successfully showed that it is impossible to implement the revisionist count of just war theory, 254 00:30:28,280 --> 00:30:34,939 just the practical and the epistemic obstacle to actually ensuring that harm done in war in any significant, 255 00:30:34,940 --> 00:30:40,070 meaningful way tracks individual liability. I think the literature is quite extensive. 256 00:30:40,080 --> 00:30:45,620 I'm not sure to what extent Jeff GREENE agrees with me, but it really seems that we are at a theoretical impasse. 257 00:30:46,130 --> 00:30:54,290 Many conventional just war theorists will acknowledge that the idea that you can kill every combatant and as many as you want, 258 00:30:54,470 --> 00:31:00,230 regardless of what they have individually done or on which side they're fighting, is morally problematic. 259 00:31:00,680 --> 00:31:08,389 Yet at the same time, many revisionist justices, including David Rosen's, is your problem to a certain extent would say that there are serious, 260 00:31:08,390 --> 00:31:13,370 possibly unsurmountable, obstacles to implementing the revisionist account. 261 00:31:14,680 --> 00:31:18,490 So what do we do with this impulse or dilemma? 262 00:31:19,510 --> 00:31:27,820 Well, what is less obvious and often overlooked is that know the international humanitarian law is actually in the same position, 263 00:31:27,850 --> 00:31:35,530 is in the same kind of impulse and practical dilemma. It has recently come under criticism for legitimising violence. 264 00:31:35,740 --> 00:31:39,940 This is really formulated in the language of liability or individual rights. 265 00:31:40,420 --> 00:31:45,700 But what would have been unheard of even ten years ago is now quite a common argument 266 00:31:45,700 --> 00:31:50,580 that lawyers say you can't fully trust international humanitarian law anymore. 267 00:31:50,590 --> 00:31:55,450 It is not fully up to scratch. And this is not merely a theoretical problem. 268 00:31:55,450 --> 00:32:00,520 It is a practical dilemma, because international humanitarian law, of course, needs to be applicable. 269 00:32:01,210 --> 00:32:09,430 And if we look at conflicts like in Afghanistan, where public outrage was so significant in light of collateral damage, 270 00:32:09,430 --> 00:32:15,459 that the rules of engagement were strengthened and tightened ever more up until 271 00:32:15,460 --> 00:32:18,880 the point where they were much stricter than international humanitarian law. 272 00:32:19,210 --> 00:32:23,590 Yet they never succeeded in quelling this outrage about collateral damage, 273 00:32:23,920 --> 00:32:27,969 suggesting that the standard put forward by international humanitarian law doesn't 274 00:32:27,970 --> 00:32:33,700 satisfy our most basic normative expectations of what law ought to accomplish. 275 00:32:34,210 --> 00:32:40,840 Basically, how you legalised into conduct of hostilities no longer meet with even our most basic law. 276 00:32:42,880 --> 00:32:45,960 So what does that mean for international humanitarian law? 277 00:32:45,970 --> 00:32:55,240 I also mentioned I already mentioned briefly that some some scholars will say, well, that means we can't trust international humanitarian law anymore. 278 00:32:55,630 --> 00:33:01,500 Well, there are some tentative, but a little more concrete attempts to actually change international humanitarian law, 279 00:33:01,510 --> 00:33:10,840 one being the idea that we should actually introduce the proportionality criterion when we talk about killing combatants or if not combatants, 280 00:33:11,140 --> 00:33:16,640 at least for killing civilians who directly participate in hostilities and have lost. 281 00:33:17,920 --> 00:33:23,350 Basically, the idea that we challenged this fundamental, longstanding assumptions about the laws of war, 282 00:33:23,350 --> 00:33:28,510 that killing as many people as possible, is what you actually ultimately try to do in war. 283 00:33:28,630 --> 00:33:34,120 But even then, we should, you know, at some point put in the brakes and say, maybe this is what Jeff said about the Falklands War, 284 00:33:34,130 --> 00:33:40,250 saying maybe there's no such thing as an overall proportionality or contextual proportionality. 285 00:33:40,720 --> 00:33:49,330 But now all these tentative arguments, one of them having actually been put forward in the ICRC guidelines on their classification, 286 00:33:49,330 --> 00:33:51,340 sort of under the purview of me as Nasser, 287 00:33:51,730 --> 00:34:00,400 they have all met with vociferous criticism by military practitioners, basically saying that this is makes war all but impossible. 288 00:34:00,700 --> 00:34:06,669 We have already been in Afghanistan with rules of engagement that were so strict that we put our own forces at risk, 289 00:34:06,670 --> 00:34:13,540 which also makes it more politically infeasible. What you're asking here basically is trying to turn more into a peacetime activity. 290 00:34:16,580 --> 00:34:24,380 So it's quite interesting that this is very similar discourse than the one we have on the morality side tonight, 291 00:34:24,710 --> 00:34:27,980 where the criticism of convention that just war theory, 292 00:34:27,980 --> 00:34:29,000 international, humanitarian, 293 00:34:29,240 --> 00:34:37,700 world and executive are extremely fertile ground because there is a widespread moral intuition that something's wrong in the state of Denmark. 294 00:34:38,000 --> 00:34:48,380 Yet there is in both cases, this very clear criticism that what is being asked is completely unfeasible in the international humanitarian law side. 295 00:34:49,100 --> 00:34:56,870 Of course, we have actually a change in how we evaluate how we legally evaluate the conduct of hostilities. 296 00:34:57,230 --> 00:35:04,790 And that has been affected by the encroachment of human rights law into the regulative purview of international humanitarian law. 297 00:35:05,330 --> 00:35:10,309 So while all efforts and attempts to make international humanitarian law more stringent are sort of failing, 298 00:35:10,310 --> 00:35:14,450 what is really happening is that we increasingly apply human rights law in conflict, 299 00:35:14,840 --> 00:35:19,730 specifically human rights courts like the European Court of Human Rights take on cases that 300 00:35:20,060 --> 00:35:24,080 are in the context of the conduct of hostilities and then apply human rights standards. 301 00:35:25,160 --> 00:35:34,700 So to a certain extent, we're seeing it is happening in the laws of war, but it is happening in quite a haphazard and sort of an unpredictable way. 302 00:35:35,330 --> 00:35:38,809 So if we basically accept just very fundamental premises, one, 303 00:35:38,810 --> 00:35:43,100 we accept that you can't wage war properly, so-called, without infringing on human rights. 304 00:35:43,370 --> 00:35:48,799 Yet do we accept that individual rights is a morally relevant standard in the 305 00:35:48,800 --> 00:35:54,110 international system and therefore also the touchstone for successful international law? 306 00:35:55,100 --> 00:35:59,690 And we need a mechanism of leading to violence in the international system because every system ultimately, 307 00:36:00,380 --> 00:36:03,530 of course, that the alternative has to go into that. 308 00:36:03,830 --> 00:36:06,920 Then we need to think about quite radically alternatives to war. 309 00:36:07,460 --> 00:36:09,200 And that is really just sort of my point. 310 00:36:09,200 --> 00:36:18,620 I think we need to not attempt to change or to sort of take a piecemeal approach and change individual crimes and individual areas of regulation. 311 00:36:18,620 --> 00:36:24,319 But I think we need to think quite radically about possible alternatives to war like law enforcement directly. 312 00:36:24,320 --> 00:36:28,940 These would be individual leaders, targeted humanitarian rescue missions, things like that. 313 00:36:29,330 --> 00:36:31,730 Because a couple of times and this is going to be my last point, 314 00:36:32,120 --> 00:36:38,540 if law were actually to take up your challenges, for instance, by introducing gradations of culpability, 315 00:36:38,540 --> 00:36:45,700 by looking at, for instance, a munitions worker as sometimes liable to attack and sometimes not, that is extremely problematic. 316 00:36:45,710 --> 00:36:51,140 I mean, this is the idea of a clause that a combatant or any kind of third category is highly discredited in the war, 317 00:36:51,360 --> 00:36:56,750 precisely because it has led to the erosion of any kind of protection in the rule of law. 318 00:36:57,170 --> 00:37:00,680 And that is very true in regarding other topics. 319 00:37:00,680 --> 00:37:08,629 You mentioned that, of course, is the overall proportionality idea or whether we should tie proportionality to not to military advantage, 320 00:37:08,630 --> 00:37:17,810 but to the overall goal of the war. As soon as we do that and we observe that not so much tying it to a just cause, but tying it to a political goal. 321 00:37:18,410 --> 00:37:24,530 What we observe is that states think everything is proportionate because the goals are so important to it. 322 00:37:24,560 --> 00:37:31,850 So sometimes and that's my last point, it is if we try to adjust laws being to approximate morality in a better way, 323 00:37:32,240 --> 00:37:35,420 it loses its ability to actually fulfil its constraining purpose. 324 00:37:36,720 --> 00:37:39,990 And over to Google. Gina, thank you. 325 00:37:39,990 --> 00:37:45,719 And it's a great place to talk after two really genuine and brilliant leading just for seriousness. 326 00:37:45,720 --> 00:37:53,310 And I'm certainly not. I see myself as a just war theory, so I'm not going to speak from the heart of this debate. 327 00:37:53,700 --> 00:38:01,320 I'm going to speak more from a community of practice, which is the humanitarian agency, community humanitarian studies, that tradition much more. 328 00:38:01,740 --> 00:38:07,860 And in that respect, I, I should sort of say, I suppose that from that tradition, when you pick up Geoff's book, 329 00:38:07,860 --> 00:38:15,540 when you pick up Killing in War and you read the first chapter, you sort of think, Oh, God, he shouldn't say that. 330 00:38:15,660 --> 00:38:21,420 He shouldn't be saying this stuff. This is a really slippery slope that we've always worked hard not to say that. 331 00:38:21,900 --> 00:38:26,430 You know, that's because often he's actually about restraining war as much as possible. 332 00:38:26,610 --> 00:38:35,790 So the idea of sort of cascading individual liability through military and civilian communities is what we've always tried to somehow avoid. 333 00:38:36,120 --> 00:38:39,060 So it's a very sort of scandalous thing to read at first glance. 334 00:38:39,390 --> 00:38:44,700 But then you think and maybe, yeah, but then you think and maybe we were right not to go that way. 335 00:38:44,910 --> 00:38:50,219 And I think we probably still are. And that's what I'm going to come from. I'm on just on something. 336 00:38:50,220 --> 00:38:53,730 General points, Jeff, I think, yes, I agree with cyber war. 337 00:38:54,270 --> 00:38:58,170 That's an issue which theory must engage with. Watch more and look at side effects. 338 00:38:58,830 --> 00:39:06,390 The only thing I would say about I really disagree with your idea of, you know, less but wider damage. 339 00:39:06,690 --> 00:39:11,490 If you look at the majority of wars throughout the world, people are killed from war, 340 00:39:11,760 --> 00:39:19,350 from the devastation of the structures that sustain like water, health, food markets, not from being killed by bullets. 341 00:39:19,800 --> 00:39:26,120 So it's very accepting, say, the structure of what you call the less wider are actually often the deeper heart out. 342 00:39:26,400 --> 00:39:29,780 So I think the empirical evidence is against you on that one. 343 00:39:29,790 --> 00:39:36,059 So I think that's why we need these things tested. Let's go with much more on proportionality. 344 00:39:36,060 --> 00:39:40,650 I really, you know. Well, can you saying you want to think about what this means in practice, 345 00:39:40,650 --> 00:39:46,020 what revision is means to reformulate laws to fit this to redefine the combatant? 346 00:39:46,020 --> 00:39:51,690 Yeah, I think, you know, we've got to cool your platforms and you've got to try to do this for us in and you know, 347 00:39:51,690 --> 00:39:53,610 the revolving door civilian that you mentioned, 348 00:39:53,610 --> 00:40:01,410 the direct participation issues, this is an ancient issue, as you know, discussed in this city, in the Medieval Times by Gentile in things said. 349 00:40:01,770 --> 00:40:06,059 You know, we've all thought about this before. So how are you going to make those laws? 350 00:40:06,060 --> 00:40:09,959 How are you going to identify this array of categories? 351 00:40:09,960 --> 00:40:15,060 Because our instinct from our community is always to say, we'll never identify all the categories. 352 00:40:15,300 --> 00:40:22,740 And even if you identify the philosophical legally, you won't get buy in in such a nuanced way in the heat of war. 353 00:40:23,010 --> 00:40:30,389 So go for the big category. So I really welcome the fact that you want to try and make those categories and push them through into law and realism. 354 00:40:30,390 --> 00:40:35,100 And, you know, let's see if that works. I'm just on on a few things. 355 00:40:35,100 --> 00:40:43,229 What I want to try to do in this talk from where I come from, I suppose in the humanitarian practice field I want to talk from, I mean, 356 00:40:43,230 --> 00:40:46,590 my concerns are with application which which fuels our team, 357 00:40:46,590 --> 00:40:52,910 which is good with application and therefore with the practical implications of revisionism. 358 00:40:53,790 --> 00:41:00,540 And I'm thinking about three things reliability, legitimacy and contextualising, 359 00:41:01,350 --> 00:41:05,580 because really, I don't think the revisionists have contextualised at all. 360 00:41:05,700 --> 00:41:09,659 Yes. And every time I hear your thought experiments, they are about I walk into a room, 361 00:41:09,660 --> 00:41:13,950 a guy's about to give a child, blah, blah, blah, let's contextualise around real wars. 362 00:41:13,950 --> 00:41:17,190 Let's talk about C.A.R., DRC, Mali. 363 00:41:17,370 --> 00:41:20,520 Let's really talk about where wars are being fought. 364 00:41:20,550 --> 00:41:26,040 Not nice thought experiments that help philosophers create categories and nuance. 365 00:41:26,460 --> 00:41:30,120 And so I would really embrace the research agenda that we could all put together. 366 00:41:30,120 --> 00:41:33,360 What I mean, assistants look at reality, not thought experiment. 367 00:41:34,030 --> 00:41:37,950 I'd say starting with that today is real wars. 368 00:41:38,370 --> 00:41:47,160 You know, it would help me to really see how you can and cannot and come up with definitions of justice and unjust wars. 369 00:41:47,520 --> 00:41:53,220 And let's start with our own wars at the moment, and let's make a distinction perhaps between existential and wars of choice. 370 00:41:53,790 --> 00:41:56,609 You know, what is a just war of choice? 371 00:41:56,610 --> 00:42:05,340 And, you know, when we get to Afghanistan, when we get Mali, now, when we are in Somalia, as we all know, this is war as development. 372 00:42:05,400 --> 00:42:13,229 This is saying we are going to use war and violence through counterinsurgency as a means of developing democratic, 373 00:42:13,230 --> 00:42:17,490 liberal societies as much as we can. Because we think that's right. Because we think that's safer for us. 374 00:42:17,880 --> 00:42:24,870 Okay. Is that a just war, to have a totally transformative agenda and to run a war for 20 years to pacify, 375 00:42:24,870 --> 00:42:34,410 stabilise and liberalise a society often without any notion of core consent means of how you measure consent and you get. 376 00:42:35,340 --> 00:42:37,660 So I need answers. Those questions, you know, 377 00:42:37,930 --> 00:42:46,400 because I need to understand you of the Johnson I'm just confidence in that situation because they actually seem more like imperialist wars to me. 378 00:42:46,450 --> 00:42:53,829 They might be liberationist wars. I think they say that point about wars of choice and existential wars, 379 00:42:53,830 --> 00:43:02,510 are they are they somehow different kinds of just difficult but then to move on to the civil wars of our time and you know, 380 00:43:02,530 --> 00:43:09,340 thankfully again, civil wars are decreasing over the last 26 months and therefore it's lessening. 381 00:43:09,940 --> 00:43:14,860 But we still have Democratic Republic of Congo and C.A.R. 382 00:43:14,860 --> 00:43:20,860 We have a lot of armed groups moving around. I need to because, you know, my community works with these people every day. 383 00:43:20,860 --> 00:43:25,839 And and that's what I think. Is the M23 a just or unjust force? 384 00:43:25,840 --> 00:43:30,459 And how is revisionism going to tell me that? Okay, so what criteria are you going to use? 385 00:43:30,460 --> 00:43:36,580 Where are you going to find it? What information empirically you're going to understand about the sociology and the political 386 00:43:36,970 --> 00:43:44,410 drivers of cause and notions of justice in the use of force in the civil wars by these armed groups. 387 00:43:44,800 --> 00:43:49,840 So, you know, I would really embrace the research agenda which sees revisionism saying, right, 388 00:43:49,840 --> 00:43:56,320 we're going to do a two year study on C.A.R. and DRC because that is a pattern of wars that's not going to go away. 389 00:43:56,590 --> 00:44:03,370 And we need to understand criteria for justice and injustice, just an unjust conflict in those contexts. 390 00:44:04,210 --> 00:44:12,880 And then the second one, the next one, of course, which we have at the moment in three strong state where you have a strong state civil war. 391 00:44:13,120 --> 00:44:19,660 So we're looking at Syria and the end of Sri Lanka and probably the the custom of Pakistan counterinsurgency. 392 00:44:20,230 --> 00:44:25,540 You know, how are we going to calculate that, what advice that we're going to hear? 393 00:44:27,810 --> 00:44:29,320 You know, we need concrete examples. 394 00:44:29,320 --> 00:44:41,260 So I suppose I'm just asking the theorists and you're going to come down to us and join these trifles and come and join us about these things and say, 395 00:44:41,260 --> 00:44:49,149 well, you know, Syria is an unjust war because of whatever whatever the bombing of the Tamil civilian population is. 396 00:44:49,150 --> 00:44:56,470 Just I'm just letting you to understand that much more because otherwise we hear you talking again in categories with abstract thought experiments. 397 00:44:58,000 --> 00:45:06,070 And then there are the crime wars. So what do we do about Mexico and what do we do with that wars which are, you know, largely criminal intent, 398 00:45:06,340 --> 00:45:15,550 but have mortality rates and structural disaster rates equivalent to an armed conflict or at least a civil war. 399 00:45:15,970 --> 00:45:22,210 And how do we understand unjust just combatants in these situations, etc.? 400 00:45:22,900 --> 00:45:33,250 And the thing, of course, that really needs further research for the humanitarian community is the question of civilian liability, 401 00:45:33,610 --> 00:45:37,629 which, of course, we've always understood. That's why we as I said, we talk about direct participation. 402 00:45:37,630 --> 00:45:43,990 We understand the ambiguity in civilian identity. You know, we're not going to pretend it doesn't exist. 403 00:45:43,990 --> 00:45:52,210 We're going to just come down always giving the benefit of the doubt and prioritising a principle of restraint when violence is concerned. 404 00:45:52,690 --> 00:45:57,729 So your idea is that actually we should extend and and really try and put into 405 00:45:57,730 --> 00:46:02,620 operation the notion of individual civilian liability and what does that mean? 406 00:46:02,620 --> 00:46:08,259 And that's a really important research agenda, in my view, because if we are going to start talking very coherent, 407 00:46:08,260 --> 00:46:12,310 you know, and even formulating wars about things called unjust civilians, 408 00:46:12,610 --> 00:46:18,819 then we really need to understand how you generate that category and how you can 409 00:46:18,820 --> 00:46:24,850 spot it and how you can always know enough to identify individual responsibility. 410 00:46:24,850 --> 00:46:28,450 Because in many ways, responsibility and accountability is your criteria of liability. 411 00:46:28,450 --> 00:46:37,480 So how can you ever be involved in a society where so often in these societies there is massive forms of oppression and constraint, 412 00:46:37,840 --> 00:46:44,710 where, you know, your choices are so constricted that you may often do things that you don't want to do and you know, are wrong. 413 00:46:44,830 --> 00:46:46,750 You still have all these really difficult issues. 414 00:46:47,050 --> 00:46:54,460 So I would really welcome a research agenda that looks at civilian identity and proves that much more. 415 00:46:54,790 --> 00:46:57,519 And of course, the next step from that is humanitarian action, 416 00:46:57,520 --> 00:47:04,030 because one of the extraordinary features of the last 20 years has been the deep, you know, because I want to describe it, 417 00:47:04,030 --> 00:47:07,359 I would say, you know, positive involvement in humanitarian action, 418 00:47:07,360 --> 00:47:13,450 other people with sort of subversive, reactionary penetration of humanitarian agencies into into wars. 419 00:47:14,320 --> 00:47:17,410 So that humanitarian action is usually everywhere in any war. 420 00:47:18,220 --> 00:47:22,060 Now, if we have a notion of the unjust civilian, does that mean we have a nation of people, 421 00:47:22,100 --> 00:47:27,270 just humanitarian aid worker, the unjust humanitarian action which follows very quickly? 422 00:47:27,820 --> 00:47:34,690 And are we therefore looking at the liability of humanitarian workers, you know, not just as a breach of. 423 00:47:36,230 --> 00:47:40,760 23 of the fourth Geneva Convention to supply effective material support. 424 00:47:41,090 --> 00:47:46,660 But then actually we are engaged in complicity with unjust competence of unjust civilians. 425 00:47:46,970 --> 00:47:53,240 In which case are we unjust combatants as well as liable to shooting of or whatever, whatever. 426 00:47:53,600 --> 00:47:58,400 So there's a huge agenda that if you're really going to get serious and come to the ground with this stuff, 427 00:47:58,730 --> 00:48:08,660 you've got to work out what you're going to call the humanitarian way and when not just exaggerating the battle and changing humanitarian law as well. 428 00:48:08,720 --> 00:48:10,100 You've been saying that that what happen. 429 00:48:10,100 --> 00:48:18,169 And I think I would really urge you to take that seriously as well and then will go and talk to my attorney lawyers and have a conference about it, 430 00:48:18,170 --> 00:48:19,220 getting Geneva talks going. 431 00:48:20,030 --> 00:48:29,930 So just to finish my my research recommendations would be all those, but to really deepen the engagement between revisionist practitioners, 432 00:48:30,050 --> 00:48:34,760 revisionist theorists, the Boondocks practitioners, because at the moment I feel we talk past each other. 433 00:48:35,630 --> 00:48:40,640 We hear these scary ideas that have a certain logic and a moral coherence to them 434 00:48:41,300 --> 00:48:45,770 that something in our wisdom and deeper intuition says we've got to tread carefully. 435 00:48:45,770 --> 00:48:50,060 That the only way to do this, I think, is by meeting much more together and hammering out something. 436 00:48:50,630 --> 00:48:54,000 Thank you. Do you want to take a couple of minutes to respond? May I? 437 00:48:54,030 --> 00:49:03,350 It's okay. I really have almost nothing to say in response to what you said, that you agree with most of what you said. 438 00:49:05,950 --> 00:49:12,430 Just put my philosopher's hat on. I'll say that philosophers draw a distinction between the violation of the right and the infringement of a right. 439 00:49:13,480 --> 00:49:17,620 Often the different ways of drawing the distinction are basically for our purposes. 440 00:49:17,620 --> 00:49:23,670 We can say infringements are actually justified over the writings of people's rights and violations are wrongful, 441 00:49:23,680 --> 00:49:29,620 not overriding, sort or contravening of people's rights. 442 00:49:30,580 --> 00:49:41,470 And it's not clear to me that we can't realistically aspire to fight wars that in which there are no violations of rights. 443 00:49:42,890 --> 00:49:53,500 Wars. Since we we're actually wrongfully violating and infringing people's rights as we attack only the people who are liable to be attacked. 444 00:49:53,900 --> 00:49:57,580 But we're never going to be able to fight wars in which rights are not infringed. 445 00:49:57,580 --> 00:50:03,520 That is where innocent bystanders get harmed and are harmed by us knowingly. 446 00:50:04,090 --> 00:50:08,290 But as long as we have a justification for that, well, it happens. 447 00:50:08,290 --> 00:50:14,919 It happens all the time in everything in life. We're infringing people's I mean, I'm going to infringe on people's rights today. 448 00:50:14,920 --> 00:50:16,870 So are you. You know, it just goes like that. 449 00:50:16,870 --> 00:50:27,399 If you make a promise and have to have something more important comes out that I absolutely have to do, then I fail to keep my promise to you. 450 00:50:27,400 --> 00:50:31,330 I've infringed your right. You had a right to the performance of some act by me. 451 00:50:32,500 --> 00:50:37,239 I couldn't do it. I infringed your right to to promise I'll use in compensation. 452 00:50:37,240 --> 00:50:44,350 But it happens all the time. So, I mean, I meant that you can't. And there's no way of not violating rights unjustifiably infringing them. 453 00:50:44,830 --> 00:50:48,600 I see. Okay, well, I. I would. 454 00:50:48,680 --> 00:50:54,130 I would dispute that. It seems to me that in, you know, in smaller scale settings, 455 00:50:54,610 --> 00:51:02,679 it's possible to intentionally attack only those people who are harmful or in the wrong or whatever. 456 00:51:02,680 --> 00:51:09,160 But. Okay. The main thing I would say in response to what Hugo said is. 457 00:51:14,700 --> 00:51:18,570 Give us time. We're working on what I'm trying to tell you. 458 00:51:18,600 --> 00:51:26,580 So how long has revisionist dress for a theory been around and seriously been worked on by people? 459 00:51:27,330 --> 00:51:34,739 15 years, maybe something like that. At most, a huge amount of progress has been made, I think, over that period. 460 00:51:34,740 --> 00:51:45,690 But most of what what revisionist just war theorists are doing is they're taking this enormous tradition of thought and rethinking the whole thing. 461 00:51:45,690 --> 00:51:56,280 It's a niche and re-evaluation of values. It's starting from the ground up on on starting with with a notion of rights rather 462 00:51:56,280 --> 00:52:01,530 than with the notion of really kind of conventions in the service of minimising harm. 463 00:52:02,730 --> 00:52:09,960 The difference between the framework that we have now is that it says, 464 00:52:10,140 --> 00:52:16,690 let's try to constrain things in a way that's going to cause the least sort of destruction overall. 465 00:52:16,690 --> 00:52:20,399 Let's try to constrain everything and adjust the revision. 466 00:52:20,400 --> 00:52:29,340 Revisionist just for theorists, just saying that the aim should be really to seek minimisation of the violation of rights by war. 467 00:52:29,790 --> 00:52:31,769 And so we're having to rethink everything. 468 00:52:31,770 --> 00:52:43,739 All these issues are having to be rethought and we're having to rethink the relation between morality and law and to what extent the 469 00:52:43,740 --> 00:52:57,000 conventional and legal rules can be modified in ways that bring them into closer convergence with morality without leading to disaster. 470 00:52:57,930 --> 00:53:00,360 And so we want to tread very carefully as well. 471 00:53:00,360 --> 00:53:10,260 Nobody's in the business of saying let's let's make morality straight into law come what may, even if the heavens may fall. 472 00:53:10,860 --> 00:53:13,739 Nobody's going to say that in my riding. 473 00:53:13,740 --> 00:53:20,550 I say repeatedly, it's probably best for the time being, for the law to remain much as it is that is asymmetrical and neutral. 474 00:53:21,330 --> 00:53:24,360 I'm sorry, symmetrical and neutral between between the parties. 475 00:53:26,520 --> 00:53:32,960 I think probably the least good work has been done by just war theorists about appellate issues in this. 476 00:53:33,000 --> 00:53:40,079 When is it permissible to go to war? There's more work remains to be done about that. 477 00:53:40,080 --> 00:53:44,139 But work has to be done within within the just war theory. 478 00:53:44,140 --> 00:53:54,360 We're just not in a position to start saying yet how we think the law should be reshaped, if at all. 479 00:53:58,080 --> 00:54:05,520 That being said, so so one thing I would say is the work of moral philosophy is trying to 480 00:54:05,520 --> 00:54:09,509 understand things at the level of principle and trying to understand things at a 481 00:54:09,510 --> 00:54:17,900 fairly high level of abstraction with respect to categories of rights and duties and immunities and privileges and permissions and that kind of thing. 482 00:54:17,910 --> 00:54:22,710 We want to get it. We're going to get the problems at the higher level worked out first, and we haven't done that yet. 483 00:54:24,090 --> 00:54:27,990 So one thing, we can't stop working with the hypothetical examples yet. 484 00:54:28,680 --> 00:54:32,309 That's still the where we are in our work. 485 00:54:32,310 --> 00:54:39,030 We're sorting out the principles and thinking about hypothetical examples is just an indispensable tool of moral philosophy. 486 00:54:39,030 --> 00:54:43,290 So it may seem frivolous outside of philosophy, but it's the way philosophy has always worked. 487 00:54:43,800 --> 00:54:48,330 And I can explain to you how it works. If we had time at work, I won't try to do it here. 488 00:54:48,330 --> 00:54:53,520 And it works by trying to isolate different variables and assess them independently 489 00:54:53,520 --> 00:54:57,749 of other things that may be affecting our understanding of the situation. 490 00:54:57,750 --> 00:55:03,270 So you take real life examples. They're too complicated. We can't tell what's influencing our intuitive reactions. 491 00:55:03,270 --> 00:55:07,140 We can't tell which the factors are that are really doing the moral work there. 492 00:55:07,410 --> 00:55:16,080 So we make up hypothetical examples that eliminate the clutter, that eliminate the noise, and allow us to focus on the factors that we want to test. 493 00:55:16,980 --> 00:55:22,379 At the time, some form of science. We purifying our our working materials here. 494 00:55:22,380 --> 00:55:25,740 We're getting rid of the impurities and we're testing for this factor or that factor. 495 00:55:25,740 --> 00:55:30,480 We want to know, is it responsibility that's important here or culpability, you know, something like that. 496 00:55:30,780 --> 00:55:36,059 So we clear out all the other things that might distract us from focusing on the things that we need to focus on. 497 00:55:36,060 --> 00:55:41,280 That's why, in moral philosophy, hypothetical examples, thought experiments are really important. 498 00:55:42,510 --> 00:55:53,159 We're not in a position yet to deliver authoritative judgements about the particular conflicts in all their messy and unruly particularity. 499 00:55:53,160 --> 00:55:58,170 Partly because we don't have the principles right yet. We can say, we can say some things. 500 00:55:58,170 --> 00:56:04,800 And one of the things we can say is that often the use of force is to some, 501 00:56:05,070 --> 00:56:11,790 the morality of the use of force is to some considerable degree, divorce of all from the background, rights and drugs. 502 00:56:15,210 --> 00:56:30,180 We can say things like this, that the Palestinians have many legitimate, serious grievances against the Israelis. 503 00:56:31,680 --> 00:56:36,420 On the other hand, if they start firing rockets into Israeli cities, 504 00:56:36,600 --> 00:56:45,150 Israel has the permission to take certain forms of action to stop that from being done by fire, by force, 505 00:56:47,250 --> 00:56:54,140 and the rights and wrongs of the use of force in that context may actually be, to some considerable degree, 506 00:56:54,150 --> 00:57:03,300 divorced from the fact that the Palestinians have these grievances if they actually pursue the redress of grievances by wrongful means. 507 00:57:04,650 --> 00:57:10,980 And that may be true in a lot of other areas of the world as well in Sri Lanka and other places. 508 00:57:11,400 --> 00:57:19,730 It's true in individual self-defence. I insult guy in all kinds of ways. 509 00:57:19,740 --> 00:57:24,629 I'd say your mother, whereas army boots and you know this kind of thing and really antagonise him. 510 00:57:24,630 --> 00:57:32,280 But nothing I've done justifies him in lashing out and trying to hit me with a baseball bat as soon as he does that. 511 00:57:32,520 --> 00:57:39,180 All the rights on my side and none are on his side, even though I've provoked him in this way, even though I'm the kind of initial wrongdoer, 512 00:57:39,870 --> 00:57:50,460 if he's the one who's initiated the violence, that has a major effect on what the what our rights and permissions are in the conflict. 513 00:57:51,120 --> 00:57:57,440 Point of clarification. I'm sorry. I'm taking up far more than my share of the time for clarification of the term unjust civilians. 514 00:57:57,450 --> 00:58:04,769 I do use that term. All I mean by that is civilians in the country that is fighting unjustly or without a just 515 00:58:04,770 --> 00:58:09,920 cause does not mean that they have any liabilities or any kind of moral status whatsoever. 516 00:58:09,930 --> 00:58:17,330 It just means that's how and I it's just a it's just a convenient locution for referring to civilians on the side that's fighting unjustly. 517 00:58:17,340 --> 00:58:27,870 That's all that means. I should specify that. So I think there are no and I might use the I might use the phrase unjust humanitarian workers to the 518 00:58:27,870 --> 00:58:33,139 people who are bringing food supplies to and medical supplies to the civilians on the on the side of. 519 00:58:33,140 --> 00:58:38,000 It's unjust. Probably be inadvisable thing to do. Maybe I should figure out a better phrase here. 520 00:58:38,400 --> 00:58:42,780 But the term itself has no impact, no moral implications whatsoever. 521 00:58:43,830 --> 00:58:49,260 Not not supposed to just be a term for for identification or reference without having to use the cumbersome 522 00:58:49,260 --> 00:58:54,590 locution civilians who live in the kind of or who are citizens of the country fighting an unjust war, 523 00:58:54,600 --> 00:58:59,580 you just you need a shorter phrase. One final thing. 524 00:59:00,090 --> 00:59:07,860 I just I think this notion of wars, of choice in existential wars, I just don't accept that that that's any kind of valid distinction at all. 525 00:59:08,100 --> 00:59:15,540 And I'm not sure I even know what a war of choice is. I guess what I'm saying, a war of choice would be a war that is actually unjust war, 526 00:59:15,930 --> 00:59:22,499 but that would be sufficiently costly to the agents who have to wage it, that it might be possible for them not to wage it. 527 00:59:22,500 --> 00:59:27,479 In other words, it's they would be morally justified if they did my be willing to sacrifice a case 528 00:59:27,480 --> 00:59:30,770 of humanitarian intervention that's going to be very costly to the intervener. 529 00:59:31,470 --> 00:59:36,900 Noble and super rocketry for the intervener to do it. 530 00:59:36,900 --> 00:59:39,990 That would be the only instance I think of where you'd have something like the 531 00:59:39,990 --> 00:59:45,690 notion of a war of choice and wars that are either justified or unjustified. 532 00:59:45,690 --> 00:59:48,990 Just that they're either just justified or unjustified. 533 00:59:50,250 --> 00:59:53,670 Optional. Non optional. That's another problem. 534 00:59:54,120 --> 00:59:57,060 Existential. I'm not sure if I know what that means. 535 00:59:58,890 --> 01:00:05,910 People apply that label to wars when the war by the Carthaginians against it in the third Punic War, 536 01:00:05,910 --> 01:00:11,820 that was an existential war for the Carthaginians and they lost it. But what wars nowadays are really existential? 537 01:00:12,570 --> 01:00:17,230 I don't know. Nuclear war might be. So I'll shut up. 538 01:00:17,500 --> 01:00:19,720 Thank you, Jack. Why don't we open for discussion?