Hurka, Thomas - Proportionality and the Morality of War
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© by Blackwell Publishing, Inc. Philosophy & Public Affairs , no. Just war theory, the most widely accepted theory of the morality of war, contains two proportionality conditions that say a war or an act in war is justified only if the damage it causes is not excessive. T hese conditions have figured prominently in recent debates about the morality of par- ticular wars, including the Gulf, Kosovo, and Iraq wars. But commenta- tors often say the conditions are poorly understood, so it is unclear exactly what they do and do not forbid. In this article I will try to clarify the idea of proportionality in war , or explain what makes damage in war excessive. I will not, however, arrive at simple conditions that can be applied mechanically to acts in war. This is partly because judgments about proportionality in war require empirical assessments that are complex and controversial, but also because the conditions themselves can be formulated in different ways that have different implications even given an agreed-on set of facts. I will try to identify some of these differ- ences and show how they affect specific judgments about war. But first I must place the proportionality conditions in the larger context of just war theory as a whole. Proportionality in the Morality of War THOMAS HURKA Earlier versions of this article were presented to the Rice University Lecture Series on Ethics, Politics, and Society, the University of Calgary, the University of Toronto, a Roundtable on Just War Theory at the University of Illinois/Urbana, and the Murphy Institute Series in Ethical and Political Philosophy at Tulane University. I am especially grateful to my Calgary Ph.D. student David Mellow for conversations on this and related topics over a number of years, as well as to Joseph Boyle, Col. Charles J. Dunlap, Jr ., Dennis McKerlie, Jeff McMahan, George Sher, Howard Sobel, Wayne Sumner, the audiences at the above-mentioned occasions, and the Editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs for helpful suggestions.
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