The doctrinal philosophy of war essay

Carl von Clausewitz, painting by Karl Wilhelm Wach. Perhaps the greatest and most influential work in the philosophy of war is On War by Carl von Clausewitz.

Saba Bazargan-Forward and Samuel C. The Ethics of War: Essays, Oxford University Press,pp. Reviewed by Uwe Steinhoff, University of Hong Kong On the back cover the book is advertised as "The authoritative anthology on the ethics and law of war.

While the best-edited volumes on just war theory focus on a particular issue for instance, preventive war, humanitarian intervention, or legitimate authoritythis volume does not really form a coherent whole.

In fact, Nancy Sherman's "Moral Recovery After War" has very little to do with either the laws or the ethics of war, dealing instead, as she herself acknowledges, with "philosophical moral psychology" Moreover, the contributions by Adil Ahmad Haque on the principle of discrimination, of Kai Draper on the doctrine of double effect, and of Larry May on the rights of soldiers have appeared in very similar if not almost identical versions in other publications by these authors as chapters of their books in the first two cases, and as a contribution to another edited volume in the latter case.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with these three chapters on the contrary, all are intelligent contributions. But in my view, such extensive recycling would only be justified if the three chapters had either established themselves as classics, which is certainly not the case given that these publications are very recent, or would clearly contribute to an "authoritative" or at least representative picture of the ethics of war.

However, I see no indication for this.

MOLTKE’S MISSION COMMAND PHILOSOPHY IN THE. TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: FALLACY OR VERITY? A thesis presented to the Faculty of the U.S. Army. Command and General Staff College in partial. fulfillment of the requirements for the. degree. Doctrinal background In , as a member of one of the transformation . Essay about A Philosophy of the Impersonal - For a Philosophy of the Impersonal 1. Never more than today is the notion of person the unavoidable reference for all discourses, be they philosophical, political, or juridical in nature, that assert the value of human life as such. The Doctrinal Philosophy of War Essay - The Battle of Kasserine Pass was an engagement that came about during WWII, had a number of encounters that came about around the Kasserine Pass, which was a gap that was the width of about two miles in the Atlas Mountains.

In any case, given that these chapters have appeared in similar form elsewhere, I will not discuss them further here. Furthermore, I only mention in passing Andrew Altman's very good chapter on the law and morality of targeted killing via drones which together with Draper's and Haque's contributions is grouped in the laws of war section of the book.

Instead, I focus on the remaining philosophical contributions. These contributions, according to the editors, belong to a new, allegedly "revisionist" school of just war theory: Bazargan-Forward and Rickless provide no textual evidence in support of these claims.

This is not surprising as these claims -- although they have for some time now been the basis of self-proclaimed "revisionism -- are simply wrong. Be that as it may, let us have a closer look at some of the individual contributions.

Jeff McMahan believes in "liability justifications" for the infliction of harm. That is, he thinks that a person's being liable to the infliction of a certain harm which means that she has forfeited the right that the harm not be inflicted provides a defeasible justification for inflicting this harm on her.

Philosophers and thinkers

McMahan's solution to this problem is to suggest a third kind of proportionality. In the past, he has already distinguished between "wide proportionality" and "narrow proportionality," where the former refers to harms inflicted on threats or aggressors, and the latter to harms inflicted on bystanders.

Yet these conceptual innovations are unnecessary. The actual distinction, at least in law, is not between different kinds of proportionality, but between different justifications: In any case, McMahan now suggests solving the problem by an appeal to "proportionality in the aggregate" 25, emphasis in the original.

However, this solution seems to be entirely ad hoc and to rely solely on McMahan's intuitions, without any theoretical foundation or further explanation.

This is precisely David Rodin's charge against McMahan's approach Rodin's own solution to the problem involves what he calls a "lesser evil obligation" Bear in mind that, as already mentioned, a liability justification is supposed to be defeasible.

It is, for example, defeasible if acting on the liability justification would have consequences that are bad enough to override the justification. Regarding such consequences, Rodin states that "harm inflicted on a liable person is still an evil from an impersonal view" Accordingly, if the number of liable persons is large enough, the overall evil that would be produced by acting on the liberty to kill all these persons can override this liberty -- thus producing an all-things-considered lesser evil obligation not to do what one has a Hohfeldian liberty to do.

Unfortunately, the quite correct idea that harming a person constitutes an evil is incompatible with the very idea of a liability justification: Yet, the idea that a "right bearer is all things considered obligated to behave in a certain way toward a person despite the fact that they have the right with respect to that party to behave otherwise" 33 is most definitely not novel at all; it has been known in the German legal literature for at least years.

Richard Arneson sets out to resolve what Seth Lazar has called "the responsibility dilemma. Lazar rejects outright McMahan's responsibility account of liability that is Lazar's external criticism but makes it very clear that his "critique of McMahan's argument" in terms of the responsibility dilemma "is internal" to that account.

Accordingly, a solution would require a demonstration that McMahan's responsibility account is able to escape the dilemma. This, however, is precisely what Arneson does. In fact, he offers two different accounts of liability which are supposed to interact with each other.MOLTKE’S MISSION COMMAND PHILOSOPHY IN THE.

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: FALLACY OR VERITY? A thesis presented to the Faculty of the U.S. Army. Command and General Staff College in partial. fulfillment of the requirements for the. degree. Doctrinal background In , as a member of one of the transformation .

It was a lengthy statement of her philosophy and history, an account of speaking directly with God that concluded with a prophecy of the ruin of the court and the colony in retribution for their.

Medieval philosophy is the philosophy in the era now known as medieval or the Middle Ages, the period roughly extending from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century A.D.

to the Renaissance in the 16th century. Clausewitz's personality has been treated in a great many different ways. To the British military historian Michael Howard he was a "soldier's soldier" who wrote a practical military philosophy aimed at practical military men. Military doctrine is the expression of how military forces contribute to campaigns, major operations, battles, and engagements..

It is a guide to action, rather than hard and fast initiativeblog.comne provides a common frame of reference across the military. It helps standardize operations, facilitating readiness by establishing common ways of .

Doctrinal, philosophical, and religious prose

The Philosophy Of Relationship And It 's Which Means Through The Eyes Of Aristotle For example during war, the two extremes would be for a soldier to be rash or cowardly, but being courageous is the accepted golden mean.

More about Essay on Aristotle and the Doctrine of the Mean. Aristotle and the Doctrine of the Mean Essay Words.