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| 1 |
ID:
151648
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| Summary/Abstract |
How do members of the general public come to regard some uses of violence as legitimate and others as illegitimate? And how do they learn to use widely recognised normative principles in doing so such as those encapsulated in the laws of war and debated by just war theorists? This article argues that popular cinema is likely to be a major source of influence especially through a subgenre that I call ‘Just War Cinema’. Since the 1950s, many films have addressed the moral drama at the centre of contemporary Just War Theory through the figure of the enemy in the Second World War, offering often explicit and sophisticated treatments of the relationship between the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello that anticipate or echo the arguments of philosophers. But whereas Cold War-era films may have supported Just War Theory’s ambitions to shape public understanding, a strongly revisionary tendency in Just War Cinema since the late 1990s is just as likely to thwart them. The potential of Just War Cinema to vitiate efforts to shape wider attitudes is a matter that both moral philosophers and those concerned with disseminating the law of war ought to pay close attention to.
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| 2 |
ID:
092437
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Recently, some commentators have argued that the word 'terrorist' should be abandoned as it has become overloaded with undesirable 'rhetorical' connotations. This view is premised on the assumption that an adequate distinction may be drawn between principled, 'logical' usages and merely 'rhetorical' ones. This article argues that the use of the word 'terrorist' normally has a 'rhetorical' aspect and that theorists must therefore find ways to distinguish between principled and unprincipled rhetorical deployments. I distinguish three rhetorical possibilities for using the word 'terrorist': the first invokes interlocutors' established background commitments to moral and descriptive norms, seeking agreement on the application of the word to a particular case; the second seeks to innovate, challenging either moral norms, descriptive criteria or, less often, the illocutionary force of the term; the third resists innovation but deploys the term in metaphorical ways for moral-rhetorical emphasis. Based on this taxonomy, the article reviews both polemical and scholary debates about definition and then proposes pragmatic, rhetorical considerations for adjudicating between competing definitional arguments. Finally, I review the implications of these considerations for the contentious issue of whether or not the term 'terrorist' properly applies to states.
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| 3 |
ID:
079906
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2007.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Can interventions be used to assist oppressed peoples in overthrowing their governments? According to the influential non-interventionist arguments of J.S. Mill and Michael Walzer, reform interventions are incompatible with a principle of national self-determination. This article challenges Mill and Walzer, arguing that, in limited cases, interventions could in principle support revolutionary movements in such a way as to facilitate democratic transition. It does so by tracing a lack of conceptual clarity back to Mill's argument in `A Few Words on Non-Intervention'. In particular, it is argued that Mill's and consequently Walzer's account of domestic revolutionary conflicts fails to distinguish the salience of military from properly political forces. Mill's Considerations on Representative Government provides the starting point for a clearer set of distinctions through which to reconstruct the principle of non-intervention on a stronger footing
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