Volume 30, Number 5
September 2025
SYMPOSIUM

Fighting Unjust Wars: Political Authority, Tragic Choices, and the Value of Obedience

Volume 30, Number 5, September 2025, Pages 795–826
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v30i5.4416
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Abstract

Legitimate authorities occasionally issue mistaken directives. Do we have a duty to obey such directives? This question is especially pressing in cases in which (1) obeying a mistaken directive would lead us to take part in the perpetration of a serious injustice and (2) the victims of the injustice are not themselves subject to the authority that issued the directive. The clearest case is when a legitimate authority, acting in good faith, orders us to fight a war that is in fact unjust. I address the question of whether we have a duty to obey such orders by responding to a number of important objections that Thomas Christiano, Christopher Kutz, and David Estlund raise against the view that I originally defended in my article “Political Authority and Unjust Wars.”
Copyright © 2025 Massimo Renzo
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
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Making Sense of Political Normativity

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Portico