The Deadly Serious Causes of Legitimate Rebellion: Between the Wrongs of Terrorism and the Crimes of War

Finlay, Christopher J.

doi:10.1007/s11572-017-9420-2

The Deadly Serious Causes of Legitimate Rebellion: Between the Wrongs of Terrorism and the Crimes of War

Finlay, Christopher J.

Authors

Professor Christopher Finlay christopher.j.finlay@durham.ac.uk
Head of Department

Abstract

This article challenges the tendency exhibited in arguments by Michael Ignatieff, Jeremy Waldron, and others to treat the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) as the only valid moral frame of reference for guiding (and judging) armed rebels with just cause. To succeed, normative language and principles must reflect not only the wrongs of ‘terrorism’ and war crimes, but also the rights of legitimate rebels. However, these do not always correspond to the legal privileges of combatants. Rebels are often unlikely to gain belligerent recognition and might sometimes have strong moral reasons to exceed the rights of regular combatants. Where this gives rise to tensions between morality and the LOAC, a decision is needed to determine which to follow. Setting aside the idea of (a) suppressing just war theory altogether in favour of a more purely regulatory approach to war and (b) reforming law in the direct light of moral theory, I question the attempt by Waldron (among others) (c) to argue that moral weight of the legal conventions at the heart of the LOAC trump any moral reasons there might be for breaching them. Even if non-combatant immunity is, as Waldron suggests, a deadly serious convention, I argue that war is justified only if pursued for the sake of deadly serious causes which may even be serious enough to oblige agents to break the law. A political theory of the ethics of war is needed (d) to mediate between the moral and legal in such cases where they cannot be reconciled directly.

Citation

Finlay, C. J. (2018). The Deadly Serious Causes of Legitimate Rebellion: Between the Wrongs of Terrorism and the Crimes of War. Criminal Law and Philosophy, 12(2), 271-287. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-017-9420-2

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Jun 16, 2017
Online Publication Date	Jul 11, 2017
Publication Date	Jun 1, 2018
Deposit Date	Sep 26, 2017
Publicly Available Date	Oct 18, 2017
Journal	Criminal Law and Philosophy
Print ISSN	1871-9791
Electronic ISSN	1871-9805
Publisher	Springer
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	12
Issue	2
Pages	271-287
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-017-9420-2

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Advance online version © The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.