Rodin & Shue: Just and Unjust Warriors: The Moral and Legal Status of Soldiers

David Rodin (Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War) & Henry Shue (Univ. of Oxford - International Relations) have published Just and Unjust Warriors: The Moral and Legal Status of Soldiers (Oxford Univ. Press 2008). Here's the abstract:

Can a soldier be held responsible for fighting in a war that is illegal or unjust? This is the question at the heart of a new debate that has the potential to profoundly change our understanding of the moral and legal status of warriors, wars, and indeed of moral agency itself. The debate pits a widely shared and legally entrenched assumption about war--that combatants have equal rights and equal responsibilities irrespective of whether they are fighting in a war that just or unjust--against a set of striking new arguments. These arguments challenge the idea that there is a separation between the rules governing the justice of going to war (the jus ad bellum) and the rules governing what combatants can do in war (the jus in bello). If ad bellum and in bello rules are connected in the way these new arguments suggest, then many aspects of just war theory and laws of war will have to be rethought and perhaps reformed.

This book contains eleven original and closely argued essays by leading figures in the ethics and laws of war and provides an authoritative treatment of this important new debate. The essays both challenge and defend many deeply held assumptions: about the liability of soldiers for crimes of aggression, about the nature and justifiability of terrorism, about the relationship between law and morality, the relationship between soldiers and states, and the relationship between the ethics of war and the ethics of ordinary life.

Contents include:

• David Rodin & Henry Shue, Introduction
• Jeff McMahan, The Morality of War and the Law of War
• David Roden, The Moral Inequality of Soldiers: Why Jus in Bello Asymmetry is Half Right
• Christopher Kutz, Fearful Symmetry
• Henry Shue, Do We Need a "Morality of War"?
• Judith Lichtenberg, How to Judge Soldiers Whose Cause in Unjust
• Ryan Cheyney, Moral equality, victimhood and the sovereignty symmetry problem
• Tony Coady, The Status of Combatants
• Anthony Coates, Is the Independent Application of Jus in Bello the way to Limit War?
• Gregory Reichberg, Just War and Regular War: Competing Paradigms
• Dan Zupan, A Presumption of the Moral Equality of Combatants: a Citizen Soldier' Perspective
• Adam Roberts, The Principle of Equal Application of the Laws of War