Ethics and War: A Critical Intervention

There has been renewed interest in the relationship between ethics and war. Traditionally, it has been thought that a robust set of principles could reduce the overall destructiveness of war but a growing body of more critical scholarship argues that it may actually enhance it. This article reviews three recent books on the ethics of war by Adil Ahmad Haque, Maja Zehfuss and James Eastwood. Defending more conventional accounts, Haque sets out to develop a normative framework that can be used to assess, clarify and refine the existing rules. Zehfuss and Eastwood, by contrast, argue that the invocation of ethics may work to legitimise, normalise and obscure the effects of this violence. This article suggests ways in which these texts might help to reinvigorate debates about ethics and war, opening up lines of inquiry that were previously foreclosed.