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For the term "frowe".

Just War Theory and The Russia-Ukraine War

A photograph of male and female Ukrainian soldiers standing in a line.
Ceremony on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Photo: President of Ukraine, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Public Domain

This is a guest post by Professor Jeff McMahan (Oxford University), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.

There are three wars currently in progress in Ukraine: the war between Russia and Ukraine, the Russian war against Ukraine, and the Ukrainian war against Russia. It is necessary for the purpose of evaluation to make these distinctions, for the first of these wars is, like the Second World War (understood as a war between allied and axis powers), neither just nor unjust. Only a war fought by one or more belligerents against an opponent can be just or unjust. Many or most of what we refer to as wars consist of a just war on one side and an unjust war on the other – or, to be more precise, a war with predominantly just aims on one side and a war with predominantly unjust aims on the other.

There is no credible understanding of a just war according to which the Russian war against Ukraine is a just war. It is a wholly unprovoked war of aggression intended by those who initiated it – primarily Putin – to conquer Ukraine, annex its territory, and assimilate its population. The motives of the war’s planners are doubtless many and various but some stand out as obvious and dominant. One is to expand the Russian empire until it is at least coextensive with its earlier boundaries under the tsars and the post-revolutionary Soviet dictators. Another motivation echoes the American concern about “falling dominoes” as a reason for invading Vietnam. Many of the states that were ruled by Soviet puppet regimes during the Cold War have, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, been adopting more and more elements of Western culture, in particular liberalism and democracy. Ukraine was a falling domino that threatened to become a fully independent, economically flourishing democracy in a large border territory that Russia had repeatedly ravaged in the past – a state that would be an example, highly visible to Russians, of an appealing alternative to Putin’s tyrannical kleptocracy.

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From the Vault: Collaboration with Journal of Applied Philosophy

While Justice Everywhere takes a break over the summer, we recall some of the highlights from our 2020-21 season. This post focuses on our ongoing collaboration with the Journal of Applied Philosophy.

In 2019, Justice Everywhere began a collaboration with the Journal of Applied Philosophy. The journal is a unique forum that publishes philosophical analysis of problems of practical concern, and several of its authors post accessible summaries of their work on Justice Everywhere. These posts draw on diverse theoretical viewpoints and bring them to bear on a broad spectrum of issues, ranging from the environment and immigration to economics, parenting, and punishment.

For a full list of these posts, visit the JAP page on Justice Everywhere. For a flavour of the range, you might read:

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Why We (Usually) Shouldn’t Fund Rebellions

In this post, Helen Frowe discusses their recent article in the Ethics of Indirect Intervention symposium in Journal of Applied Philosophy on how funding rebel fighters can cause unjust harm.


Consider the following scenario, Rebellion.

Rebellion: A rebel group in Eastland is waging an armed revolt against its unjust, murderous government. If they are successful, they will avert significant harm to their people. A foreign state, Westland, is providing the Eastlandic rebels with financial support, hoping that this will enable the rebels to replace their oppressive government and thereby save lives.

This kind of indirect support for foreign uprisings has been rather fêted in recent years. It enables governments to assist those in need without risking the lives of their own armed forces. But is it the right thing to do?

Philosophical discussions of the ethics of assisting rebellions have, thus far, focused on features of the rebellions. For example, they worry about the moral character and aims of the groups that are being funded, whether foreign support will prolong war, or render a new regime less stable, and how foreign interference bears on issues of self-determination. But in a recent article, I argue that there can be decisive moral objections to funding rebellions that are independent of these features of rebellions. These objections are grounded in the contours of our duties to rescue.

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A Symposium on The Ethics of Indirect Intervention

In this post, Helen Frowe and Ben Matheson introduce a symposium they recently edited in Journal of Applied Philosophy on the ethical issues that arise in indirect interventions.


Recent years have seen a marked shift in political responses to humanitarian crises abroad. In the aftermath of disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, governments are increasingly reluctant to engage in direct foreign intervention – that is, to put ‘boots on the ground’ in overseas conflicts to try to protect foreign citizens from harm. Several countries are, instead, increasingly advocating and employing indirect forms of intervention, such as overtly funding, arming, or training foreign rebel groups. France, Turkey, the UK and the US have armed and trained rebels in Syria, for example.

We might think that indirect intervention avoids the moral perils that arise in cases of direct intervention. But, to the contrary, indirectly contributing to war raises a host of moral concerns, as a growing body of literature in the ethics of war attests. And, of course, not all indirect contributions to foreign conflicts fall under the description of aiding foreign citizens. On the contrary: governments sell, or facilitate the selling of, weapons and equipment to authoritarian states that use those weapons to harm their citizens. Just as we ought to be concerned about vaunted attempts to influence foreign conflicts by supporting rebels, we ought to be concerned about third parties’ rather less publicised roles in suppressing resistance abroad. In this post, we summarise a symposium exploring some of these issues, presented at a workshop organised by the Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace.

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Introduction: Symposium on War and Causation

In this post, Helen Frowe and Massimo Renzo introduce a recent symposium they edited in Journal of Applied Philosophy on how accounts of causation bear on ethics in war.


Causation, and differences in types of causal contribution, underpin various issues in the ethics of war and defensive harming. For example, one of the key ideas about defensive harming is that of moral liability to defensive harm. A standard view of liability is that a person forfeits her right not to suffer harm if she is morally responsible for a threat of unjust harm to others. Her specific connection to the threat might matter in several ways – the degree, type, and proximity to causation might all make a difference to her liability. Some writers argue that although civilians causally contribute to threats of unjust harm in war, they do not contribute enough to render themselves liable to (lethal) attack. Others argue that making distinctively military causal contributions, such as providing weapons, makes one a candidate for liability, but contributing food or medical supplies does not. Still others argue that one’s position in the causal chain bears on one’s liability: only those who directly pose threats of unjust harm, or who are sufficiently causally proximate to them, are liable to defensive harm.

However, despite their centrality to some of the most important issues in the ethics of war and self-defence, there has been very little exploration of whether these claims withstand scrutiny from the perspective of our best accounts of causation. To cast some light on this, the Conversations on War project, which is run by the Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace and the YTL Centre at King’s College, London, set out to explore how philosophers working on the ethics of war can draw on research in other areas of philosophy to improve our accounts of harming in war, and how research on the ethics of war might challenge or illuminate work in those other areas. In this post, we summarise our introduction to a symposium that arose from these conversations that offers a substantial critical analysis of the role of causation in contemporary work on the ethics of war and self-defence, and is an important move towards making work on just war theory and defensive harm less insular.

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