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The central contention of this essay is that a just cause for war is a wrong that is of a type that can make those responsible for it morally liable to military attack as a means of preventing or rectifying it. This claim has many implications that conflict with assumptions of the currently orthodox theory of the just war. Among the implications explored in the text are that the requirement of just cause is logically and morally prior to all the other requirements of a just war, that this requirement governs all phases of a war and not just the resort to war, that it is thus impermissible to continue to fight a war once the just cause or causes have been achieved, that it is impermissible to fight at all in a war that lacks a just cause, that just cause is a restriction on the type of aim that may be pursued by means of war and is not a matter of scale, that a war that lacks a just cause may be morally justified even if it is not just, and that a belligerent can pursue both just and unjust causes in the same war, which may then have elements or phases that are just and other elements or phases that are unjust.

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

Intervention often violates both respect for state sovereignty and the right to self-determination. McMahan focuses on the latter ethical dimension rather than the former political and legal one, although his claims have important implications for issues of state sovereignty. He challenges the common assumption that respect for self-determination requires an almost exceptionless doctrine of nonintervention by first defining the notions of "intervention" and "self-determination," and then analyzing Walzer's doctrine of nonintervention. The recognition that there are different ideals of self-determination results in a less rigid and more permissive doctrine of nonintervention.