What do you think?
Rate this book
Killing in War
Killing a person is in general among the most seriously wrongful forms of action, yet most of us accept that it can be permissible to kill people on a large scale in war. Does morality become more permissive in a state of war? Jeff McMahan argues that conditions in war make no difference to what morality permits and the justifications for killing people are the same in war as they are in other contexts, such as individual self-defence. This view is radically at odds with the traditional theory of the just war and has implications that challenge common sense views. McMahan argues, for example, that it is wrong to fight in a war that is unjust because it lacks a just cause.
264 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
17 people are currently reading
327 people want to read
About the author
Jeff McMahan
20 books38 followersJeff McMahan is an American philosopher. He completed a BA degree in English literature at the University of the South (Sewanee), then did graduate work in philosophy in Britain as a Rhodes Scholar. He studied first under Jonathan Glover and Derek Parfit at the University of Oxford and was later supervised by Bernard Williams at the University of Cambridge, where he was a research fellow at St. John’s College. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He has written extensively on normative and applied ethics. His publications include The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (Oxford, 2002) and Killing in War (Oxford, 2009), which deals with Just War theory and argues against the deeply held beliefs within the theory, The Morality of Nationalism (co-edited with Robert McKim; Oxford, 1997), and Ethics and Humanity (co-edited with Ann Davis and Richard Keshen; Oxford, 2010).
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
June 14, 2010
There is a great deal to be said about this book, both good and bad, and I think it would take me about 10 pages to do it justice. My first reaction to finishing this book is: why does he not discuss Afghanistan? Never does he take an example from the biggest current war going on right now! Why is that? Many of his examples are hypothetical, but he also has several 'real' war examples (such as Kosovo, the 1991 Iraq - Kuwait war, WWII, etc.) It is certainly sophisticated, but lacks an attention to the non-rational aspects of war, a subject that René Girard or Nancy Sherman does a much better job of describing (or even Sebastian Junger) as if every move in war (or in civilian life) were entirely calculated and rationally thought out with the utmost precision. I am writing a paper on this book right now, so any more on here will have to wait...
August 16, 2020
War is a social disease, a show of mass insanity that one would perceive as absurd, were it not so uncomfortably common. It is a disease we should eradicate. The project to rid ourselves of this disease is a long-term project. It has come forward substantially over centuries, and will probably take generations yet. McMahan’s work gives us important traction forward.
This book is moral philosophy, but McMahan is a practical realist. He rejects the brutal cynicism of a Hobbesian position that moral restraint cannot be applied in war. Nevertheless, he is fully understands our tortuous path to find a way out of the problems we have of armies and nations and wars. Improving human behavior in this realm will require careful thought, and McMahan is diligent. I have been aware of his work for years, and his earliest publication that I use is “The Limits of National Partiality,” his chapter in The Morality of Nationalism, McKim and McMahan, eds. I have returned to it many times to try to understand how we are all, in our own way, nationalists, and what there is to do about it. I will be coming back to Killing in War for years also.
In this book, about war, McMahan is focused on analysis and moral evaluation of the behavior of individual soldiers in war. He is asking, “During war, when should killing be permitted?” He thoroughly lines out each practical concern a soldier faces, focusing on how the individual should act. He is a very organized philosopher, and sets up a clear system for studying, in detail, what is just and moral, within the constraints of what is practical and effective, for a soldier. The fields of what is moral, and what is legal, are necessarily separate matters; McMahan is knowledgeable in both fields, having spent decades studying and lecturing and writing about ethics in war.
The task that McMahan has set for himself is to deconstruct a set of concepts that have, up until now, been the standard model for understanding the moral responsibilities of a soldier during war. According to that standard model, it does not matter which side a soldier is fighting on; her/his moral responsibilities are the same. According to this model, even if it is overwhelmingly obvious that one side in a war is aggressive in clearly wrong ways, and the other side is clearly justifiably defending itself, the ethical rules for the soldiers on both sides should be exactly the same. For example, the Filipino soldiers resisting the brutal invasion and occupation of the Japanese would be expected to toe the line to the same permissions and restrictions that the Japanese soldiers would be expected to follow. Each soldier that followed those rules would be considered to be acting morally. McMahan singles out a specific author, Michael Walzer, whose work represents this tradition. He elaborates a withering critique of Walzer, and proposes that it is time to take apart the fundamentally illogical structure of the “tidy set of rules” that governments and armies and politicians and international bodies have so comfortably used to allow soldiers to rationalize their behavior in war.
The book is too painstakingly thorough to be comfortably summarized. For example, McMahan reviews and appreciates all of Walzer’s reasoning, both practical and moral, prior to setting out his critique of that paradigm. The issues are complex; the individual soldier will often face moral ambivalence. However, there is one key point of disagreement between Walzer and McMahan that powerfully exemplifies McMahan’s understanding of how it is that we must mature, as societies and individuals, to begin to cure the disease of war at the cellular level. Walzer’s claim has been that the moral status of a soldier is unrelated to the issue of whether her/his side in a war is the just side or the unjust side. McMahan disagrees strongly, and argues convincingly that soldiers fighting for the unjust side in a war must be held to task for this.
In international treaties, it is recognized that the only just wars are those that are fought in self-defense. A country defending itself against an unjust invader is, generally, in the right. McMahan recognizes that there is seldom complete clarity, but says that most of the time it is quite clear which side is “just.” The Iraqis were wrong and the Kuwaitis were right. McMahan is not a traditional pacifist. He treats self-defense against an unjust aggressor as a complete justification for killing someone, if necessary to save one’s own life.
It is this very argument that McMahan brings to the individual level of the soldier. He is not at all insensitive to the plight of soldiers, from the draftee to the dupe. He understands the publicly impractical and individually grave consequences that will arise from labeling individual soldiers as blameworthy or liable for what they have done if they are fighting for an unjust cause. He covers all angles of every moral and legal defense, and the unconvincing and/or partial excuses that can be raised to rationalize the killing that is done by soldiers that are fighting for an unjust cause. Among other themes, he cycles constantly back to: 1. the practical problems, after a war, of prosecuting hundreds of thousands of soldiers, 2. the effects of war propaganda and youth on the ignorance of soldiers, and the resulting limitation in what they can know, 3. the duress and threats that the soldiers’ own governments put them under, (which still do not relieve these soldiers from all responsibility for unjust killing), 4. a moral grading of the types of threats that a soldier can face, and an ongoing discussion of proportional response (e.g., it is not moral to obliterate an entire village because there was a bullet fired from one of the houses), 5. the special case of child soldiers, 6. the issue of who is a combatant and who is not, and 7. justifications of “lesser evils.” He carefully dissects and deploys terms such as innocence, liability, culpability, permissibility, diminished responsibility, collateral damage, and civilian target.
This review is only giving the reader a light overview of McMahan’s thoughtful organization and presentation of the moral elements involved in the dilemmas soldiers face in war. It is everyone’s job to disseminate these ideas to the public, and especially to soldiers and the young people who are considering becoming soldiers.
McMahan is well aware that the world is not yet ready to start regularly prosecuting masses of unjust soldiers, or even soldiers who fight in an immoral way for the just side in a war, in criminal proceedings. He knows that we do not yet have the institutional framework for these undertakings. We can’t even yet make institutionally authoritative judgments about the just and unjust side in most wars. Our efforts at this time are best put into trying to prevent wars, and especially unjust wars, wherein no self-defense is at play. If we were to begin prosecuting individual soldiers at this time, there is an understandable likelihood that the only result would be a sad “Victor’s Justice.” Yet McMahan has successfully revealed the weaknesses in Walzer’s structures, and shown us a plausible way to work toward the prevention of unjust wars. If the availability of more ethical and historical information about the individual responsibility and culpability of soldiers fighting unjust wars were distributed widely, in combination with mechanisms, however lightly applied, putting blame where it belongs, on people who kill unjustly, many young people would be deterred from killing unjustly, or even being soldiers for governments that conduct unjust wars. A government that fears that it has the full support of its population and military for unjust wars might not risk the challenge to its authority.
This book is moral philosophy, but McMahan is a practical realist. He rejects the brutal cynicism of a Hobbesian position that moral restraint cannot be applied in war. Nevertheless, he is fully understands our tortuous path to find a way out of the problems we have of armies and nations and wars. Improving human behavior in this realm will require careful thought, and McMahan is diligent. I have been aware of his work for years, and his earliest publication that I use is “The Limits of National Partiality,” his chapter in The Morality of Nationalism, McKim and McMahan, eds. I have returned to it many times to try to understand how we are all, in our own way, nationalists, and what there is to do about it. I will be coming back to Killing in War for years also.
In this book, about war, McMahan is focused on analysis and moral evaluation of the behavior of individual soldiers in war. He is asking, “During war, when should killing be permitted?” He thoroughly lines out each practical concern a soldier faces, focusing on how the individual should act. He is a very organized philosopher, and sets up a clear system for studying, in detail, what is just and moral, within the constraints of what is practical and effective, for a soldier. The fields of what is moral, and what is legal, are necessarily separate matters; McMahan is knowledgeable in both fields, having spent decades studying and lecturing and writing about ethics in war.
The task that McMahan has set for himself is to deconstruct a set of concepts that have, up until now, been the standard model for understanding the moral responsibilities of a soldier during war. According to that standard model, it does not matter which side a soldier is fighting on; her/his moral responsibilities are the same. According to this model, even if it is overwhelmingly obvious that one side in a war is aggressive in clearly wrong ways, and the other side is clearly justifiably defending itself, the ethical rules for the soldiers on both sides should be exactly the same. For example, the Filipino soldiers resisting the brutal invasion and occupation of the Japanese would be expected to toe the line to the same permissions and restrictions that the Japanese soldiers would be expected to follow. Each soldier that followed those rules would be considered to be acting morally. McMahan singles out a specific author, Michael Walzer, whose work represents this tradition. He elaborates a withering critique of Walzer, and proposes that it is time to take apart the fundamentally illogical structure of the “tidy set of rules” that governments and armies and politicians and international bodies have so comfortably used to allow soldiers to rationalize their behavior in war.
The book is too painstakingly thorough to be comfortably summarized. For example, McMahan reviews and appreciates all of Walzer’s reasoning, both practical and moral, prior to setting out his critique of that paradigm. The issues are complex; the individual soldier will often face moral ambivalence. However, there is one key point of disagreement between Walzer and McMahan that powerfully exemplifies McMahan’s understanding of how it is that we must mature, as societies and individuals, to begin to cure the disease of war at the cellular level. Walzer’s claim has been that the moral status of a soldier is unrelated to the issue of whether her/his side in a war is the just side or the unjust side. McMahan disagrees strongly, and argues convincingly that soldiers fighting for the unjust side in a war must be held to task for this.
In international treaties, it is recognized that the only just wars are those that are fought in self-defense. A country defending itself against an unjust invader is, generally, in the right. McMahan recognizes that there is seldom complete clarity, but says that most of the time it is quite clear which side is “just.” The Iraqis were wrong and the Kuwaitis were right. McMahan is not a traditional pacifist. He treats self-defense against an unjust aggressor as a complete justification for killing someone, if necessary to save one’s own life.
It is this very argument that McMahan brings to the individual level of the soldier. He is not at all insensitive to the plight of soldiers, from the draftee to the dupe. He understands the publicly impractical and individually grave consequences that will arise from labeling individual soldiers as blameworthy or liable for what they have done if they are fighting for an unjust cause. He covers all angles of every moral and legal defense, and the unconvincing and/or partial excuses that can be raised to rationalize the killing that is done by soldiers that are fighting for an unjust cause. Among other themes, he cycles constantly back to: 1. the practical problems, after a war, of prosecuting hundreds of thousands of soldiers, 2. the effects of war propaganda and youth on the ignorance of soldiers, and the resulting limitation in what they can know, 3. the duress and threats that the soldiers’ own governments put them under, (which still do not relieve these soldiers from all responsibility for unjust killing), 4. a moral grading of the types of threats that a soldier can face, and an ongoing discussion of proportional response (e.g., it is not moral to obliterate an entire village because there was a bullet fired from one of the houses), 5. the special case of child soldiers, 6. the issue of who is a combatant and who is not, and 7. justifications of “lesser evils.” He carefully dissects and deploys terms such as innocence, liability, culpability, permissibility, diminished responsibility, collateral damage, and civilian target.
This review is only giving the reader a light overview of McMahan’s thoughtful organization and presentation of the moral elements involved in the dilemmas soldiers face in war. It is everyone’s job to disseminate these ideas to the public, and especially to soldiers and the young people who are considering becoming soldiers.
McMahan is well aware that the world is not yet ready to start regularly prosecuting masses of unjust soldiers, or even soldiers who fight in an immoral way for the just side in a war, in criminal proceedings. He knows that we do not yet have the institutional framework for these undertakings. We can’t even yet make institutionally authoritative judgments about the just and unjust side in most wars. Our efforts at this time are best put into trying to prevent wars, and especially unjust wars, wherein no self-defense is at play. If we were to begin prosecuting individual soldiers at this time, there is an understandable likelihood that the only result would be a sad “Victor’s Justice.” Yet McMahan has successfully revealed the weaknesses in Walzer’s structures, and shown us a plausible way to work toward the prevention of unjust wars. If the availability of more ethical and historical information about the individual responsibility and culpability of soldiers fighting unjust wars were distributed widely, in combination with mechanisms, however lightly applied, putting blame where it belongs, on people who kill unjustly, many young people would be deterred from killing unjustly, or even being soldiers for governments that conduct unjust wars. A government that fears that it has the full support of its population and military for unjust wars might not risk the challenge to its authority.
September 22, 2025
This is a book for those serious about Just War Theory or the morality of war in general. McMahan is dense but also extremely intelligent, and his arguments reflect that. While I had objections to some of the moves he made here, I think he made a very good case against the principle of the Moral Equality of Combatants (the big takeaway from the book) and any advocate of MEC will have to wrestle with McMahan's powerful arguments against it.
October 14, 2024
this is the second best philosophy book ive ever read. kit called it the best and most important book of the 21st century and i am inclined to agree. the only thing more impressive than the depth of mcmahan's thought is the grace of his prose.
Read
October 11, 2020Disclaimer: no academic training in philosophy. Thank you, Jeff McMahan for this elegant, challenging, precise and ultimately passionate guide through the moral questions around killing in war. Just/unjust wars, permissible, innocent, excusable...the author carefully defines many categories and offers examples that help the reader understand why it is important to be painstakingly (for me) specific.
I found especially compelling McMahan's discussion regarding a soldier's responsibility in participating in an unjust war. He lays out all the mitigating factors that would lead a soldier to fight in an unjust war, such as lack of knowledge about the true facts behind a declaration of war, threat to life if he does not fight, and so on... The issue of epistemic knowledge resonates with me, as one of the concepts I learned from my Catholic upbringing concerned sin in the context of vincible ignorance: it is not a sin if I could not have known, in any way possible to me, that it was wrong. And if there was any way I could have known - from my moral upbringing, from knowledge that was accessible to me had I but looked - but I remained ignorant, I was guilty of the sin of vincible ignorance, and therefore responsible for my sin.
The conditions surrounding war, and especially unjust wars, do not lend themselves to careful reflections about the right or wrongness of the war. Soldiers may be forced to fight, may not have time or access to the truth, etc. Should they be held responsible?
The author offers the idea (p. 192) that there might be some sort of international court or body that could "put soldiers on notice that the war in which they have been commanded to fight, or in which they are at present fighting, is an illegal war..." Then soldiers could be held responsible. In a later chapter, McMahan takes on civilian liability and responsibility.
Three particular examples were especially stark in terms of an individual's moral responsibility in war, and civilians' liability: the role of the United Fruit company executives (civilians) in overthrowing the Guatemalan government in the 1950's, the bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki (the war would have possibly ended without the bombings and killing of so many civilians), and the settlement of the West Bank. Here, McMahan points out (p. 222): "The Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, for example, threaten Palestinians with dispossession of the land on which they and their ancestors have lived for generations. The right to occupy and retain possession of the territory on which one's nation has lived for generations is internationally recognized as a fundamental right...Defense of the right of people to prevent themselves from being dispossessed of the lands where they and their ancestors have lived is almost universally regarded as a just cause for war, as is the recovery of such lands...The threat that the settlers pose to the Palestinians - knowingly and deliberately - is precisely the threat of establishing a rival moral claim to Palestinian lands that have been under Israeli occupation since 1967."
Much more has to be done to really get at killing in war. I say this humbly; after reading this excellent book I am a little better equipped at thinking through these complex issues, and realize I need to keep learning. I also know that I must grow my moral courage to speak out and act as I get better at recognizing right from wrong. There needs to be more commitment toward secular moral education - from a very early age - so that we (all humanity) have the capacity to sort out what to do and how to do it, when people go to war - and ideally, before we go to war.
I found especially compelling McMahan's discussion regarding a soldier's responsibility in participating in an unjust war. He lays out all the mitigating factors that would lead a soldier to fight in an unjust war, such as lack of knowledge about the true facts behind a declaration of war, threat to life if he does not fight, and so on... The issue of epistemic knowledge resonates with me, as one of the concepts I learned from my Catholic upbringing concerned sin in the context of vincible ignorance: it is not a sin if I could not have known, in any way possible to me, that it was wrong. And if there was any way I could have known - from my moral upbringing, from knowledge that was accessible to me had I but looked - but I remained ignorant, I was guilty of the sin of vincible ignorance, and therefore responsible for my sin.
The conditions surrounding war, and especially unjust wars, do not lend themselves to careful reflections about the right or wrongness of the war. Soldiers may be forced to fight, may not have time or access to the truth, etc. Should they be held responsible?
The author offers the idea (p. 192) that there might be some sort of international court or body that could "put soldiers on notice that the war in which they have been commanded to fight, or in which they are at present fighting, is an illegal war..." Then soldiers could be held responsible. In a later chapter, McMahan takes on civilian liability and responsibility.
Three particular examples were especially stark in terms of an individual's moral responsibility in war, and civilians' liability: the role of the United Fruit company executives (civilians) in overthrowing the Guatemalan government in the 1950's, the bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki (the war would have possibly ended without the bombings and killing of so many civilians), and the settlement of the West Bank. Here, McMahan points out (p. 222): "The Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, for example, threaten Palestinians with dispossession of the land on which they and their ancestors have lived for generations. The right to occupy and retain possession of the territory on which one's nation has lived for generations is internationally recognized as a fundamental right...Defense of the right of people to prevent themselves from being dispossessed of the lands where they and their ancestors have lived is almost universally regarded as a just cause for war, as is the recovery of such lands...The threat that the settlers pose to the Palestinians - knowingly and deliberately - is precisely the threat of establishing a rival moral claim to Palestinian lands that have been under Israeli occupation since 1967."
Much more has to be done to really get at killing in war. I say this humbly; after reading this excellent book I am a little better equipped at thinking through these complex issues, and realize I need to keep learning. I also know that I must grow my moral courage to speak out and act as I get better at recognizing right from wrong. There needs to be more commitment toward secular moral education - from a very early age - so that we (all humanity) have the capacity to sort out what to do and how to do it, when people go to war - and ideally, before we go to war.
February 21, 2019
Pretty compelling arguments.
January 9, 2025
UGA: Philosophy of War
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews