The Surrey Centre for Law and Philosophy invites you to an online seminar to be delivered by Cécile Fabre (Oxford), on the topic of the ethics of military intervention in interstate conflicts.

The Zoom meeting will begin at 16:00 (UK time) on Nov 10. A link will be provided HERE closer to the date.

(If you have any problems registering through Eventbrite, please simply click the link above at the time of the event.)

Abstract: Suppose that state A attacks state D and that the ensuing military conflict threatens international peace and security – thereby triggering a global crisis. Does this provide third parties with a justification for militarily intervening in that conflict? To international public lawyers, if by third parties one means `the UN Security Council’ or `states so authorized by the Council’, then the well-rehearsed and obvious answer `yes’. Just war theorists are not in the fortunate position of being as clearly verdictive. Compared to the ethics of humanitarian intervention and the ethics of national self-defence, the ethics of third-party military involvment in interstate conflicts remains strikingly under-developed in contemporary just war theory. Michael Walzer’s defence of neutrality in Just and Unjust Wars is the exception that confirms the rule.

My aim in this paper is to defend the view that the protection of of international peace and security is a just cause for third-party military intervention – for short, Intervention. As we shall see, however, a defence of Intervention requires fairly substantive revisions to key tenets of just war theory. I first sketch an account of the conditions under which an interstate conflict is or has the potential to threaten international peace and security such as to be, or to have the potential of becoming, a global crisis if left unchecked. I show that to defend Intervention is tantamount to defending preventive military force, deterrent military force, and the resort to force in defence of rights violations of which are not standardly regarded as just causes for military action.

Much work has been done in the thirty years on, respectively, the ethics of preventive war, and the ethics of waging war against threats which do not take the form of an armed attack (such as wars in defence of rights to the basic necessity of life.) Instead of retreading these relatively familiar debate, in the remainder of the paper, I focus on the use of military force as a deterrent. I end the paper with some observations on Walzer’s defense of neutrality.

Cécile Fabre is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. She is also Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and affiliated with the Faculty of Philosophy, the Department of Politics and International Relations, and Nuffield College, Oxford. Prof Fabre’s research interests are in theories of distributive justice; the philosophy of democracy; just war theory; the ethics of foreign policy, with particular focus on the ethics of economic statecraft and the ethics of espionage. She am currently working on issues concerning reparative justice; doxastic wrongs; the ethics of gossip, and the moral and political philosophy of cultural heritage.