My book manuscript, Public War: Restoring the Political Nature of Warfare, provides a novel foundation for just war doctrines enshrined in the international laws of war, including the requirement of legitimate authority, the right to national defense, the equality of just and unjust combatants, and the principle of civilian immunity. It also addresses an array of undertheorized contemporary problems, including gender-based violence in war and soldiers’ moral injuries. I argue that reductive individualism, which dominates recent scholarship and sees war as individuals acting in self-defense and other-defense, is inadequate as a framework to understand public wars, i.e., wars either aiming to defend public rights (e.g., a people’s right to self-governance) or relying on public means (e.g., conscription and taxation). Public war has its distinct logic—primarily because of sovereign states’ rights to rule and the exclusionary power of their legitimate orders—rendering the distribution of rights, obligations, and liabilities distinctive from those of private conflicts.
Public War and the Requirement of Legitimate Authority
The traditional requirement of legitimate authority claims that only states have a right to wield violence on the scale of war. This requirement may seem unfair because it deprives non-state belligerents of the right to use force even if they have a just cause. Chapter 1, “Public War and the Requirement of Legitimate Authority,”—the main idea of which has been published as a standalone article in Philosophical Studies—responds to this challenge. I distinguish between private and public wars and argue that the requirement of legitimate authority applies to public war but not private war. A war is public when it either aims to defend public rights (e.g., a people’s right to self-governance) or relies on public means (e.g., conscription and taxation). A public war waged by private parties involves a form of private domination over one’s fellow citizens. However, I also contend that this requirement of legitimate authority is not absolute and can be overridden under certain conditions. Therefore, my account—in practice—protects people from reckless guerrilla warfare while generating moral permission for responsible state founders to resort to force to secure social justice and national sovereignty when appropriate.
National Defense: The Right and the Wrong
I draw on the state’s exclusive right to make enforceable decisions to renew our understanding of national defense in Chapter 2, “National Defense: The Right and the Wrong.” I argue that as the guardians of their citizens, states should exercise their right to self-defense to protect their citizens’ interests—taking both their citizens’ freedom and well-being into account. Therefore, their defensive wars are only justified when they secure net benefits for their citizens. However, states’ right to rule includes a right to make reasonable mistakes amid uncertainties. Given the radical uncertainties concerning the consequences of unresisted aggressions, states have a right to do wrong to their citizens to fight against aggressions at a net cost to them but only within reasonable limits.
Robust Equality of Just and Unjust Combatants
In violent personal encounters, the right to use force is almost always asymmetric. The victim of an unjustified threat has the right to use force against the aggressor but not vice versa. Thus, the equal permission for just and unjust combatants to engage in hostilities embraced by international law—looks morally dubious. Chapter 3, “Robust Equality of Just and Unjust Combatants,” argues that a legitimate state’s reasonable decision to resort to war excludes reasons bearing on the war’s justice for its combatants. Therefore, just and unjust combatants operating under legitimate orders have not only equal permission but also precisely the same justification for fighting their wars: They are ordered to fight.
Who Lives and Who Dies
International law prohibits combatants from targeting civilians. However, reductive individualists have argued that civilians who are sufficiently responsible for their side’s unjust war effort are in principle liable to attack. Chapter 4, “Who Lives and Who Dies,” first rejects this reductivist contention of civilian liability, arguing that due to legitimate directives’ exclusionary power, ordinary citizens on the unjust side operating under legitimate (i.e., reasonable and duly-made) directives—where they pay taxes, produce weapons, or provide other supports for the war—are not liable to attack based on their personal contribution to the war effort. Nevertheless, I further contend that civilians can be liable to attack because they bear strict liability for their state’s mistakes. However, this does not necessarily abrogate the notion of civilian immunity. I argue that legitimate states, representing their citizenries, have the moral power to institute limits on legitimate targets in war. Thus, multilateral treaties among legitimate states establishing civilian immunity in war constitute a solid basis for the moral prohibition against targeting civilians.
Gender-based Violence in War
Currently, international law draws a dichotomy between individual and collective gender-based violence: The former is perpetrated by individual soldiers, and the latter is a weapon of war systematically employed by a warring party. Chapter 5, “Gender-based Violence and Patriarchal States,” shows this dichotomy is insensitive to subtle ways a warring party can be complicit in gender-based violence carried out by its troops, e.g., by facilitation, toleration, and willful ignorance. I argue that when a warring party is complicit in those ways, it acquiesces in the patriarchal logic according to which men are entitled to women’s sexuality, which undermines its internal legitimacy—premised on its equal representation of all citizens—on top of violating outsiders’ human rights and could render its otherwise just war unjust. I further contend that an adequate response to gender-based violence in war must go beyond tokenized criminal sanction on individual perpetrators and move towards building a domestic and international order free from patriarchalism.
The Moral Injury of Soldiering
When soldiers fight justly in a just war waged by their state, they may nonetheless kill or maim innocent civilians unexpectedly or as expected collateral damage in overall justified assaults. Such incidents often inflict severe moral injuries on those soldiers in the form of immense guilt, shame, and remorse, which I call the moral injuries of soldiering. Such injuries seem to have a fatalistic flavor, representing a wound at the heart of soldiering itself as they haunt soldiers despite the fact that they have done the “right” thing in light of the morality of soldiering. Chapter 6, “The Moral Injury of Soldering,” contends that soldiers do not kill in their personal capacity when they fight conscientiously in a war legitimately initiated by their state. Instead, they kill on behalf of and in the name of the people. While they share the responsibility for the killings as citizens of the warring state, their responsibility is no more and no less than that of any other citizen due to the exclusionary power of the appropriate rules of engagement. Only if the citizenry takes up the moral responsibilities for the unavoidable killings of innocents in a just war, through collective mourning and fair compensation, can soldiers be liberated from the crushing emotional burdens of harming the victims.