May 28, 2025
Some guy a month ago asked for underrated philosophers - I want to push this a little further. Give me here your most obscure (but still worth reading) philosophers, the real hidden gems.
I'm biased since its my area of study, but a lot of contemporary philosophy that I love treads the thin disciplinary line between the aforementioned and International Relations theory. I'm always jabbering on about it but Seth Lazar's Sparing Civilians is excellent (if a smidge on the technical side), and basically completely unknown outside the everlasting debates of Revisionist v Walz-ian Just War theorists.
aenesidemus1 year ago
Sounds interesting, I'll add it to the list... what is the everlasting debate?
At the risk of being extraordinarily reductive, because this is a dense subject you could easily spend a semester teaching a class on: Michael Walzer outlined most of the 'Classical' stance on contemporary Just War theory (if you haven't heard the term before, it's easiest to think of it as 'justified' war or war with 'just' cause) in his book Just and Unjust War, back in the 70s. He makes a lot of claims based on the overarching notion that the moral circumstances of war are exceptional and, as such, require separate understandings from everyday morality. A good throughline example would be moral criminality for the individual soldier. Walzer believes in a separation between the morality of a cause and the morality of actions made by individuals in service of said cause (usually referred to as 'jus ad bellum' and 'jus in bello' respectively), and this separation is key to allowing this moral exceptionalism to exist. Therefore, even if they were fighting for an unjust cause, if the individual soldier were to fight justly (i.e. abiding by the rules of war within whatever meagre or major influence they have), their actions would be permissible. This is just one example of one of his concepts, but it hopefully gives a broad enough idea of what he's on about. I'd consider the Revisionist movement, led foremost by Jeff McMahan's writing, to be a reaction against Walzer's fundamental notion of moral exceptionalism. For example, McMahan posits in one of his papers that a soldier fighting for a just cause has not actually done anything that would make killing them permissible, so a soldier killing on behalf of an unjust cause is inherently complicit in a crime. Or, in challenge to Walzer's definition of war itself as 'combat between combatants' (therefore declaring any attack on any non-combatant unjust), McMahan argues that certain militarily or politically relevant non-combatants would actually be more permissible targets than the naive soldier tricked into conflict by the propaganda of their state. If I had to sum it up in a sentence, this corner of debate is primarily on the level of moral responsibility held by the individual, with (relative to a theoretical centrist, of which there are many) classical theorists undervaluing the role of the individual and revisionists overvaluing it. I must stress further, though, that everything I've said is a minuscule vertical slice, basically only a single issue, though hopefully one that gets the gist of it across. If you want a more comprehensive version of this, McMahan's paper 'The Ethics of Killing in War' is, while coming from his perspective, surprisingly comprehensive in giving a short and sharp introduction to the classical perspective he argues against, and obviously goes into great detail on his qualms with it. And Lazar is a niche but oft-cited modern theorist who argues for something of a return to classical theory, especially concerning the sanctity of non-combatant immunity, which is what Sparing Civilians is entirely about. This didn't turn out as short as I wanted, but I hope it makes sense.
aenesidemus1 year ago
I hope this isn't asked too much, but what is the point? I.e.: soldiers are not checking through an academic paper before killing/sparing someone, okay, but this is not to be expected. The end goal of any paper on ethics in war is, if it is being honest, to make sure war is more ethical by finding out what should or should not be done, and then getting that either to be done or not done. If not directly, then how? It must happen someway roughly like this: a govt staffer knows of the paper, summarizes some of it in a memo to their boss, the boss, who is some sort of analyst maybe, gives some recommendation to a top military guy, who orders his colonels to do this and that, and it gets passed down to the troops maybe. Even assuming everyone cares about this being passed on, it gets so diluted that it has no influence on the real action of war. So really, what is the point of this research? It seems to be more a point of making people feel like they are serving a purpose in a greater system, which is in essence the same as that system having a purpose. The academic is made to feel he is Doing Something About The Injustice Of War, the staffer that he is Relaying Important Information, the analyst that he is Making Ethical Recommendations, the military brass - they must know the frivolity of this, the colonels are following orders (one can imagine them joking among each other, "they told us again not to kill civilians today, ha ha..."), the soldiers are half following orders but half (or more) operating on pure instinct... the whole purpose of the system being first, to win the war, and second, to show to the public a face of justness - which is not the same as to be just. Think: which is a larger danger for the careers of everyone involved, of being unethical but seeming ethical, or of seeming unethical regardless of being? If I was more cynical, I might even say that the end goal of these academics was not to make wars just, but to write the best book on how to make wars just, because the only the second will advance your career. (Which might cause them more stress: a strong refutation of some section of their work, or a typo in the introduction that changes the meaning to advocate for an extremely unethical policy?)
Here's an idea I think you're not considering. Suppose State A has defeated State B in a war, and the leaders of State A believe that State B was fighting an unjust cause. How should State A treat the low-ranking infantry of State B who were just following orders? Do you punish them or do you forgive them, now that the war is done? Your answers on the questions of this debate have relevant implications, and those decisions are very much concentrated in the hands of a few powerful state actors.
I mean, sure, but I think you could say this about any theoretical concept ever written; all philosophy is vaporwave to a certain capacity. Your average member of the Western world never read Kant, but the shape of 'Perpetual Peace' still affected the next century of politicking that formed into the Liberal international order that then curdled into neoliberalism and so on. The point of these particular works is a pretty minor niche, as both you and xdye say, to hope that wars are fought ethically, and to argue where the moral responsibility lies. Will everyone in government read them? No. But my old professor worked in the Australian Department of Defence and directly influenced decisions by high-level state actors, and it's not hard to assume that equivalents constantly scouring thought on these subjects exist high up in all governments. Does the world fundamentally change every time one is published? Unfortunately not, but I'd imagine that a guy like Seth Lazar is hoping to persuade important advisors (there are fewer steps between paper -> decision maker than you might think, though there are still a few) away from least-worst decision making, rather than instructing any given soldier on the ground of how to conduct themselves. Or, xdye put it well, it can be more about the government's perception of enemy combatants than their own actions. Does any of it work? I don't know! But, in my opinion, it is better to formulate the shape of best practice as something to strive for than to accept that people will operate 100% in their own interests 100% of the time. Regardless, good question!
Thanks for sharing, and I like the profile pic!
A little known faggot named ~specialberry~
aenesidemus1 year ago
where's the 800 page incomprehensible treatise at then, hmm?
It will be a lit.salon exclusive publication. Watch this space. Gay sex will never be the same.
The Phenomenology of Bottoming Out
I definitely feel that I ought to reread this paper by Katia Vavova called "Debunking Evolutionary Debunking", which is relevant to Sharon Street's critique of Korsgaard's Kantian metaethics. https://philarchive.org/rec/VAVDED - "Some guy"
Looks interesting though niche. Interesting tic of analytic philosophers - "My aim in this paper is to show that no plausible evolutionary debunking argument can both have force against the value realist and not collapse into a more general skeptical argument" - how so many argue against their opponents by saying, if the opponent's views are embraced, it leads to skepticism, but yet never stop to consider skepticism as reasonable, instead only ever using it in a modus tollens. Too many papers I have read say something along the lines of "I have very good reasons for rejecting the more general skeptical argument in this case, but it is beyond the scope of this paper etc". I'll read it and perhaps we can discuss it.