Ethical judgments are relevant to all phases of protracted violent conflict and inter-state war. Before, during, and after the tumult, martial forces are guided, in part, by their sense of morality for assessing whether an action is (morally) right or wrong, an event has good and/or bad consequences, and an individual (or group) is inherently virtuous or evil. This new book series focuses on the morality of decisions by military and political leaders to engage in violence and the normative underpinnings of military strategy and tactics in the prosecution of the war.
By George Lucas
December 16, 2022
This book addresses issues of legal and moral governance arising in the development, deployment, and eventual uses of emerging technologies in military operations. Proverbial wisdom has it that law and morality always lag behind technological innovation. Hence, the book aims to identify, enumerate...
By Tine Molendijk
March 16, 2021
This book advances an interdisciplinary understanding of moral injury by analyzing the stories of military veterans of combat and peace missions. In the past decade, the concept of moral injury has emerged to address the potential moral impact of deployment. This book contributes to an ...
By Michael Skerker
July 22, 2020
This book develops a new contractualist foundation for just war theory, which defends the traditional view of the moral equality of combatants and associated egalitarian moral norms. Traditionally it has been viewed that combatants on both sides of a war have the same right to fight, irrespective ...
By Eric Patterson
September 27, 2018
This book examines the moral choices faced by U.S. political and military leaders in deciding when and how to employ force, from the American Revolution to the present day. Specifically, the book looks at discrete ethical dilemmas in various American conflicts from a just war perspective. For ...
By Tamar Meisels
August 16, 2017
This book offers a renewed defense of traditional just war theory and considers its application to certain contemporary cases, particularly in the Middle East. The first part of the book addresses and responds to the central theoretical criticisms levelled at traditional just war theory. It offers...
Edited
By Daniel Rothbart, Karina Korostelina, Mohammed Cherkaoui
July 27, 2017
This book explores the issue of civilian devastation in modern warfare, focusing on the complex processes that effectively establish civilians’ identity in times of war. Underpinning the physicality of war’s tumult are structural forces that create landscapes of civilian vulnerability. Such forces...
By Pamela Creed
May 22, 2017
This book examines the ethics and values that render a war discourse normative, and features the stories of American soldiers who fought in the Iraq War to show how this narrative can change. The invasion of Iraq, launched in March 2003, was led by the United States under the now discredited claim...
Edited
By Ping-Cheung Lo, Sumner B Twiss
February 01, 2017
This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of warfare ethics in early China as well as its subsequent development. Chinese attitudes toward war are rich and nuanced, ranging across amoral realism, defensive just war, humanitarian intervention, and mournful skepticism. Covering the five ...
By William Feldman
June 23, 2016
This book offers a comprehensive moral theory of privatization in war. It examines the kind of wars that private actors might wage separate from the state and the kind of wars that private actors might wage as functionaries of the state. The first type of war serves to probe the ad bellum question ...
By William Shaw
February 17, 2016
This book offers a detailed utilitarian analysis of the ethical issues involved in war. Utilitarianism and the Ethics of War addresses the two basic ethical questions posed by war: when, if ever, are we morally justified in waging war, and if recourse to arms is warranted, how are we permitted to ...
By Christian Enemark
May 21, 2015
This book assesses the ethical implications of using armed unmanned aerial vehicles (‘hunter-killer drones’) in contemporary conflicts. The American way of war is trending away from the heroic and towards the post-heroic, driven by a political preference for air-powered management of strategic ...
By Thomas E. Doyle, II
January 30, 2015
This book examines the moral dilemmas of nuclear dissemination, and the justifications of both nuclear pursuit and avoidance by contemporary states. Applying Constructivist methodologies and moral theory, the author analyses a core set of moral dilemmas that ensnare decision-makers amongst state ...