You Tube Theology

The last twenty years have seen a significant shift in philosophical work on the ethics of war. Many – perhaps a majority – of writers now reject what we can call the ‘traditional’ account of the ethics of war, which draws sharp distinctions between states and citizens, between soldiers and civilians, between the justness of the war and the permissibility of fighting it, and, more generally, between the ethics of war and the ethics of ordinary life. And yet the traditional view continues to dominate legal, political and public discourse about war.
In this talk, Frowe suggests that the war in Ukraine throws the implausibility of this view into especially stark relief. Killing Ukrainian soldiers is as bad as killing Ukrainian civilians. Russian soldiers act wrongly in killing Ukrainian soldiers, even if they are following orders and those orders are legal. We do not need a special ‘ethics of war’ to reveal these truths. They are made apparent by the lights of our ordinary moral thinking.

Helen Frowe is a Professor of Practical Philosophy and Knut and Alice Wallenberg Scholar at Stockholm University, where she directs the Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace. She works on moral and political philosophy and is Honorary Chair of the Society for Applied Philosophy. Her work on the ethics of war and self-defence has been published in Ethics, Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Journal of Applied Philosophy, Law and Philosophy, Criminal Law and Philosophy, Journal of Moral Philosophy, as two monographs (Defensive Killing, Oxford University Press; The Ethics of War and Peace: An Introduction, Routledge) and in numerous edited collections. Frowe is also co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Ethics of War.

Photo: Det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi/Thomas B. Eckhoff