Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Drone Warfare And Just War Theory, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

This book chapter addresses two questions. First, can targeted killing by drones in non-battlefield zones be justified on basis of just war theory? Second, will the proliferation and expansion of combat drones in warfare, including the introduction of autonomous drones, be an obstacle to initiating or executing wars in a just manner in the future? The first question is answered by applying traditional jus ad bellum (justice in the resort to war) and jus in bello (justice in the execution of war) principles to the American targeted killing campaign in Pakistan; the second question is answered on basis of principles …

Trump, Populism, Fascism, And The Road Ahead, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

This review essay offers a discussion of some recent studies that help to explain the election of Donald Trump as president of the USA. The studies examine Trump as “media spectacle,” analyze his support among Tea Partiers, and discuss his backing by the white working class left behind by neoliberalism and global capitalism. Special attention is given to two questions: Is Trump a rightwing populist or closer to a fascist? Relatedly, is Trump a threat to liberal democracy? The essay concludes with some suggestions of how to move beyond Trump.

Review: Killing By Remote Control: The Ethics Of An Unmanned Military, Edited By Bradley Jay Strawser, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

Dr. Harry van der Linden's review of: Killing by Remote Control: The Ethics of an Unmanned Military, edited by Bradley Jay Strawser. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 (264 pages, cloth).

Arguments Against Drone Warfare With A Focus On The Immorality Of Remote Control Killing And “Deadly Surveillance”, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

Drone warfare, particularly in the form of targeted killing, has serious legal, moral, and political costs so that a case can be made for an international treaty prohibiting this type of warfare. However, the case would be stronger if it could be shown that killing by drones is inherently immoral. From this angle I explore the moral significance of two features of this technology of killing: the killing is done by remote control with the operators geographically far away from the target zone and the killing is typically the outcome of a long process of surveillance. I argue that remote …

Review Of Essays On Kant's Political Philosophy, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

Article reviews the book "Essays on Kant's Political Philosophy," edited by Howard Lloyd Williams.

Review Of Kant's System Of Rights, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

This article reviews the book "Kant's System of Rights," by Leslie A. Mulholland.

Review Of Kant's Platonic Revolution In Moral And Political Philosophy, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

Article reviews the book "Kant's Platonic Revolution in Moral and Political Philosophy," by T.K. Seung.

Review Of From Marx To Kant, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

This article reviews the book "From Marx to Kant," by Dick Howard.

Drone Warfare And Just War Theory, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

This book chapter addresses two questions. First, can targeted killing by drones in non-battlefield zones be justified on basis of just war theory? Second, will the proliferation and expansion of combat drones in warfare, including the introduction of autonomous drones, be an obstacle to initiating or executing wars in a just manner in the future? The first question is answered by applying traditional jus ad bellum (justice in the resort to war) and jus in bello (justice in the execution of war) principles to the American targeted killing campaign in Pakistan; the second question is answered on basis of principles …

Review Of Howard Williams, Kant And The End Of War: A Critique Of Just War Theory, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

Harry van der Linden's review of:

Howard Williams, Kant and the End of War: A Critique of Just War Theory, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 216pp., $90.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780230244207.

Cohen, Hermann (1842 - 1918), Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

Harry van der Linden's contribution to The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Windelband, Wilhelm (1848 - 1915), Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

Harry van der Linden's contribution to The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Neo-Kantianism, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

Harry van der Linden's contribution to The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Iris Young, Radical Responsibility, And War, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

In this paper I argue that a merit of Iris Young’s social connection model of responsibility for structural injustices is that it directs the American people’s responsibility for unjust wars, such as the recent war against Iraq, toward their responsibility to abolish the “war machine,” including the “empire of bases,” that is a contributing factor of unjust U.S. wars. I also raise two objections to her model. First, her model leads us to downplay the culpability of the American people as a political collective in voting to continue the Iraq war with the re-election of George W. Bush. Second, Young …

Combatant’S Privilege Reconsidered, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

International law grants to legitimate combatants the right to kill enemy soldiers both in wars of aggression and defensive wars. A main argument in support of this “combatant’s privilege” is Michael Walzer’s doctrine of the “moral equality of soldiers.” The doctrine argues that soldiers fighting in wars of aggression and defensive wars have the same moral status because they both typically believe that justice is on their side, and their moral choices are equally severely restricted by the overwhelming coercive powers of the state, including propaganda, conscription, and harsh penalties for the refusal to fight. Recently, this doctrine has been …

Permanent Wartime, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

This article reviews War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences by Mary L. Dudziak, published by Oxford University Press in 2012.

On The Violence Of Systemic Violence: A Critique Of Slavoj Žižek, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

This paper questions the extension of the common notion of violence, i.e., “subjective violence,” involving the intentional use of force to inflict injury or damage, towards social injustice as “systemic violence.” Systemic violence is altogether unlike subjective violence and the work of Slavoj Žižek illustrates that conceptual obfuscation in this regard may lead to an overly broad and facile justification of revolutionary violence as counter-violence to systemic violence, appealing to the ethics of self-defense. I argue that revolutionary violence is only justified to counter subjective violence inflicted or organized by the state. Thus I reject in conclusion Žižek’s further defense …

Barack Obama As Just War Theorist: The Libyan Intervention, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

President Barack Obama has clearly placed himself in the just war tradition, and so we may ask how successful has President Obama in fact been as just war theorist? His justification of the recent NATO intervention in Libya shows that the record is at best mixed. More broadly, Obama’s failure as just war theorist is at least partly a failure of the theory itself: as long as this theory does not address issues of “just military preparedness,” it will fail to place real constraints on American resort to military force.

Rich Man’S War, Poor Man’S Fight, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

This article reviews The Casualty Gap: The Causes and Consequences of American Wartime Inequalities by Douglas L. Kriner and Francis X. Shen, published by Oxford University Press in 2010.

From Hiroshima To Baghdad: Military Hegemony Versus Just Military Preparedness, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

In this paper I question the morality of U.S. military supremacy or hegemony in terms of what constitute the legitimate use of military force and the proper preparation for using such force. I first discuss in a somewhat synoptic fashion how American hegemonic military force (from its very beginning with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima) has been justified in dishonest ways and wrongly executed. Next, I show that Just War Theory (JWT) needs to be revised in order to come to a convincing assessment of U.S. military hegemony and its use of military force. This leads me …

Is Global Poverty A Moral Problem For Citizens Of Affluent Societies?, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

The gap between the affluent and the global poor has increased during the past few decades, whether it is measured in terms of private consumption, income, or wealth. One would expect that severe poverty in a world of abundance would constitute a moral challenge to the affluent, but in fact it hardly seems a serious ethical concern. Affluent citizens seem so little morally concerned with global poverty. However, the most promising approach seems to be to explore and divulge factually and conceptually the numerous ways in which the affluent are implicated in a wholly unjust world of growing inequality. Changing …

From Combat Boots To Civilian Shoes: Reflections On The Chickenhawk Syndrome, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

This essay is part of a symposium on Cheyney Ryan’s The Chickenhawk Syndrome: War, Sacrifice, and Personal Responsibility (2009). Ryan’s reply to his critics can be found on pp. 181-89 in Radical Philosophy Review, Volume 13, Issue 2, 2010.

Marx And Morality: An Impossible Synthesis?, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

A discussion of Allen E. Buchanan, Marx and Justice (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982); Marshall Cohen, Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Scanlon, eds., Marx. Justice. and History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); and Kai Nielsen and Steven C. Patten, eds., Marx and Morality, Supplementary Volume VII of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy (Guelph: Canadian Association for Publishing in Philosophy, 1981).

Questioning The Resort To U.S. Hegemonic Military Force, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

This paper seeks to defend the thesis that this American project of military hegemony has a variety of global security costs of such combined magnitude that there is a strong prima facie case against the resort to armed force by the United States, so that its wars might be wrong even when there is a just cause. My thesis is based on the jus ad bellum principle of proportionality.

Barack Obama, Resort To Force, And U.S. Military Hegemony, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

Just War Theorists have neglected that a lack of “just military preparedness” on the side of a country seriously undermines its capability to resort justly to military force. In this paper, I put forth five principles of “just military preparedness” and show that since the new Obama administration will seek to maintain the United States’ dominant military position in the world, it will violate each of the principles. I conclude on this basis that we should anticipate that the Obama administration will add another page to the United States’ history of unjust military interventions.

Cohen, Collective Responsibility, And Economic Democracy, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

My main objective in this paper is to show that Hermann Cohen's ethics offers an important but hitherto neglected contribution to the- current debate within Anglo-American ethics on the moral status of the modern business corporation.

Hermann Cohen’S Political Philosophy And The Communitarian Critique Of Liberalism, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

My main aim here is to examine what the significance is of the communitarian critique of liberalism for Hermann Cohen's political philosophy. I will conclude that Cohen's socialist Kantianism can successfully meet this critique. Also, I will argue that his political philosophy can better deal with some of the problems that communitarians detect in our Western democracies than can communitarianism itself. One crucial reason for this is that Cohen completes the original Kantian liberal project by making all agents fully autonomous in the economic sphere.

Marx's Political Universalism, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

My main aim in this paper is to arrive at a defensible form of Marxian or socialist political universalism through a critical examination of Marx's own political universalism. In the next section, I will outline several moral errors that Walzer ascribes to political universalism, including Marx's, and show that Walzer largely misdirects his criticisms because what primarily accounts for Marx committing the errors is his Hegelian metaphysical conception of history, not his political universalism as such.

Review Of Roger J. Sullivan, An Introduction To Kant's Ethics (1994), Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

Harry van der Linden's review of: Roger Sullivan, An Introduction to Kant's Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994, viii + 183 pages.

Cohen's Socialist Reconstruction Of Kant's Ethics, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

The neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) famously wrote that Kant “is the true and real originator of German socialism.” This paper seeks to explicate Cohen’s socialist reconstruction of Kant’s ethics and show that this reconstruction overcomes some weaknesses of Kant’s ethics. In conclusion, the paper discusses the contemporary relevance of Cohen’s cooperative socialism.