Regina Sibylle Surber

This article argues that the reduction of the morality of killing in war to the morality of killing in self-defense by ‘reductive-individualist’ revisionist just war theories is inconsistent, because when those theories apply the moral notion of self-defense to the morality of killing in war, they do not preserve the two conceptions of the “individual” inherent in this notion. The article demonstrates this inconsistency in two steps: First, it disentangles the two conceptions of the individual inherent to the notion of self-defense, namely (1) that the individual is an “entity” potentially bearing a right to self-defense (unlike, e.g., groups) and (2) that the individual is a “particular,” where “particular” signifies that every human is different from every other human. The conception of the individual as a “particular” is tied to the idea that a justification grounded in a rule of self-defense is necessarily “concrete,” in the sense of referring to individually given and specific perceptions or cases, as opposed to “abstract,” in the sense of being detached from specific perceptions or cases. The article then demonstrates that reductive individualism reflects the first notion of the individual, but not the second. Due to the “loss” of the individual as a “particular”, the reductive-individualist reduction of the morality of killing in war to the morality of killing in self-defense is inconsistent, and hence its justification of killing in war grounded in self-defense is not concrete. Since such a justification must be concrete, reductive individualism cannot offer a justification for belligerent killing.

This article argues that military conditioning (MC) systematically violates the human dignity of soldiers. The argument relies on an absolute deontologist account of human dignity understood as a claim-right to live in self-respect, which is a right to decide on one’s own behalf about, and to be in control of, essential aspects of one’s own life. The article claims that MC violates soldiers’ dignity so understood because the largely automatic physical killing reflex that MC instills aims to remove their freedom of choice to kill or not to kill, while the MC practices that rationalize the killing of opponents aim to subvert soldiers’ moral deliberation in relation to this behavior. MC thus aims to take away soldiers’ control over a very essential aspect of human life: the decision whether to take life in war. Thereby, MC systematically violates their human dignity. The article concludes with a proposal for an amendment to international law that would allow legal institutions to do more justice to soldiers’ dignity.

This article presents an analytic critique of the predominant revisionist theoretical paradigm of just war (henceforth: revisionism). This is accomplished by means of a precise description and explanation of the practicability problem that confronts it, namely that soldiers that revisionism would deem “unjust” are bound to fail to fulfil the duties that revisionism imposes on them, because these duties are overdemanding. The article locates the origin of the practicability problem in revisionism’s overidealized conception of a soldier as an individual rational agent analogous to the aggressor or defender in a case of lethal self-defense, who is capable of reflecting on the morality of his status in war and of the killing he performs and thus of recognizing his revisionist duties. Revisionism, however, ignores the following fact: Killing in war is not a natural human behavior. This is why training soldiers to kill is—and arguably always has been—a necessity for the existence of war and the killing that occurs in it. Moreover, this training involves a certain level of moral desensitization to violence whose goal is to prevent soldiers from thoroughly reflecting on the morality of the killing they engage in. Hence, war and killing can only exist if soldiers are trained in such a way that they do not reflect on whether they could be addressees of revisionist duties in the first place. This means that military training is a “constitutive condition” of soldiers and war, which is why it cannot excuse their noncompliance with revisionist duties, thus making these duties categorically overdemanding. The argument here draws on the paradigmatic example of modern US military killing conditioning (MC), but embeds it into a broader military-historical perspective that describes how soldiers have always needed to be mentally and morally influenced in order to enable war and killing. The article’s explanation of revisionism’s practicability problem has a constructive consequence for future theory-building in the ethics of war: It implies that a potentially revised ethical theory of war must necessarily analyze the institutions that allocate belligerent resources, if it aims to morally assess battlefield behavior in a practicable manner.

The essay reviews the digital emergency measures many governments have adopted in an attempt to curb Covid-19. It argues that those ‘virologically legitimized’ measures may infringe the human right to privacy and mark the transition into a world of global surveillance. At this possible turning point in human history, panic and latent fear seem to fog much needed farsightedness. Leaving the current state of emotional paralysis and restarting to critically assess the digital pandemic management can serve as an emergency break against drifting into a new era of digital monitoring.