Previous Event

September 12, 2004

"War and Morality: Rethinking the Just War Tradition for the 21st Century"  

by Deen Chatterjee, professor at the University of Utah.  

Deen Chatterjee teaches philosophy at University of Utah.  His recent publications include Ethics and Foreign Intervention.  This summer he participated in the month-long Institute on War and Morality at the US Navel Academy in Annapolis, MD.

Recent military actions over Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq have raised, in a dramatic way, a host of pressing and difficult moral and legal questions about the use of military force in international affairs.  Granted that a state's sovereignty should not provide complete immunity from foreign military intervention in extreme cases, what exactly should be the conditions under which such interventions may or may not be undertaken against a sovereign state?  Who may undertake them?  Who should authorize them?  What adjustments are required in the concept of state sovereignty, and what should be the rights and duties of states able to undertake military intervention?

These questions and the tragic dilemmas of recent military operations have severely challenged international law over the question of the justification of waging war to maintain international peace and security.  Because international law governing the morality of warfare is largely based on the traditional doctrine of just-war, these challenges have raised fundamental questions about the adequacy of the just-war tradition itself.  The forum examined the just-war doctrine, originally meant for traditional wars, in response to the likely challenges of the 21st century military conflicts, often involving non-state actors within sovereign states.

The forum addressed the moral challenges of high-tech "virtual" war, the rhetoric of human rights in the "war on terrorism," and the distinction between prevention and preemption in the debate over the use of military force in "self defense."  One major concern of the presentation was to assess the topic of international justice in a world dominated by a sole super power.

Speaker Suggested References and Resources:
Deen Chatterjee and Don Scheid, eds. Ethics and Foreign Intervention (Cambridge, 2003)  
Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (Basic Books, 1977, 1992)  
Michael Walzer, Arguing About War (Yale, 2004)

Additional Resources:
Another source of topic information is a survey of The Ethics of War prepared by the BBC web site.