How We Fight: Ethics in War

As indicated by the editors, the ten essays in this volume “arose from a conference on just war theory held at the University of Sheffield [United Kingdom] in August 2010” (vii). The authors are all academics and all but two are philosophers; the outliers are professors of law and of politics. The emphasis is indeed on just war theory, not investigation of the development of the just war tradition over many centuries in theological, philosophical, or legal contexts, or of its application to historical cases from the remote or recent past. One should not look here for scholarly illumination, say, of the justification given for the invasion of Iraq by the United States and the United Kingdom in 2003. This despite the fact that four of the essayists are employed at universities in the U.S. and two in the U.K., with the remainder representing Sweden, Denmark, Australia, and Israel