So we will start by talking about 30 minute presentation.
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.
David Roden Who can't be here today, unfortunately.
Wanted to have a session that would be devoted to the issue.
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?
I took this to mean both. What are some of the theoretical problems that may be most interesting or most difficult or most important?
And also, in what ways might we make practical progress in influencing both the military and international lawyers?
So that was the the brief, the last email exchange we had.
David seemed to want me to say quite a bit about what I thought some of the more
important theoretical issues might be what might be high on the research agenda.
Some of these I have views about and others I don't have views about or haven't thought about very much.
Let me mention a couple of the topics I put them at the end because I have really almost nothing to say about them,
but I think are going to be issues that people expect just war theorists to have something to say about.
And one of them is cyber war, which just war things really have not said very much about.
This raises, I think, just familiar issues about side effect harms to civilians,
but harms of a different form from the kind that we've seen in the past.
Cyber war threatens innocent bystanders with infrastructure failure.
Loss of computer data. Economic disruption.
Disruption of the stock markets. That kind of thing might pose some physical threats if water supplies,
sewage treatment facilities stop working as a result of interference with the computers that are involved in running those things.
But it's an it's an unexplored area.
To the extent that the moral problem with cyber warfare is a problem of side effect harm to civilians,
it resembles this problem that I call the problem of lesser aggression in military war rather than cyber war.
Namely, the use, the side effect harms of cyber warfare are likely to be lesser,
more minor harms to individuals than, you know, having a drop bomb dropped on them or something like that.
But they're going to be very widespread.
That is to say the harms themselves may be comparatively small, but the number of victims may be very, very large.
And that phenomenon raises a lot of interesting issues.
And that's actually what I'll be talking about in my master lecture on Thursday night.
I'm going to discuss this problem of lesser aggression where you have military aggression that threatens certain lesser rights or lesser values.
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,
is the use of robots and automated technologies in war fighting,
where more of the decision making that that's in quotation marks will be done by machines rather than by persons.
So this is going to raise a lot of questions about responsibility and liability, both in morality and in law.
So when the. When some robotic technology destroys some facility and lots of innocent people are killed
and they know who we're going to want to know who's responsible for that under law,
what kind of constraints should be imposed on this technology. But I actually had very little to say about these issues.
I mentioned them because David said this is, you know, what should we be thinking about?
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.
Stepping back a bit to some things that I've thought a bit more about.
I think one of the more important issues is going to be how we think about these very theoretically,
very difficult issues of proportionality and necessity, both at vellum and in Bella.
The reason that this is a problem is that. According to the revisionist understanding just war theory that I try to defend unjust combatants.
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.
And it's very seldom going to be able to satisfy the requirement of discrimination properly understood or by properly understood,
I mean that the requirement of discrimination holds that one must not intentionally attack people
who are illegitimate targets and confine one's attacks only to people who are legitimate targets.
And on the revisionist view, people who are fighting in a just war by permissible means aren't morally legitimate, legitimate targets.
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.
Understood as the revisionists. Just war theory understands that this is a huge problem for international law.
We need to know and just for practical concerns, we want to constrain people who are fighting in an unjust war,
and we want to subject them to requirements of discrimination and proportionality.
But if the revisionist approach to just war theory is right, they just are very,
very seldom going to be able to satisfy the morally correct requirements of discrimination and proportionality.
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.
But whatever the law comes up with there very unlikely to coincide at all closely with what morality requires.
So there are general questions here, it seems to me.
Can the legal rules be in any way asymmetrical between just and unjust combatants, or do they have to remain neutral rules?
That's an important question.
With respect to the requirement of discrimination, you should ask whether the legal rules could ever permit unjust combatants to attack, just combat.
It seems that they have to. At least it seems that they can't make mere participation in an unjust war criminal.
That's a highly counterproductive idea.
So what do we do? What should the law say about attacks by unjust combatants on just combatants?
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,
who may actually be liable to some forms of harm as a result of their complicity in their country's action?
Can the law ever take account of liability on the part of non-combatants in the country that is fighting unjustly?
Does so to a slight extent already,
I think in that we acknowledge that civilians in a country that has fought a war unjustly may be responsible for some share
of the reparations that needs to be paid to the country that has been wrongfully attacked or people wrongfully harmed.
We accept that civilians in a society that has gone to war unjustly may be liable to accept some of the
burdens of occupation or some of the burdens of economic sanctions that during the course of a war.
So the idea of civilian liability to certain forms of sanction or harm isn't utterly alien.
But there's a question about whether that can be extended to military harm, militarily imposed as well.
One question that we might want to think about in this connection is whether
anything might be gained by seeking to redefine the notion of a combatant.
It's already a rather blurry notion at the edges morally, at any rate, particularly in just war theory,
where you find that authors do say there are combatants and then there are non-combatants
and these are mutually exclusive categories and they're pretty well defined and so forth.
But then when you push on it a little bit and you ask just war theorists about munitions manufacturers,
for example, they tend to say things that are rather strange.
So they say things like this Munitions factory workers may be attacked while they're at work in the factory,
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.
And I take it that what that means is that when they're working in the factory,
they're not they don't have the exact same moral status as other civilians or other non-combatants.
It's not that the justification for killing munitions factory workers when they're in the process of making weapons is just that.
These are side effect harms to innocent bystanders, that their status is not that of an innocent bystander when they're at work,
but when they leave work and go home, they're then have full civilian immunity.
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,
that munitions workers are neither one or the other. They don't have the exact same status as either.
And that raises the possibility that there may be gradations of status that could be distinguished both in morality and in law,
particularly in law, so that we could we could we could have a richer array of categories than just combatants, non-combat.
That's one possibility.
Another problem that is both practical and theoretical is this How should we formulate a plausible in Bello proportionality requirement,
taking now proportionality in the conduct of war to be concerned solely with side effect harms to innocent bystanders?
That's the way it's commonly understood, as I'll mention in a little while.
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,
an issue that is not recognised in just war theory or international law.
I think that's something that we need to take up as stress a years,
but for the moment just think about proportionality in the conduct of war as concerned only with side effect harms to civilians.
How can we formulate a proportionality rule for that purpose?
The existing rule that you find in protocol one of the 77 Geneva protocols says that the
harm to civilians and damage to civilian objects should not be excessive in relation.
Is a concrete military advantage expected from the attack.
I've argued in various places that that rule is actually incoherent in its application to unjust combatants.
It's incoherent because it harms to innocent people.
Really are bad things. They are that's that's morally objectionable to harm innocent people.
If that's going to be justified, it has to be weighed against something that has real value.
Military advantage is not something that in and of itself has any value.
Military advantage has value only in relation to the ends that it serves the military.
The value of military advantage is entirely instrumental. And if the goals that are being sought are wrongful goals,
then there's nothing good to be weighed against the harms that you're going to be causing to innocent people.
So it seems to me that in its application to the action that people who are fighting in an unjust war,
the the portion of the rule that we find in the Geneva Conventions, just makes no sense.
But I can't think of anything plausible to replace it.
There are lots of possibilities here. I could run through them, perhaps.
How long have I been going? 10 minutes left. Oh, really?
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.
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
or other that that discusses this problem of proportionality and how you can
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.
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.
If the revisionist approach to just war is correct.
And by that I mean an approach to war that is asymmetrical between morally asymmetrical,
between the people who are fighting justly and the people who are fighting unjustly.
Then, as I suggested earlier, when I said that unjust combatants can scarcely ever respect a proper requirement of discrimination,
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,
or at least in the absence of a just cause, are going to be morally impermissible, given that that's the case.
And given that it's implausible to say that everything that an unjust combatant does in war is a war crime.
We're going to need to formulate a notion of a war crime that has some fight that's plausibly legally enforceable.
It's not going to be unduly restrictive on unjust combatants,
but isn't going to be unduly permissive with respect to sorry isn't going to be unduly restrictive with respect to just combatants,
but isn't going to be excessively permissive with respect to unjust combatants.
So this is really the fundamental problem of criminalisation, of action in war,
in the light of moral, genuine moral criteria, genuine moral standards.
We want acts that we criminalise and treat as punishable to be acts that really are morally wrong.
We don't want to be punishing people for doing things that are permissible, but also we don't want the law.
Ideally, we don't want to the law to permit people to do things that are horribly immoral or impermissible.
So you've got a problem with the notion of a war crime.
Can it be revised in certain ways to bring it into closer conformity with our notion of what genuine wrongdoing in war is?
Is one of the questions that some people ask is this is there really any difference morally between killing
somebody who is fighting by permissible means in a just war and killing innocent civilians on that person's side?
Salazar and a number of other people think that there is there's just got to be.
That's a datum. But that's not at all clear to me.
So imagine imagine that there's a man who's going to murder a child and a Good
Samaritan shows up and is going to prevent the murderer from murdering the child,
but may have to kill him or badly injuring or wounded remain him or something in the process.
And so what happens is the the murderer, instead of murdering the Chavez's, only got one bullet.
He shoots and kills the Good Samaritan instead. You know, the Samaritan is the analogue of the just combatant.
Has the murder actually done anything less seriously wrong by killing the man who came to stop him from killing the innocent victim?
In that case, it seems to me the answer is no.
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.
Same may be true of just combatants. So that's something to think about.
Is there really any moral difference there? What's the relevance?
The answer to that question for law.
I mentioned earlier that I think another important theoretical issue was that practical minded people aren't going to have any particular interest in,
but is clearly, I think, very clearly a problem of theory.
And that is what are the proportionality constraints on the killing of combatants even,
and perhaps most especially on the killing of unjust combatants.
There are bound to be limits to what it is permissible to do to people who are fighting in an unjust war.
You can. You can. You can. And imagine a case.
I'll actually be talking about this in my talk on Thursday night.
So I anticipate a kind of hypothetical example. Like you said,
imagine a hypothetical version of the Falklands War where Britain would have had to kill 100,000 Argentine
combatants in order to preserve British sovereignty over the islands where there were 1800 human inhabitants.
That must have been disproportionate. I mean, as it was, they killed and wounded a number of Argentine combatants.
Some people may think that was disproportionate. Others may think it wasn't.
But if they had had to kill 100,000 Argentine combatants to preserve sovereignty of those barren,
desolate islands in the South Atlantic, would that really have been morally proportionate?
To me, that's inconceivable. So there is an issue here, and I do claim that the Argentine combatants were unjust combatants.
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,
because that's obvious in the case of individual self-defence.
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.
I can't kill even a malicious attacker just to prevent myself from being punched in the nose.
That some people may disagree. Two final issues, both rather large.
And I've got till 132 right here this morning. Okay.
Two final issues that I think that we need to think more about.
One, which I've discussed with Cheney in the past, and that is conscientious objection.
Morally, what should the options for conscientious objection be?
Legally, what should the options for conscientious objection be? How should we resolve the trade-offs between the moral and, I think,
legal imperative to avoid inflicting terrible punishments on people who perhaps rightly
protest that they are refusing to engage in activity that would be highly morally wrong for.
What kind of provisions can we make for them and what are the trade-offs between what we can
allow there and the maintenance of military efficiency and the preservation of national security?
There is a worry that the more permissive, the provisions for conscientious objection by active duty serving military personnel are,
the weaker the chain of command is going to be, the less efficient the military forces are going to be.
So I think that's a that's a major problem.
It looks to me as if the revisionist approach to just war theory, if it has any really significant practical tendency,
that is what good could ever come of the revisionist approach to just war theory.
That good will be that soldiers who are being asked to fight in a war that is in fact an unjust
war will be encouraged by the theory and its proponents and its effect on the culture to resist.
Orders to fight in a war that is, in fact, unjust.
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.
But what of real moral significance can come from this?
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,
I think, a really important part of fulfilling the agenda of the revisionist project.
The final thing that I think we want to think about is how to deal with terrorism and what the
revisionist approach to just war theory might say about terrorism and anti-terrorist action.
This is going to require us to think about what defensive legal paradigm terrorism and anti-terrorism fit into.
The Bush administration very clearly wanted to say.
Anti-Terrorist action is war. It's a war on terror.
And it should be governed by the war convention. Norms of war.
More than that, of course, terrorists aren't really combatants.
They're unlawful combatants. So they are neither criminals and they don't then.
So they don't have the rights of criminals, nor are they really combat have the rights of combatants.
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.
The Obama administration also often presents its arguments within the war paradigm and treats anti-terrorist action as wartime action.
But then various representatives of the Obama administration say things that make it seem that some of their anti-terrorist
actions should be understood within the law enforcement paradigm where anti-terrorist action is really police action.
Remember what Obama said right after bin Laden was killed?
Justice has been done. That's what you say when criminals have been prosecuted.
That's not what you say when you win a battle or something like that in a war.
And there are many other occasions in which they have said things that make it seem
as if they might be willing to conceptualise anti-terrorist action as police action.
Which is the way I instantly think it ought to be understood.
And I think there are there's even a perfectly plausible justification for some instances of targeted killing within the law enforcement paradigm.
So they could. They could do that. Another is another position that people, myself included, have taken here is that in anti-terrorist action,
both of the available frameworks and available normative frameworks are inadequate.
That anti-terrorist action is really neither war nor ordinary police work, and I think that's actually right.
It's somewhere in between.
And maybe we need entirely new legal norms for addressing the threat from decentralised, dispersed, unrepresentative terrorist organisations.
A new legal framework for thinking about that.
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.
Set the kind of moral limits on what the legal framework should look.
Okay. Half an hour. I'm done. Thank you.
Thank you so much for this very rich account or broad research agenda being so scattershot.
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
context a little bit with this practical expertise on your iPhone to actually introduce us to skin clauses,
because you have to understand you can be an expert on all kinds of issues arising in war,
how you build the Gulf, head of the Department of Politics, member of the board.
So I also got the memo by David that we should talk about where to go from here.
And I'm going to look at the Gulf, but also take up a couple of the parts to specifically articulated below.
And maybe it's sort of outlined where I think it would be difficult or impossible for us to actually address them.
If we start from the assumption that no social system ultimately will function or survive without a mechanism for the legitimate use of violence,
we have a fundamental problem in international system because in the domestic context we of course rely on the monopoly of use of force.
And if being expressed in some sort of police force in the international system,
the only legitimate mechanism for the use of force we currently have is war.
And it is legitimate or legally speaking, legitimate if it is backed by either a Security Council member or the right to self-defence.
Now, war is about breaking things and killing people,
and hardly anyone would contest the observation that we can't really wage war without infringing individuals rights on a large scale.
That dilemma that on the one hand, we need war to uphold order,
sometimes to render justice and preserving human rights on the one hand, yet never use that tool without actually infringing.
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.
Now,
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,
to rely on law to solve our dilemma about war,
because international humanitarian law or the laws of war follow conventional just war theory,
permitting the killing of combatants and the incidental harming of civilians regardless of their status, regardless of their liability and actions.
So basically,
contrary to the revisionist accounts that death proponents of international humanitarian law does not safeguard individual rights of war.
It regulates war not in light of preserving the individual and its status to which is entitled, but basically just distinguishes or sorts.
Individuals and one large groups rendering every combatant, regardless of their individual moral stature,
is liable to attack and thereby fighting impunity, at least relative impunity for the rest of society.
I believe we have attempted and successfully showed that it is impossible to implement the revisionist count of just war theory,
just the practical and the epistemic obstacle to actually ensuring that harm done in war in any significant,
meaningful way tracks individual liability. I think the literature is quite extensive.
I'm not sure to what extent Jeff GREENE agrees with me, but it really seems that we are at a theoretical impasse.
Many conventional just war theorists will acknowledge that the idea that you can kill every combatant and as many as you want,
regardless of what they have individually done or on which side they're fighting, is morally problematic.
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,
possibly unsurmountable, obstacles to implementing the revisionist account.
So what do we do with this impulse or dilemma?
Well, what is less obvious and often overlooked is that know the international humanitarian law is actually in the same position,
is in the same kind of impulse and practical dilemma. It has recently come under criticism for legitimising violence.
This is really formulated in the language of liability or individual rights.
But what would have been unheard of even ten years ago is now quite a common argument
that lawyers say you can't fully trust international humanitarian law anymore.
It is not fully up to scratch. And this is not merely a theoretical problem.
It is a practical dilemma, because international humanitarian law, of course, needs to be applicable.
And if we look at conflicts like in Afghanistan, where public outrage was so significant in light of collateral damage,
that the rules of engagement were strengthened and tightened ever more up until
the point where they were much stricter than international humanitarian law.
Yet they never succeeded in quelling this outrage about collateral damage,
suggesting that the standard put forward by international humanitarian law doesn't
satisfy our most basic normative expectations of what law ought to accomplish.
Basically, how you legalised into conduct of hostilities no longer meet with even our most basic law.
So what does that mean for international humanitarian law?
I also mentioned I already mentioned briefly that some some scholars will say, well, that means we can't trust international humanitarian law anymore.
Well, there are some tentative, but a little more concrete attempts to actually change international humanitarian law,
one being the idea that we should actually introduce the proportionality criterion when we talk about killing combatants or if not combatants,
at least for killing civilians who directly participate in hostilities and have lost.
Basically, the idea that we challenged this fundamental, longstanding assumptions about the laws of war,
that killing as many people as possible, is what you actually ultimately try to do in war.
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,
saying maybe there's no such thing as an overall proportionality or contextual proportionality.
But now all these tentative arguments, one of them having actually been put forward in the ICRC guidelines on their classification,
sort of under the purview of me as Nasser,
they have all met with vociferous criticism by military practitioners, basically saying that this is makes war all but impossible.
We have already been in Afghanistan with rules of engagement that were so strict that we put our own forces at risk,
which also makes it more politically infeasible. What you're asking here basically is trying to turn more into a peacetime activity.
So it's quite interesting that this is very similar discourse than the one we have on the morality side tonight,
where the criticism of convention that just war theory,
international, humanitarian,
world and executive are extremely fertile ground because there is a widespread moral intuition that something's wrong in the state of Denmark.
Yet there is in both cases, this very clear criticism that what is being asked is completely unfeasible in the international humanitarian law side.
Of course, we have actually a change in how we evaluate how we legally evaluate the conduct of hostilities.
And that has been affected by the encroachment of human rights law into the regulative purview of international humanitarian law.
So while all efforts and attempts to make international humanitarian law more stringent are sort of failing,
what is really happening is that we increasingly apply human rights law in conflict,
specifically human rights courts like the European Court of Human Rights take on cases that
are in the context of the conduct of hostilities and then apply human rights standards.
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.
So if we basically accept just very fundamental premises, one,
we accept that you can't wage war properly, so-called, without infringing on human rights.
Yet do we accept that individual rights is a morally relevant standard in the
international system and therefore also the touchstone for successful international law?
And we need a mechanism of leading to violence in the international system because every system ultimately,
of course, that the alternative has to go into that.
Then we need to think about quite radically alternatives to war.
And that is really just sort of my point.
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.
But I think we need to think quite radically about possible alternatives to war like law enforcement directly.
These would be individual leaders, targeted humanitarian rescue missions, things like that.
Because a couple of times and this is going to be my last point,
if law were actually to take up your challenges, for instance, by introducing gradations of culpability,
by looking at, for instance, a munitions worker as sometimes liable to attack and sometimes not, that is extremely problematic.
I mean, this is the idea of a clause that a combatant or any kind of third category is highly discredited in the war,
precisely because it has led to the erosion of any kind of protection in the rule of law.
And that is very true in regarding other topics.
You mentioned that, of course, is the overall proportionality idea or whether we should tie proportionality to not to military advantage,
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.
What we observe is that states think everything is proportionate because the goals are so important to it.
So sometimes and that's my last point, it is if we try to adjust laws being to approximate morality in a better way,
it loses its ability to actually fulfil its constraining purpose.
And over to Google. Gina, thank you.
And it's a great place to talk after two really genuine and brilliant leading just for seriousness.
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.
I'm going to speak more from a community of practice, which is the humanitarian agency, community humanitarian studies, that tradition much more.
And in that respect, I, I should sort of say, I suppose that from that tradition, when you pick up Geoff's book,
when you pick up Killing in War and you read the first chapter, you sort of think, Oh, God, he shouldn't say that.
He shouldn't be saying this stuff. This is a really slippery slope that we've always worked hard not to say that.
You know, that's because often he's actually about restraining war as much as possible.
So the idea of sort of cascading individual liability through military and civilian communities is what we've always tried to somehow avoid.
So it's a very sort of scandalous thing to read at first glance.
But then you think and maybe, yeah, but then you think and maybe we were right not to go that way.
And I think we probably still are. And that's what I'm going to come from. I'm on just on something.
General points, Jeff, I think, yes, I agree with cyber war.
That's an issue which theory must engage with. Watch more and look at side effects.
The only thing I would say about I really disagree with your idea of, you know, less but wider damage.
If you look at the majority of wars throughout the world, people are killed from war,
from the devastation of the structures that sustain like water, health, food markets, not from being killed by bullets.
So it's very accepting, say, the structure of what you call the less wider are actually often the deeper heart out.
So I think the empirical evidence is against you on that one.
So I think that's why we need these things tested. Let's go with much more on proportionality.
I really, you know. Well, can you saying you want to think about what this means in practice,
what revision is means to reformulate laws to fit this to redefine the combatant?
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,
the revolving door civilian that you mentioned,
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.
You know, we've all thought about this before. So how are you going to make those laws?
How are you going to identify this array of categories?
Because our instinct from our community is always to say, we'll never identify all the categories.
And even if you identify the philosophical legally, you won't get buy in in such a nuanced way in the heat of war.
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.
And, you know, let's see if that works. I'm just on on a few things.
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,
my concerns are with application which which fuels our team,
which is good with application and therefore with the practical implications of revisionism.
And I'm thinking about three things reliability, legitimacy and contextualising,
because really, I don't think the revisionists have contextualised at all.
Yes. And every time I hear your thought experiments, they are about I walk into a room,
a guy's about to give a child, blah, blah, blah, let's contextualise around real wars.
Let's talk about C.A.R., DRC, Mali.
Let's really talk about where wars are being fought.
Not nice thought experiments that help philosophers create categories and nuance.
And so I would really embrace the research agenda that we could all put together.
What I mean, assistants look at reality, not thought experiment.
I'd say starting with that today is real wars.
You know, it would help me to really see how you can and cannot and come up with definitions of justice and unjust wars.
And let's start with our own wars at the moment, and let's make a distinction perhaps between existential and wars of choice.
You know, what is a just war of choice?
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.
This is saying we are going to use war and violence through counterinsurgency as a means of developing democratic,
liberal societies as much as we can. Because we think that's right. Because we think that's safer for us.
Okay. Is that a just war, to have a totally transformative agenda and to run a war for 20 years to pacify,
stabilise and liberalise a society often without any notion of core consent means of how you measure consent and you get.
So I need answers. Those questions, you know,
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.
They might be liberationist wars. I think they say that point about wars of choice and existential wars,
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,
thankfully again, civil wars are decreasing over the last 26 months and therefore it's lessening.
But we still have Democratic Republic of Congo and C.A.R.
We have a lot of armed groups moving around. I need to because, you know, my community works with these people every day.
And and that's what I think. Is the M23 a just or unjust force?
And how is revisionism going to tell me that? Okay, so what criteria are you going to use?
Where are you going to find it? What information empirically you're going to understand about the sociology and the political
drivers of cause and notions of justice in the use of force in the civil wars by these armed groups.
So, you know, I would really embrace the research agenda which sees revisionism saying, right,
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.
And we need to understand criteria for justice and injustice, just an unjust conflict in those contexts.
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.
So we're looking at Syria and the end of Sri Lanka and probably the the custom of Pakistan counterinsurgency.
You know, how are we going to calculate that, what advice that we're going to hear?
You know, we need concrete examples.
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,
well, you know, Syria is an unjust war because of whatever whatever the bombing of the Tamil civilian population is.
Just I'm just letting you to understand that much more because otherwise we hear you talking again in categories with abstract thought experiments.
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,
but have mortality rates and structural disaster rates equivalent to an armed conflict or at least a civil war.
And how do we understand unjust just combatants in these situations, etc.?
And the thing, of course, that really needs further research for the humanitarian community is the question of civilian liability,
which, of course, we've always understood. That's why we as I said, we talk about direct participation.
We understand the ambiguity in civilian identity. You know, we're not going to pretend it doesn't exist.
We're going to just come down always giving the benefit of the doubt and prioritising a principle of restraint when violence is concerned.
So your idea is that actually we should extend and and really try and put into
operation the notion of individual civilian liability and what does that mean?
And that's a really important research agenda, in my view, because if we are going to start talking very coherent,
you know, and even formulating wars about things called unjust civilians,
then we really need to understand how you generate that category and how you can
spot it and how you can always know enough to identify individual responsibility.
Because in many ways, responsibility and accountability is your criteria of liability.
So how can you ever be involved in a society where so often in these societies there is massive forms of oppression and constraint,
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.
You still have all these really difficult issues.
So I would really welcome a research agenda that looks at civilian identity and proves that much more.
And of course, the next step from that is humanitarian action,
because one of the extraordinary features of the last 20 years has been the deep, you know, because I want to describe it,
I would say, you know, positive involvement in humanitarian action,
other people with sort of subversive, reactionary penetration of humanitarian agencies into into wars.
So that humanitarian action is usually everywhere in any war.
Now, if we have a notion of the unjust civilian, does that mean we have a nation of people,
just humanitarian aid worker, the unjust humanitarian action which follows very quickly?
And are we therefore looking at the liability of humanitarian workers, you know, not just as a breach of.
23 of the fourth Geneva Convention to supply effective material support.
But then actually we are engaged in complicity with unjust competence of unjust civilians.
In which case are we unjust combatants as well as liable to shooting of or whatever, whatever.
So there's a huge agenda that if you're really going to get serious and come to the ground with this stuff,
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.
You've been saying that that what happen.
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,
getting Geneva talks going.
So just to finish my my research recommendations would be all those, but to really deepen the engagement between revisionist practitioners,
revisionist theorists, the Boondocks practitioners, because at the moment I feel we talk past each other.
We hear these scary ideas that have a certain logic and a moral coherence to them
that something in our wisdom and deeper intuition says we've got to tread carefully.
That the only way to do this, I think, is by meeting much more together and hammering out something.
Thank you. Do you want to take a couple of minutes to respond? May I?
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.
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.
Often the different ways of drawing the distinction are basically for our purposes.
We can say infringements are actually justified over the writings of people's rights and violations are wrongful,
not overriding, sort or contravening of people's rights.
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.
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.
But we're never going to be able to fight wars in which rights are not infringed.
That is where innocent bystanders get harmed and are harmed by us knowingly.
But as long as we have a justification for that, well, it happens.
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.
So are you. You know, it just goes like that.
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.
I've infringed your right. You had a right to the performance of some act by me.
I couldn't do it. I infringed your right to to promise I'll use in compensation.
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.
I see. Okay, well, I. I would.
I would dispute that. It seems to me that in, you know, in smaller scale settings,
it's possible to intentionally attack only those people who are harmful or in the wrong or whatever.
But. Okay. The main thing I would say in response to what Hugo said is.
Give us time. We're working on what I'm trying to tell you.
So how long has revisionist dress for a theory been around and seriously been worked on by people?
15 years, maybe something like that. At most, a huge amount of progress has been made, I think, over that period.
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.
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
than with the notion of really kind of conventions in the service of minimising harm.
The difference between the framework that we have now is that it says,
let's try to constrain things in a way that's going to cause the least sort of destruction overall.
Let's try to constrain everything and adjust the revision.
Revisionist just for theorists, just saying that the aim should be really to seek minimisation of the violation of rights by war.
And so we're having to rethink everything.
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
conventional and legal rules can be modified in ways that bring them into closer convergence with morality without leading to disaster.
And so we want to tread very carefully as well.
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.
Nobody's going to say that in my riding.
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.
I'm sorry, symmetrical and neutral between between the parties.
I think probably the least good work has been done by just war theorists about appellate issues in this.
When is it permissible to go to war? There's more work remains to be done about that.
But work has to be done within within the just war theory.
We're just not in a position to start saying yet how we think the law should be reshaped, if at all.
That being said, so so one thing I would say is the work of moral philosophy is trying to
understand things at the level of principle and trying to understand things at a
fairly high level of abstraction with respect to categories of rights and duties and immunities and privileges and permissions and that kind of thing.
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.
So one thing, we can't stop working with the hypothetical examples yet.
That's still the where we are in our work.
We're sorting out the principles and thinking about hypothetical examples is just an indispensable tool of moral philosophy.
So it may seem frivolous outside of philosophy, but it's the way philosophy has always worked.
And I can explain to you how it works. If we had time at work, I won't try to do it here.
And it works by trying to isolate different variables and assess them independently
of other things that may be affecting our understanding of the situation.
So you take real life examples. They're too complicated. We can't tell what's influencing our intuitive reactions.
We can't tell which the factors are that are really doing the moral work there.
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.
At the time, some form of science. We purifying our our working materials here.
We're getting rid of the impurities and we're testing for this factor or that factor.
We want to know, is it responsibility that's important here or culpability, you know, something like that.
So we clear out all the other things that might distract us from focusing on the things that we need to focus on.
That's why, in moral philosophy, hypothetical examples, thought experiments are really important.
We're not in a position yet to deliver authoritative judgements about the particular conflicts in all their messy and unruly particularity.
Partly because we don't have the principles right yet. We can say, we can say some things.
And one of the things we can say is that often the use of force is to some,
the morality of the use of force is to some considerable degree, divorce of all from the background, rights and drugs.
We can say things like this, that the Palestinians have many legitimate, serious grievances against the Israelis.
On the other hand, if they start firing rockets into Israeli cities,
Israel has the permission to take certain forms of action to stop that from being done by fire, by force,
and the rights and wrongs of the use of force in that context may actually be, to some considerable degree,
divorced from the fact that the Palestinians have these grievances if they actually pursue the redress of grievances by wrongful means.
And that may be true in a lot of other areas of the world as well in Sri Lanka and other places.
It's true in individual self-defence. I insult guy in all kinds of ways.
I'd say your mother, whereas army boots and you know this kind of thing and really antagonise him.
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.
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,
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.
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.
I do use that term. All I mean by that is civilians in the country that is fighting unjustly or without a just
cause does not mean that they have any liabilities or any kind of moral status whatsoever.
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.
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
people who are bringing food supplies to and medical supplies to the civilians on the on the side of.
It's unjust. Probably be inadvisable thing to do. Maybe I should figure out a better phrase here.
But the term itself has no impact, no moral implications whatsoever.
Not not supposed to just be a term for for identification or reference without having to use the cumbersome
locution civilians who live in the kind of or who are citizens of the country fighting an unjust war,
you just you need a shorter phrase. One final thing.
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.
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,
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.
In other words, it's they would be morally justified if they did my be willing to sacrifice a case
of humanitarian intervention that's going to be very costly to the intervener.
Noble and super rocketry for the intervener to do it.
That would be the only instance I think of where you'd have something like the
notion of a war of choice and wars that are either justified or unjustified.
Just that they're either just justified or unjustified.
Optional. Non optional. That's another problem.
Existential. I'm not sure if I know what that means.
People apply that label to wars when the war by the Carthaginians against it in the third Punic War,
that was an existential war for the Carthaginians and they lost it. But what wars nowadays are really existential?
I don't know. Nuclear war might be. So I'll shut up.
Thank you, Jack. Why don't we open for discussion?