Canceled: The Contemporary: Morality and Necessity at War: On War’s Moral Psychology

** THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED**

With Guest Speaker Oded Na'aman (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Contemporary just war theorists share a common blindspot: the hatred that structures war, and the internal logic of that hatred. By failing to see how hatred shapes wartime agency and deliberation, just war theory’s constraining ambitions are undermined: firstly, it misconceives the very agents its standards are meant to guide. This leads to confusion about how the standards they propose properly apply to war, and how such standards can be understood as action-guiding. Secondly, by overlooking the hatred that structures war, just war theory exhibits a form of the moral blindness it purports to counteract. This theoretical blindness is revealed in just war theory's inability to acknowledge what soldiers sometimes recognize: that even the justified killing of enemy combatants—not merely the unjustified killing of civilians—constitutes a moral horror.