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14th Summer School in Political Philosophy and Public Policy
July 8, 2024 - July 10, 2024

The enduring civil wars in Syria, Yemen and Ethiopia, the continuing Russian invasion of Ukraine and the recent Hamas terrorist attacks and ensuing Israel retaliation in Gaza seem to render prospects for global peace nothing but a utopic mirage. As war turns into a 24/7 reality show, a pervasive tendency towards polarization often neglects the more nuanced and complex genesis of conflicts and their underlying moral issues. This summer school will explore a range of issues in the ethics of war that have been given new salience by these ongoing conflicts.
The current zeitgeist manifests debates that have preoccupied many contemporary just war theorists. Russian soldiers in Ukraine have been widely depicted as mere murderers, irrespective of their compliance with in bello norms, in line with the reductivist just war theorists. Reductivist accounts contest traditional martial virtues such as obedience to orders, arguing that combatants ought to refuse to fight in unjust wars. Nearly two years into the war, and with no end in sight, Ukraine faces a drastic decline in the number of willing recruits. The fact that many Ukrainian and Russian men are now trying to evade compulsory enlistment – by either trying to flee the country or bribing authorities and/or health professionals to exempt them – challenges deeply-entrenched ideas regarding the legitimacy of conscription, particularly within existing and aspiring liberal democracies. The acquisition and deployment of newer military technologies, such as Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles or Lethal Autonomous Weapons, as well as the resort to private military companies (such as the infamous Wagner Group) have emerged as tempting, if morally controversial, solutions to the shortage of combatants on both sides.
Meanwhile, Hamas’ terrorist attacks laid bare the shortcomings of Israel’s counterterrorism strategy, exposing its failure to address the conditions that enable radicalization to thrive. Inasmuch as the post-9/11 narrative about the duty of the righteous to battle evil echoes through Netanyahu’s words, the brunt of the war against Hamas falls on Palestinian civilians as international calls for restrain are met with accusations of antisemitism or reminders that Hamas’s actions triggered the war. The conflict starkly demonstrates the hazards of warfare between states and non-state groups, such as the eliding of civilian and military targets and infrastructure, along with the perils of urban warfare. Commentators frequently assert Israel’s right and duty to defend its citizens, as well as the need deter other prospective aggressors in the region. Such claims bear on theoretical debates about whether one can ‘combine’ putatively just causes and, if so, how this bears on the proportionality of the war. The war in Gaza also brings to the fore the role of historic injustice as a genesis of conflict and main source of intergenerational cycles of violence. This, we believe, calls for a deeper interdisciplinary analysis of the relationship between intergenerational justice and the ethics of war that could potentially be valuable for both fields.
With such unsettling circumstances in mind, this event hopes to generate an open and fruitful discussion for scholars, students, policy makers to discuss old and pressing issues that permeate contemporary debates on the ethics of war.
Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:
- Fighting unjust wars and obeying unjust orders: is the Nuremberg defense still a legitimate moral defense? Should it still be a legal defense?
- The morality of conscription.
- Whether and when states are allowed to employ private military contractors.
- The ethics of using Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles, Autonomous Lethal Weapons, Killer Robots, and Military Artificial Intelligence.
- The challenges of asymmetric and urban warfare, such as adhering to the principles of discrimination and proportionality
- The moral status of human shields
- Intergenerational justice, historic injustice, and the ethics of war
- Military virtues in contemporary warfare
- Information warfare and propaganda
This event will host Professors Helen Frowe, Jeff McMahan, Susanne Burri and Isaac Taylor.