Dimitrios Kyritsis (University of Essex) has posted To Be Born in Times like These (Jus Cogens (2022)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
In this article I raise some worries about one of Alec Walen’s key claims in his very interesting new book, The Mechanics of Claims and Permissible Killing in War. This is the claim that it is permissible to cause defensive harm to innocent threateners in warfare. I argue that this position sits uneasily with another proposition that plays a central role in Walen’s account, namely that the rightness of causing defensive harm to someone partly depends on whether that person should own the bad luck of being a threat. I claim that being a non-combatant who aids an unjust aggressor is typically a matter of bad luck that one should not have to own, the result of one’s largely involuntary membership in a coercive political order. This claim, if sound, casts doubt on a central contention that Walen's theory shares with much contemporary just war theory, namely that the permissibility of harming others in war, combatants or non-combatants, crucially hangs on whether one is fighting a just or unjust war. In turn, it provides some support for the traditional view in just war theory, commonly associated with Michael Walzer, which argues for a moral symmetry between the jus in bello rights on the just and unjust side.
Link to the book in the abstract.
