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ethics of war

National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: Why the Responsibility Gap is Not a Compelling Objection to Lethal Autonomous Weapons

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This article received an honourable mention in the undergraduate category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics

Written by Tanae Rao, University of Oxford student

There are some crimes, such as killing non-combatants and mutilating corpses, so vile that they are clearly impermissible even in the brutal chaos of war. Upholding human dignity, or whatever is left of it, in these situations may require us to hold someone morally responsible for violation of the rules of combat. Common sense morality dictates that we owe it to those unlawfully killed or injured to punish the people who carried out the atrocity. But what if the perpetrators weren’t people at all? Robert Sparrow argues that, when lethal autonomous weapons cause war crimes, it is often impossible to identify someone–man or machine–who can appropriately be held morally responsible (Sparrow 2007; Sparrow 2016). This might explain some of our ambivalence about the deployment of autonomous weapons, even if their use would replace human combatants who commit war crimes more frequently than their robotic counterparts.Read More »National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: Why the Responsibility Gap is Not a Compelling Objection to Lethal Autonomous Weapons

Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: Question:  Can soldiers justify killing some as a means to influence the decisions of others?       

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This essay received an honourable mention in the 5th Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics, Graduate Category.

Written by University of Oxford DPhil student, Robert Underwood.

 

Lt. Col. Bob Underwood is a U.S. Army officer and a Fellow in its Advanced Strategic Plans and Policy Program. He is pursuing a DPhil in Philosophy at the University of Oxford and will assume command of 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry in the summer of 2019. The opinions expressed here are his own and do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

Killing in war eliminates threats but also plays a part in influencing the decisions of other persons beyond those we might kill.  This suggests that killing in war has a communicative function, and that the message is an important consideration that can feature in the balance of reasons to kill some but not others in war.  This is true provided combatants can permissibly kill some as means to communicate to others.  I argue that just combatants, those that fight for just aims, can permissibly kill to communicate and that unjust combatants cannot.  This is a new reason to revise our intuition that combatants on both sides hold equal rights to kill, the so-called moral equality of combatants (MEC).Read More »Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: Question:  Can soldiers justify killing some as a means to influence the decisions of others?       

Guest Post: The moral lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

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Written by William Isdale

University of Queensland

This year is the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Are there any moral lessons we can learn from that historical episode? I think so.

Recently I delivered a talk on radio about this topic. I argue that one key reason to study history is to learn lessons about human nature. The war in the Pacific against Japan can tech us about, (1) our tribal natures, (2) the limits of empathy when we kill from a distance, and (3) the ratchet-up effect of retaliatory violence.

We have a moral obligation to take heed of those lessons, for instance by reining in our more dangerous traits. The existence of nuclear weapons, because of their destructive power, makes the imperative to understand and control our natures all the more significant.

Below is a slightly adapted version of what I said.

 

 

This year marks 70 years since the end of World War Two. A conflict that ended with the use of the most destructive weapons ever invented – the atomic bombs, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Has it ever occurred to you to ask, just what is the point of commemorating wars? Do we commemorate them because they are interesting, or are there more important reasons?

If you’ve ever attended a war commemoration ceremony, you’ve probably heard speakers talking about the gratitude that we owe to those who fought to defend our way of life. Or speeches that urge us to reflect on the tragedy of lives lost, and the risks of rushing into conflict. And those are good reasons for remembering wars. But, in my view, they’re not the most important ones.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume once wrote that the principal reason to study history is to discover  “the constant and universal principles of human nature”. And in no other area of human life is learning those lessons more important, than when they concern war.

By studying wars we can learn lessons about ourselves. About how we get into them – why we keep fighting them – and what we do to justify extraordinary levels of cruelty and destruction visited on others.

Today I want to uncover three lessons about human nature that are revealed to us by the war in the Pacific against Japan – and particularly, from the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Read More »Guest Post: The moral lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Jeff McMahan on What Rights Can be Defended by Means of War

On the evening of Thursday 7 February, Jeff McMahan, Honorary Fellow of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and Professor Philosophy at Rutgers University, delivered an insightful and fascinating Astor Lecture at the University of Oxford.

McMahan’s topic was the relatively underdiscussed question of the extent to which states are morally entitled to resist what he called ‘lesser aggressors’, who are seeking not to take over the state in question or to inflict major harm or damage, but some lesser goal, such as control over some relatively insignificant piece of territory. McMahan mentioned the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands Islands as a possible example. Read More »Jeff McMahan on What Rights Can be Defended by Means of War