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Opens a symposium on Rodin's War and Self-Defense (New York: Oxford U Press, 2003) by posing the text's main question: How can the concept of self-defense provide justification for war? Arguing that there is no valid analogy between self-defense & national defense, a theory of self-defense is posited, maintaining that self-defense comprises normative relations between four elements: the subject of the right, the object against whom the right is held, the act that is the content of the right, the end of the self-defense. It is asserted that the best way to justify self-defense is via an account of the interaction of rights in situations of violent conflict. This understanding is extended to a notion of national defense able to justify war, raising the issue of the two levels of war, whereby war can be described as a relation among persons & a relation among nations or states. A reductive & an analogical strategy for potentially vindicating a right of national defense are then considered & found wanting. It is contended that possessing a right of defense against an aggressor state does not include possessing a right to kill soldiers of that state unless they are normatively responsible for some action that alienated their rights. This is so unless, at the very least, the traditional just war claim that soldiers are exempt from moral responsibility for taking part in an unjust war is forsaken. A call is made for an international ethics able to discern the relationship between the rights & values of states & those of individuals & to resolve any conflicts. J. Zendejas

When the Bush and Blair administrations justified the 2003 war on Iraq as an act of preemptive self-defense, this was greeted in many quarters with understandable skepticism. How can the right of self-defense be legitimately invoked when no prior aggressive attack has occurred and there is no evidence that one is imminent? This question, much debated in the months leading up to the war, invites us to reflect critically on the content of the right of self-defense. Yet there is a deeper question to be asked about the idea of a war of self-defense; namely, how is it that war can be considered an act of self-defense at all? How exactly is it that the concept of self-defense can provide a justification for war? It is this question that I ask in War and Self-Defense and the answer I arrive at is a surprising one.

First imagine a case in which a person uses violence in self-defense; then imagine a case in which two people engage in self-defense against a threat they jointly face. Continue to imagine further cases in which increasing numbers of people act with increasing coordination to defend both themselves and each other against a common threat, or a range of threats they face together. What you are imagining is a spectrum of cases that begins with acts of individual self-defense and, as the threats become more complex and extensive, the threatened individuals more numerous, and their defensive action more integrated, eventually reaches cases involving a scale of violence that is constitutive of war. But if war, at least in some instances, lies on a continuum with individual self- and other-defense, and if acts of individual self- and other-defense can sometimes be morally justified, then war can in principle be morally justified as well. It follows that the only coherent forms of pacifism are those that reject the permissibility of individual self- or other-defense—for example, those based on an absolute prohibition of violence or killing.

Part of a symposium on David Rodin's War and Self-Defense (New York: Oxford U Press, 2003) challenges five of his objections to the reductive strategy of defending the permissibility of war by appealing to rights of self-defense. Contrary to the idea that if reductive strategy were correct than it would be unnecessary or disproportionate to kill, it is contended that the reductive strategy can in principle justify war in response to lesser aggression. It is argued that killing need not be a disproportionate response to a lesser aggression & the requirement of retreat does not apply when capitulation would involve losses preventable by lethal & proportionate resistance. In acknowledging that the moral basis for killing in war is distinct from the moral basis for individual self-defense, it is demonstrated that the reductive strategy is incompatible with traditional just war theory; however, it is argued that it is just war theory that is false. Rodin's assertion that national defense is in irreconcilable tension with humanitarian intervention is rejected, arguing that the reductive strategy sees no right of self-defense for a state persecuting its citizens, therefore its sovereignty is forfeit. Once it desists from persecuting its citizens, any continued intervention becomes unjustified aggression that then can be defended against. J. Zendejas