On the 15th of May of 2024, the Uppsala Association of Foreign Affairs, in collaboration with the Philosophical Union in Uppsala, welcomed Dr. Isaac Taylor, Associate Senior Lecturer in Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University, to discuss about the illusions in the ethics of war.
For nearly as long as humans have waged war, they have discussed the ethics of war. Yet our existing international legal system governing armed conflict is built on a number of illusions about what is morally permissible in warfare. This talk will consider what members of the armed forces should do in light of this claim. Should they continue to act on the basis of these illusions, or should they resort to first-level moral principles to guide their action?
Rejecting existing accounts of the ethics of participation in warfare, it argues for an account of “combatant morality”, as it can be called, that encourages caution in waging war, in light of various potential undesirable effects that can arise from developing an institution that justifies the resort to violence in ethical terms. While the theory arrived at might be viewed as a variant of pacifism, it is shown to avoid some of the standard objections that have been raised against pacifists in the past.
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