'Let all the Earth Keep Silence': Law, Religion and Answerability for Targeted Killings

Abstract

Religion is commonly deemed to have returned to public life in ways that call attention to legal frameworks and judgments. Relatively little attention has been paid to law and religion internationally, however. This essay offers initial observations about requirements for success in the dialogue between law and religion, and the need for members of the Abrahamic faiths especially to reason together and with international lawyers, whether believers or not, about legal order in the international arena. Particular reference is made to what it might mean in Protestant Thomist perspective to affirm the 'rule of law' and how the inclusion of religious voices in contested debates about the meaning of the 'rule of law' may assist deliberation in diverse international contexts in the context of targeted killings, including in the territories of other states by armed combat aerial vehicles or 'drones'.

“Justly Shall You Pursue Justice”: Theological Approaches to Evaluative Injustice

“…Asking questions about who judges and who is judged, and on what basis—and asking questions about how this relates to the social and economic context—is not an optional prolegomenon to the task of theological ethics, it is part of the exercise. Besides the examples given in my first section, one recent example of what this looks like is found in Esther Reed’s discussion of responsibility and “answerability” in relation to global corporate responsibility and international law (Reed 2012, 2018, 121–65). Reed considers how those in positions of privilege can act to bring about the recognition of the global poor as active participants in judicial and moral debates about their future—and, conversely but just as urgently, how global corporations can be made morally and legally accountable.…”