In contemporary political science, many believe that normative restrictions on armed conflict are an outgrowth of Western culture and the just war tradition. Drawing on historical evidence, which shows that political actors in Ancient China and the early Islamic empire endorsed civilian protection rules, I claim that such norms are more common than most International Relations (IR) theorists suppose. For IR theory, this raises an important puzzle: How can we explain why similar normative ideas emerged in human societies that are otherwise very different? Building on research in cognitive science, social psychology, and social neuroscience, I argue that most people have natural cognitive and emotional predispositions that bias the emergence and transmission of cultural norms that protect non‐combatants. More specifically, capacities for perspective‐taking and empathy shape how people interpret the limits of their moral commitments, and when these capacities are engaged, intuitional heuristics affect how they judge the morality of killing in war. What is more, I claim that three key contextual variables moderate the connection between innate moral intuitions and the development of civilian protection norms: (i) societal interdependence, (ii) the social empowerment of marginal actors, and (iii) the creation of norms in argumentative contexts that require impartial moral reasoning. I argue that rationalist and constructivist theories of norm emergence will be able to better explain the emergence, the durability, and the institutional design of the norms of war by incorporating this naturalistic theory of moral cognition.

and David Traven Williams CollegeInternational Relations (IR) theorists have traditionally viewed rationality and consciousness as defining features of human behavior. But recently this approach has come under fire from several angles. Not only do many psychologists now consider rationality to be dependent on emotions, recent developments in the logics of action debate in IR theory explicitly argue for de-emphasizing the role of consciousness and rationality in theorizing agency. In an effort to put rationality back into its proper place, we critique two recent contributions to the logics of action debate: practice theory and the logic of habit. Both logics of action are useful in many respects, but we argue that they rest on a view of individual agency that is too structural and insufficiently cognitive to fully understand how individuals make decisions in international politics. We do not doubt that unconscious reflexes often control individual decisions, but we maintain that cognitive control and deliberation play a much larger role in constructing these reflexes than practice theory and the logic of habit recognize. We sketch a rational intuitionist logic of action for IR theory. We argue that intuitions constitute the most useful way to theorize the unconscious determinants of individual action and that although intuitions control how people behave in particular circumstances, they are subject to rational recalibration through internal and intersubjective reasoning.

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How people interpret the intentions of others is fundamental to politics. This article examines intention understanding in the domain of how citizens evaluate wartime conduct. Drawing on recent work in moral psychology, it argues that people are more likely to attribute intentionality to wartime actions that produce morally bad consequences than otherwise identical actions that produce morally good consequences. We test this theory with two vignette-based survey experiments. Our results show that this hypothesis holds in a variety of contexts relating to civilian casualties and the destruction of heritage sites during war. By unlocking the moral psychology of intention understanding, this article contributes to the field of political psychology in general, and more specifically to theoretical debates in International Relations (IR) about public opinion on just war doctrine.