UC Santa Barbara

The purpose of this dissertation is to argue that most unjust combatants are complicitously liable to be killed while most unjust noncombatants are not liable to be killed, and to construct an adequate moral principle for satisfying these two desiderata based on reductive collectivism. The dissertation comprises four main chapters:Chapter Ⅰ is a preliminary discussion of this dissertation. I provide an overall understanding of Just War Theory and present Walzer’s key theses on killing in war. I then analyze the methodologies Walzer used to justify his claims. I also introduce the views of revisionists who challenge Walzer's view and explain in detail the methodological differences between reductive individualism and traditionalism. In Chapter Ⅱ, my main goal is to show that reductive individualism fails to satisfy two desiderata of an adequate moral principle regarding the justification of killing in war. In my view, if we assume that war is a conflict involving the use of armed force between collectives and these collectives are not adequately characterized solely in terms of relationships between individuals, then reductive individualism faces the individualized-liability dilemma. To that end, I explain McMahan’s individual liability-based account and demonstrate how the responsibility dilemma forces us to deny McMahan's account. I then argue that the prospects of reductive individualist accounts of liability solving the responsibility dilemma face serious problems. These problems give a good motivation for us to consider a collectivist account. In Chapter Ⅲ, I shift the main discussion from reductive individualism to reductive collectivism. Reductive collectivism makes use of a notion of collective action as opposed to individual action. I give a rough analysis of collective action and argue that what distinguishes genuine from non-genuine collective actions is a shared participatory intention among the members of the collective. I then clarify what it means to say that individuals who participate in collective action have a shared participatory intention. I also analyze how individual participatory intention is linked to the complicitous liability of individual agents in a collective. In Chapter Ⅳ, my primary goal is to evaluate the liability of both unjust combatants and unjust noncombatants in war. I argue that most unjust combatants are complicitously liable to be killed but most unjust noncombatants are not liable to be killed. In order to show that, the first part of this chapter is dedicated to constructing a moral principle, rooted in reductive collectivism, that determines who is complicitously liable for a collective unjust action. I then argue that members of an organization can have two different kinds of participatory intentions, and their complicitous liability is determined by what kind of intention an individual has as a collective member. In the second part of this chapter, I illustrate how the reductive collectivist moral principle that I draw satisfies the two desiderata for which I argue at the beginning of the chapter: that most unjust combatants are liable to be killed and that most unjust noncombatants are not liable to be killed.