The Dispensable Lives of Soldiers

Blum, Gabriella

doi:10.1093/jla/2.1.115

Cited by 83 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Issues of moral coherence are unlikely to significantly trouble those whose primary concern remains the strict legality of these strikes. As Gabriella Blum (2010: 72) observes, within mainstream interpretations of the laws of war, there exists a ‘general acceptance … of the near-absolute license to kill all combatants’. For as long as these laws remain applicable, this licence endures, no matter the degree of military imbalance.…”

Section: Uav-exclusive Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

Justified killing in an age of radically asymmetric warfare

Renic

2018

European Journal of International Relations

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The growing ability of the US to kill with impunity in war has prompted some to question whether such advantage challenges the moral justifications for inter-combatant violence. This scholarship, however, has yet to properly clarify both the explicit and tacit role of reciprocal risk within this moral determination. A systematic explanation is needed of the function of risk in the right to kill in war. This article engages with the in bello component of the Just War Tradition to determine: first, the role of reciprocal risk in the moral justifications for killing in war; and, second, the extent to which these justifications may be challenged within conditions of radical asymmetry, exemplified today by the unmanned aerial vehicle exclusive violence of the US. The first three sections of this article each review an account of Just War: conventionalism, revisionism and contractarianism. It is argued that the coherence of each of these moral accounts, particularly in terms of the permissiveness of inter-combatant violence, is grounded in an assumption of collective reciprocal risk. Radically asymmetric conditions of battle render ambiguous what would otherwise be a morally unproblematic use of military violence. This article will conclude by highlighting how this challenge manifests in practice, through analysis of the ongoing unmanned aerial vehicle exclusive violence of the US. The radical differentials of physical risk that characterise this violence threaten to erode the capacity of the US to interpret and apply standard judgements of Just War theory against those it targets.

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Section: Uav-exclusive Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

Justified killing in an age of radically asymmetric warfare

Renic

2018

European Journal of International Relations

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“…Moreover, by clarifying in the days after the killing that Bin Laden would have been arrested if the opportunity presented itself, the Obama administration hedged on claiming it could kill him under any circumstances. As the ICRC guidance notes "it would defy basic notions of humanity to kill an adversary or to refrain from giving him or her an opportunity to surrender where there manifestly is no necessity for the use of lethal force" (Melzer 2009: 82), although it should be recognized that this position is highly contentious (see Blum 2010;Parks 2009Parks -2010Goodman 2013). Much more troubling has been the upsurge in targeted killing of less prominent figures engaged less obviously in either DPH or a continuous combat function.…”

Section: The Expanding Meaning Of Combatancymentioning

confidence: 99%

Legal Frontiers: Targeted Killing at the Borders of War

Sanders¹

2014

Journal of Human Rights

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“…For recent discussion on this bourgeoning topic, see in particular[Blum 2010;Luban 2011b;Bohrer and Osiel 2013].…”

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confidence: 99%

Defensive Wars and the Reprisal Dilemma

Bazargan

2014

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

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I address a foundational problem with accounts of the morality of war that are derived from the Just War Tradition (JWT). Such accounts problematically focus on 'the moment of crisis': i.e. when a state is considering a resort to war. This is problematic because sometimes the state considering the resort to war is partly responsible for wrongly creating the conditions in which the resort to war becomes necessary. By ignoring this possibility, JWT effectively ignores, in its moral evaluation of wars, certain types of past wrongdoing. I argue that we can address this problem by incorporating an account of compensatory liability into an account of the morality of war. Doing so yields the view that, if we have culpably failed to compensate victims for past wrongs, we might be morally required to weigh the well-being of those victims more heavily in our calculation of proportionality when determining the permissibility of a defensive act that harms the victim as a side-effect. This, in turn, makes satisfying the proportionality constraint more difficult. The upshot is that sometimes, in order to wage a defensive war permissibly, we first have to discharge compensatory duties. This has implications for how we evaluate 'cycles of reprisals' that plague warfare.

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The Dispensable Lives of Soldiers

Cited by 83 publications

References 32 publications

Justified killing in an age of radically asymmetric warfare

Justified killing in an age of radically asymmetric warfare

Legal Frontiers: Targeted Killing at the Borders of War

Defensive Wars and the Reprisal Dilemma

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