Keeping Exceptions Exceptional in War: Could Any Revisionist Theory Guide Action?

Action-guiding just war theory needs to take account of three diverse factors: war, law, and morality. Useful thinking about just war requires a triple conjunction. Much moral philosophy fails to engage with the choices that combatants face because it ignores the relevant epistemological and psychological features of war itself and the functional requirements of international laws of war. Specifically, current revisionist moral philosophers tend to succumb to the illusion of ever more precise conceptual targeting, which rests on the false assumption that what is superior in thought, or in conception, will automatically be superior in practice. But in some kinds of situations it is important to inhibit or prohibit the making of exceptions. War is a set of circumstances that demands exceptionless rules, so fine qualifications and philosophical subtleties morally ought to be shunned. This chapter is a philosophical argument in favor of leashing philosophical argument in the specific circumstances of armed conflict. The crucial example of a morally required exceptionless rule is: never target civilians. More subtle and theoretically superior rules of the form, never target civilians except when x, will lead to both more frequent and more serious errors than the conceptually cruder simple rule.