According to the Just War tradition a war can only be just if two sets of principles are satisfied. First there is the jus ad bellum. These principles tell us when it is just to start a war. There has to be a good reason or a just cause in order for a war to be morally permissible (self-defense, defense of others, putting a stop to human rights violations). The decision to go to war has to be t...

The views expressed in the SGIA Research Working Papers Series are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the School or of Durham University. These wide ranging Research Working Papers are products of the scholarship taking place in SGIA and are disseminated in this early form to encourage debate on the important academic and policy issues of our time. Copyright belongs ...

139 words] Rule-consequentialism is an ethical theory that does a better job than any other of justifying our moral intuitions from a single overarching principle. My dissertation defends a novel formulation of this view as an account of a good person. First, I argue that a rule-consequentialist does “what a good person would do,” and that if everyone were like her, the world would be as good a...

Radical environmental groups engaged in ecotage—or economic sabotage of inanimate objects thought to be complicit in environmental destruction—have been identified as the leading domestic terrorist threat in the post-9/11 “war on terror.” This article examines the case for extending the conventional definition of terrorism to include attacks not only against noncombatants, but also against inan...

This is the second paper of two on the role of autonomy in the unmanned systems revolution currently underway and affecting military forces around the globe. In the last paper, the authors considered the implications of autonomy on the legal obligations of military forces and their ability to meet these obligations, primarily through a survey of the domestic law of a number of drone wielding na...

During the 1640s, the Irish Franciscan theologian John Punch taught his theology students in Rome that war against Protestants was made just by their religion alone. Jesuits like Luis de Molina identified the holy war tradition in which Punch stood as a Scotist one, and insisted that the Scotists had confused the natural and supernatural spheres. Among Irishmen, Punch was unusual. The main Iris...