Arthur Ripstein

Lecture II extends the peace-centered account from the first lecture to the distinction between combatants and civilians, showing how it is already implicit in the wrongfulness of perfidy: perfidy is wrong because it is inconsistent with exiting the conditions of war; targeting civilians or civilian property or infrastructure is wrong because it makes everyone and everything part of the war. In so doing, Lecture II redeems the familiar idea, now thought by many to be naïve, that it is a special wrong for combatants to attack civilians because they are not part of the war. The second part of the lecture explains why an aggressor’s combatants cannot be punished for their participation in a war of aggression, even though such participation is morally wrong.

Lecture I explores cases in which moral and legal rules governing an activity apply even to those who are not permitted to engage in it, focusing on the striking case of the rules governing the conduct of war, which apply even to an aggressor’s combatants, who should not be fighting at all. This structure is morally intelligible once the rules are understood to introduce novel prohibitions rather than new permissions. This issue is examined through what was traditionally the most significant restriction on the conduct of war, the prohibition of perfidy, that is, false negotiation or surrender. Perfidy has received relatively little recent attention, but it is systematically important because of its moral structure: it appropriates the possibility of peace as a weapon of war. As such, it leaves no way out of war. This distinctive wartime wrong is the same whether committed by an aggressor or a defender.

This response takes up some of the central themes raised by the commentators, working from the most general to the most specific. Ripstein responds to the suggestion that category-based reasoning is empty or irrelevant, and then turns his attention to clarifying the difference between prohibitions and permissions, considering the additional _in bello_ rules of necessity and proportionality. Next, he addresses questions about why defensive war is the basic case for thinking about whether someone is part of the war, and the specific prohibition of perfidy. Only then does he take up two topics mentioned only in passing in the lectures: the role of international institutions, and the relevance of a state-focused account of war in the context of non-international armed conflict.

This chapter examines the question of the moral status of animals in Kantian moral theory. Kant’s view that all our duties regarding non-human animals are duties to ourselves is widely thought to capture neither the content of these duties nor their ground. The chapter, therefore, focuses on the supposed problem of the directionality of our moral obligations. It seeks to articulate and defend an account of Kant’s understanding of the directionality of duty, and to deploy it to explain and defend his notorious claim that our duties regarding animals are duties to ourselves. More generally, we seek to explain the relation between the content of a duty and its directionality. The chapter identifies three possible sources of the directionality problem: the issues of it involving the wrong content, or a kind of instrumentality, or a kind of contingency. It argues that the contingency worry is the key one and suggests a response to it.

Ripstein’s lectures, which constitute the central texts of this book, focus on the two bodies of rules governing war: the ius ad bellum, which regulates resort to armed force, and the ius in bello, which sets forth rules governing the conduct of armed force and applies equally to all parties. The lectures argue that both sets of rules constitute prohibitions rather than permissions, and that recognizing them as distinctive prohibitions can reconcile the seeming tension between them. By understanding that the central wrong of war is that war is the condition which force decides, Ripstein contends that the law and morality of war are in fact aligned; the rules governing the conduct of hostilities must apply equally to parties in the right and parties in the wrong in an armed conflict, because the prohibitions outlined in the rules governing war are prohibitions that restrain war. Ripstein’s method of analysis and the substantive argument he puts forward offer an opportunity for rigorous critical engagement in subsequent essays by commentators Hathaway, Kutz, and McMahan, followed by a response from Ripstein.

A waiter spills hot coffee on a customer. A person walks on another person’s land. A moored boat damages a dock during a storm. A frustrated neighbor bangs on the wall. A reputation is ruined by a mistaken news report. Although the details vary, the law recognizes all of these as torts, different ways in which one person wrongs another. Tort law can seem puzzling: sometimes people are made to pay damages when they are barely or not at fault, while at other times serious losses go uncompensated. In this pioneering book, Arthur Ripstein brings coherence and unity to the baffling diversity of tort law in an original theory that is philosophically grounded and analytically powerful. Ripstein shows that all torts violate the basic moral idea that each individual is in charge of his or her own person and property, and never in charge of another individual’s person or property. Battery and trespass involve one person wrongly using another’s body or things, while negligence injures others by imposing risks to them in ways that are inconsistent with their independence. Tort remedies aim to provide a substitute for the right that was violated. As Private Wrongs makes clear, tort law not only protects our bodies and property but constitutes our entitlement to use them as we see fit, consistent with the entitlement of others to do the same.

Kant’s objections to colonialism are cast in juridical terms, focusing on the ways in which it is contrary to requirements of right under his conception of international law. Colonial conquest is an illicit ground for going to war, and colonization is an illicit mode of conduct after a war, even if the war itself was fought on other grounds. This chapter explains Kant’s arguments for the following claims: (i) Acquiring territory or securing markets is never a legitimate ground for war. (ii) Conquest is wrongful, but colonization is a defective form of conquest, worse than simply incorporating the territory into the conquering nation. (iii) Although colonial rule is not itself rightful, it has its own internal standard of adequacy, which colonial powers historically failed to satisfy.

El presente artículo se ubica en la intersección de dos proyectos más amplios, uno sobre la filosofía política de Kant y otro sobre la relación entre el derecho privado y la justicia distributiva. Utiliza la idea del orden privado de Kant para explicar el lugar del derecho privado en lo que Rawls describe como la “división de la responsabilidad” entre la sociedad y el individuo. Explico por qué el derecho privado es una parte esencial de lo que, para Rawls, es el tema fundamental de la justicia: la estructura coercitiva de la sociedad. Sostengo que el derecho privado no es más que un sistema de límites recíprocos a la libertad, siempre que esos límites sean generales en el sentido correcto. Además, sostengo que la mejor manera de pensar el énfasis de Rawls en la provisión pública de derechos y oportunidades adecuados es en términos paralelos: son condiciones esenciales para la posibilidad misma del cumplimiento de los derechos, porque son los prerrequisitos morales para una esfera pública compartida.

This review essay examines Benbaji and Statman's _War by Agreemen__t_. It raises two challenges to their contractarian account of war, which seeks to show that considerations of mutual advantage can generate novel permissions. First, if such a robust justification for participation in unjust wars is available, it is not clear that any kind of agreement between states is even required; if a state can make otherwise unjustified killings permissible, it would seem to be able to do so without the participation of other states. Second, more generally, I doubt that any such agreement could make otherwise unjustified killings permissible.

My aim in this paper is to develop a new model of the obligation to do your part in contributing to the provision of what are frequently described as ‘public goods’. I will situate my account in a broadly Kantian account of the state as a public rightful condition, which enjoys powers that no private person could enjoy, in the service of its distinctively public mandate. The exercise of those powers imposes special duties on the state, which require it to provide distinctively public goods. As an artificial person, the state can only act through natural persons; doing your part enables the state to achieve its distinctively public purposes.

Ripstein's lectures, which constitute the central texts of this book, focus on the two bodies of rules governing war: the jus ad bellum, which regulates resort to armed force, and the jus in bello, which sets forth rules governing the conduct of armed force and applies equally to all parties. The lectures argue that both sets of rules constitute prohibitions rather than permissions, and that recognizing them as distinctive prohibitions can reconcile the seeming tension between them. By understanding that the central wrong of war is that war is the condition which force decides, Ripstein contends that the law and morality of war are in fact aligned; the rules governing the conduct of hostilities must apply equally to parties in the right and parties in the wrong in an armed conflict, because the prohibitions outlined in the rules governing war are prohibitions that restrain war. Ripstein's method of analysis and the substantive argument he puts forward offer an opportunity for rigorous critical engagement in subsequent essays by commentators Hathaway, Kutz, and McMahan, followed by a response from Ripstein.