DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Just and Unjust Warriors

The Moral and Legal Status of Soldiers

Henry Shue editor David Rodin editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:19th Aug '10

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

This paperback is available in another edition too:

Just and Unjust Warriors cover

Can a soldier be held responsible for fighting in a war that is illegal or unjust? This is the question at the heart of a new debate that has the potential to profoundly change our understanding of the moral and legal status of warriors, wars, and indeed of moral agency itself. The debate pits a widely shared and legally entrenched principle of war-that combatants have equal rights and equal responsibilities irrespective of whether they are fi ghting in a war that is just or unjust-against a set of striking new arguments. These arguments challenge the idea that there is a separation between the rules governing the justice of going to war (the jus ad bellum) and the rules governing what combatants can do in war (the jus in bello). If ad bellum and in bello rules are connected in the way these new arguments suggest, then many aspects of just war theory and laws of war would have to be rethought and perhaps reformed. This book contains eleven original and closely argued essays by leading figures in the ethics and laws of war and provides an authoritative treatment of this important new debate. The essays both challenge and defend many deeply held convictions: about the liability of soldiers for crimes of aggression, about the nature and justifi ability of terrorism, about the relationship between law and morality, the relationship between soldiers and states, and the relationship between the ethics of war and the ethics of ordinary life. This book is a project of the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War.

This volume is excellent. It is comprehensive and informative. Just and Unjust Warriors mostly delivers on its promise of tightly argued chapters that respond to each other. It gives us more to think about and is accessible to a wide audience. Even though it will be more interesting to those readers with some background in just war theory, it is also recommended for those who want simply to think seriously about the moral rules applicable to war. * Steve Viner, Intrnational Affairs *
The quality of the contributions in Just and Unjust Warriors is universally high, and, unlike most edited volumes, in which the individual chapters stand more or less in isolation, in this instance there is continuous cross-referencing between the authors. This produces a volume that is unusually coherent and focussed for an edited work, a fact for which Rodin and Shue deserve congratulation. * Journal of Applied Philosophy *

ISBN: 9780199593231

Dimensions: 234mm x 157mm x 15mm

Weight: 418g

272 pages