TORTURE: is it ever justified? Great articles by Henry Shue; challenging articles by Fritz Allhoff. The standard defense of torture directs us to contemplate a ticking time bomb situation in which we have a very limited time to discover and disarm the bomb. Fortunately, we have the terrorist who planted it. May we torture him if he won’t volunteer its location? consequentialist seem to think it would be morally permissible to torture him. And how can you deny that? Would it really be better to allow thousands to die rather than cause temporary pain to one person (the terrorist himself)? But how far are you willing to do? Maybe waterboarding doesn’t seem that bad, but suppose he can withstand innumerable waterboardings. Is it OK to use more horrible techniques–scalding, amputation, mutilation, branding, drilling his teeth? Just how far is it permissible to go? And what if the terrorist can withstand anything you can throw at him? Is it OK to torture his children in order to make him reveal the bomb’s location? (Or is it OK to threaten to torture his children? Or to pretend to torture them?)

I will argue (as will the speakers at "A Conference on Torture") that there are efficacious alternatives to torture, so we do not face the stark choice: torture one or allow thousands to die. Not only is torture not necessarily effective (we tend to romanticize it), but noncoercive interrogation may be more effective.

JUST WAR THEORY: the thirty years since Michael Walzer published JUST AND UNJUST WARS (1977) has seen a flourishing of scholarship on just war theory, some of it (primarily by Jeff McMahan) aimed at rejecting some of Walzer’s central claims. McMahan, for example, rejects the Symmetry Thesis (to wit, that unjust combatants have the same moral right to kill just combatants as the latter have to kill the former) and the Independence Thesis (to wit, that the principles of jus in bello are logically independent of the rules of jus ad bellum). We will try to figure out who is right on these questions and many others.

Just war theory also raises questions about just cause (what causes justify going to war? Is preventive war justifiable?) and proportionality (how many noncombatants may be killed unintentionally)?

We might also ask: Can war be justified at all? What is the pacifist argument against war? Should we take pacifism seriously?

TERRORISM: terrorism is often defined as the intentional targeting of innocents (or noncombatants). Some think terrorism is never morally justified; others think it can be justified in rare instances. I like to discuss this question in terms of Walzer’s idea of a Supreme Emergency. Walzer thinks that Britain was morally justified in bombing German cities (like Hamburg) in 1940-1941–in fire bombing them, or in terror bombing them, or in area bombing or carpet bombing them–-because Britain faced a Supreme Emergency. But those raids directly targeted civilian population centers and thus violated the jus in bello Principle of Discrimination (or Non-combatant Immunity). How could that be justified? Was it? And once we have answered those questions, we can turn to contemporary terrorism and figure out whether it is ever justified.

We might also spend some time thinking about genocide. Some argue that a people facing genocide are facing a Supreme Emergency and are permitted intentionally to kill unjust noncombatants. But what counts as genocide?

Walzer’s defense of the Supreme Emergency Exemption appeals to the idea of ‘dirty hands’–the claim that sometimes it is both right and wrong (or, as he says, it is both wrong and a moral duty) to perform an action like intentionally killing innocents. But, as he recognizes, that seems crazy (he calls it paradoxical). Is it? Others have tried to amend Walzer’s idea so that it is not quite so paradoxical (or contradictory), but it is not clear they succeed.

BOOKS:

Michael Walzer, JUST AND UNJUST WARS

Igor Primoratz (ed.), TERRORISM: THE PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES

Henry Rodin and Henry Shue (eds), JUST AND UNJUST WARRIORS

Tons of journal articles (I will download them onto a thumb drive for you)

A possible fourth book: David Rodin and Henry Shue (eds.), PREEMPTION: MILITARY ACTION AND MORAL JUSTIFICATION

"Rawls and Responsibility for Ends: The Problem of Expensive Tastes," APA Pacific Division Meetings, April 1996  Click Here

"Why Preference-Satisfaction Cannot Ground an Egalitarian Moral or Political Theory," APA Central Division Meetings, April 1996  Click Here

"From the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals: What Happened to Morality in Kant's Theory of Justice?" APA Pacific Division Meetings, March 1995

Commentator, Eighth International Kant Congress, Memphis, March 1995

"Consent, Rights, and Kant's Principle of Humanity," APA Pacific Division Meetings, March 1994

"On the Relation of Moral Worth to the Kantian Good Will," APA Central Division Meetings, April 1991  Click Here

"Mill on Guilt and Duty," APA Central Division Meetings, April 1990 

"Should Kantians Care About Moral Worth?" APA Central Division Meetings, April 1989   Click Here

"Are Virtues No More than Duties to Obey Moral Rules?" APA Central Division meetings, April 1987