Morality and Contemporary Warfare

"When is the use of military force by a nation morally justified? Why has the long accepted moral requirement to protect civilians from intentional attack eroded in recent years? How can the tendency toward unrestrained warfare between parties with major cultural differences be controlled? In this book, James Turner Johnson refocuses the moral analysis of war on the real problems of today's armed conflicts. Moral debates about nuclear war and annihilation fail to address the problems of actual contemporary uses of military force, Johnson argues. We must address the type of armed conflict that has emerged at the end of the twentieth century: local wars - often inflamed by historical, ethnic, or religious animosities and usually fought with conventional weapons that can be carried by individual fighters."--BOOK JACKET.

First sentence: The nature of war changes continually, and the moral questions posed by one form of war often turn out to be less pressing in another, which in turn introduces its own particular quandaries.

Year

1999

Language

English

Publisher

Yale University Press

Editions

4

Pages

259

ISBN

9780300091045

Data source: Wikidata