Ending Wars
Cecile Fabre ~ Lincoln College Oxford University
This week’s political theory seminar series in the Department of Government features Cecile Fabre from the Department of Philosophy and Lincoln College, Oxford University. Cecile will present a paper titled ‘Ending Wars’, which is part of her ongoing project on the ethics of war.
The seminar is on Thursday 15 March at 13:15 in the Ivor Crewe seminar room on the Colchester Campus of the University of Essex.
Tea and refreshments will be provided.
Paper abstract:
Military occupation is one of the harshest ‘dilemmatic situations’ to which human beings are confronted. Occupying soldiers and occupied civilians have to decide, every day, whether to treat one another as enemy, human beings, or both. Negotiating those relationships does not always require grand decisions and solemn gestures. More often than not, from the point of view of occupied populations, it is to be exposed to the necessity of daily acts of moral compromise, most of which are often insignificant when taken on their own but whose cumulative effect, under the long shadow of war and its privations, can corrode one’s moral integrity – one’s sense of how one should act towards those soldiers who walk down one’s streets, buys goods from one’s shops, uses one’s facilities. Suprisingly in the light of the recent occupation of Iraq by the US, there is a dearth of philosophical work on this issue. My aim in this paper is to explore the moral rights and duties which occupiers and occupied have vis-à¬-vis one another. I argue, contra the law of occupation, that those rights and duties largely depend on the moral status of the war (as just or unjust) which precedes the occupation.
Cecile Fabre is a Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy, Lincoln College, Oxford. Previously Chair in Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh, and Lecture/SL at the LSE. Fellow of the British Academy. Publications include: Social Rights under the Constitution (Oxford University Press), Whose Body is it Anyway (Oxford University Press), Justice in a Changing World (Polity Press), and a forthcoming monograph on the ethics of war with Oxford University Press.
