Tony Coady

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's thinking about ethics and Christianity is a fascinating attempt to combine different, and often conflicting, strands in the Christian intellectual tradition. In this article, I outline his thinking, analyse the advantages and disadvantages in his approach, and relate it to developments in contemporary philosophy. His critique of an excessive stress upon principles and abstraction in opposition to a concern for concrete circumstances is, I argue, best seen as a necessary critique of what I call moralism rather than morality. It is also related to recent philosophical theories of particularism and the debates about ‘emergency ethics’ in current philosophy. On the negative side, Bonhoeffer has a tendency to treat non-Christian ethics as necessarily relativist and at times is excessively influenced by the elements in Christian theological tradition that are hostile to the natural and to non-Christian philosophy. In addition, his invocation of ‘the Divine mandates’ seems to have undesirable implications for some genuine values in liberal democratic theory and practice

The ‘beautiful axiom’ to which Dickens refers is a central feature of Thomas Hobbes' thinking but its precise role in his moral philosophy remains unclear. I shall here attempt both to dispel the unclarity and to evaluate the adequacy of the position that emerges. Given the high level of contemporary interest in Hobbes' thought, both within and beyond philosophical circles, this is an enterprise of considerable importance. None the less, my interest is not merely interpretative, since the assessment of Hobbes' attitude to ‘the beautiful axiom’ raises important and difficult questions about what might be termed the preconditions of morality

abstract This paper aims to gain a deeper understanding of the different forms of moralism in order to throw light upon debates about the role of morality in international affairs. In particular, the influential doctrine of political realism is reinterpreted as objecting not to a role for morality in international politics, but to the baneful effects of moralism. This is a more sympathetic reading than that usually given by philosophers to the realist doctrines. I begin by showing the ambiguity and elusiveness of realist claims about morality in politics and then distinguish six forms of moralism, understood as a distortion of genuine morality: moralism of scope, of imposition, of abstraction, of absolutism, of inappropriate explicitness, and of deluded power. I argue that most of these are relevant to typical realist claims and can make their objections more plausible. But, though realists can be interpreted as rightly drawing attention to the dangers of moralism in international and national affairs, their conflation of moralism with morality wrongly leads them to an exaltation of the pursuit of national interest and to the rejection of policies and judgements that are not in fact moralistic

Any attempt to justify war in the fashion of just war theories risks underestimating its morally problematic nature. This becomes clear if we ask how the individual soldier or citizen is supposed to use just war theory in his own thinking. Michael Walzer's recent book, Just and Unjust Wars, illustrates the problem nicely. Walzer's view is that whether a state is justified in going to war is not a matter for the citizen to judge, and with regard to the way the war is conducted the individual soldier can have only minimal moral responsibility for what is done. Walzer's position is criticized in detail and the conclusion drawn that such an understanding of just war theory undermines the theory's significance as a moral outlook on war. It is also argued that a more pertinent version of just war theory must have strong implications for social change

There is a strong tendency in the scholarly and sub-scholarly literature on terrorism to treat it as something like an ideology. There is an equally strong tendency to treat it as always immoral. Both tendencies go hand in hand with a considerable degree of unclarity about the meaning of the term ‘terrorism’. I shall try to dispel this unclarity and I shall argue that the first tendency is the product of confusion and that once this is understood, we can see, in the light of a more definite analysis of terrorism, that the second tendency raises issues of inconsistency, and even hypocrisy. Finally, I shall make some tentative suggestions about what categories of target may be morally legitimate objects of revolutionary violence, and I shall discuss some lines of objection to my overall approach.

Just war theory entails that some wars may be morally unjustifiable, and hence citizens may be right to object morally to their government''s waging of a war and to their being compelled to serve in it. Given the evils attendant upon even justified war, this fact sharply restricts any obligation to die for the state, and raises important questions about the appropriate state response to selective conscientious objectors. This paper argues that such people should be legally accommodated, and discusses objections to doing so, in particular, the possible erosion of the state''s capacity to wage justified war, the unfairness of granting such exemptions from military service, and the impossibility of determining genuinely conscientious objection.