Shannon Ford

The basic thrust of the criticism of jus ad vim thus far, whether from the conventional or revisionist just war accounts, is that it weakens key jus ad bellum standards while adding nothing to the jus in bello criteria of discrimination and proportionality. In contrast, the argument this article puts forward is that moral justifications for the use of military force under jus ad vim conditions are more nuanced than conventional just war thinking currently allows. It is reasonable to recognize that situations of conflict short-of-war will require a range of moderated responses, including military options. To support my argument, I examine Australia's armed intervention in the Solomon Islands, which helped subdue the civil unrest that had destabilized the country from late 1998. If we agree that it is sometimes necessary to use military capabilities for a function that is akin to policing, we should also acknowledge that there is a significant risk that we end up transporting the ‘warrior mindset’ about using lethal force along with the military personnel, equipment and training. In such cases, we should apply more appropriate and consistent ethical constraints on the military when it operates outside the context of war.

The conventional view of Just War thinking holds that militaries operate under “special” moral rules in war. Conventional Just War thinking establishes a principled approach to such moral exceptionalism in order to prevent arbitrary or capricious uses of military force. It relies on the notion that soldiers are instruments of the state, which is a view that has been critiqued by the Revisionist movement. The Revisionist critique rightly puts greater emphasis on the moral agency of individual soldiers: they are not mere instruments of the state. Although Revisionism has something particularly important to contribute when applied to cases that are short-of-war, where an individual agent’s moral culpability plays a greater role, soldiers fighting wars are not wholly autonomous moral agents. An Institutionalist approach that responds to Revisionist criticisms is a plausible alternative to the conventional Just War account for grounding the moral exceptionalism of war. For the Institutionalist, soldiers are moral agents with state-imposed obligations whose fundamental responsibility is the performance of the proper moral ends of the military institution they serve. If this is true, then soldiers have a moral obligation to be attentive to the moral corruption of the military institution of which they are a part.