[DOWNLOAD] "War and Self-Defense (Symposium *)" by Ethics & International Affairs " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: War and Self-Defense (Symposium *)
- Author : Ethics & International Affairs
- Release Date : January 01, 2004
- Genre: Politics & Current Events,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 239 KB
Description
When the Bush and Blair administrations justified the 2003 war on Iraq as an act of preemptive self-defense, this was greeted in many quarters with understandable skepticism. How can the right of self-defense be legitimately invoked when no prior aggressive attack has occurred and there is no evidence that one is imminent? This question, much debated in the months leading up to the war, invites us to reflect critically on the content of the right of self-defense. Yet there is a deeper question to be asked about the idea of a war of self-defense; namely, how is it that war can be considered an act of self-defense at all? How exactly is it that the concept of self-defense can provide a justification for war? It is this question that I ask in War and Self-Defense and the answer I arrive at is a surprising one. (1) It may seem an odd question even to ask. Surely a nation, or at least a state, has a right to use military force in national defense in the same way that an individual who is attacked has the right to kill in self-defense. This seemingly straightforward idea, which Michael Walzer memorably called "the domestic analogy," has been a prominent feature of much political, legal, and philosophical thought on the ethics of war in the Western tradition. Indeed, so fundamental is the idea of an analogy between self-defense and national defense that it is difficult to imagine how any theory of just war could proceed without it.