Just and Unjust Warriors

David Rodin is Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Changing Character of War Program, University of Oxford, and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, the Australian National University. His research covers a wide range of topics in moral philosophy including the ethics of war and conflict, business ethics, and international justice. His is the author of War and Self-Defense (OUP 2002), which was awarded the American Philosophical Association Sharp Prize, and is co-editor of The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions (Ashgate, 2006), and of Preemption (OUP 2007). Henry Shue is Senior Research Fellow Emeritus at Merton College, Oxford; from 2002-2007 he was Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. Best known for Basic Rights (Princeton, 1980; 2nd Ed., 1996), he has written a number of highly influential articles including "Torture" (1978), "Exporting Hazards" (1981), "Mediating Duties" (1988), "Subsistence Emissions and Luxury Emissions" (1993), "War" (2003), and "Limiting Sovereignty" (2004). He continues to write on the ethical aspects of climate change and war, with a book called Limiting War currently in progress.

This volume is excellent. It is comprehensive and informative. Just and Unjust Warriors mostly delivers on its promise of tightly argued chapters that respond to each other. It gives us more to think about and is accessible to a wide audience. Even though it will be more interesting to those readers with some background in just war theory, it is also recommended for those who want simply to think seriously about the moral rules applicable to war.

• 1. Introduction ; 2. The Morality of War and the Law of War ; 3. The Moral Inequality of Soldiers: Why Jus in Bello Asymmetry is Half Right ; 4. Fearful Symmetry ; 5. Do We Need a "Morality of War"? ; 6. How to Judge Soldiers Whose Cause in Unjust ; 7. Moral equality, victimhood and the sovereignty symmetry problem ; 8. The Status of Combatants ; 9. Is the Independent Application of Jus in Bello the way to Limit War? ; 10. Just War and Regular War: Competing Paradigms ; 11. A Presumption of the Moral Equality of Combatants: a Citizen Soldier' Perspective ; 12. The Principle of Equal Application of the Laws of War