Ethics of International Relations and War

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

War belongs to the ugly reality of human history, and it would be naive to believe that this will change soon. The course addresses the specifically ethical dimensions involved with warfare - the question of legitimate reasons for going to war, the moral limits to warfare, and the moral challenges after the end of a war. We will proceed "inductively," starting with concrete issues, developing more general categories, and finally trying to find moral foundations. We will first read two dramas by Shakespeare and Schiller on two leaders in two of the bloodiest wars of European history, the Hundred Years' War and the Thirty Years' War, Henry V and Wallenstein, then study Michael Walzer's classical work Just and Unjust Wars and the recent book on post-war justice, a topic ignored by Walzer, by David Chwon Kwon: Justice After War. We will finally read the first and the third parts of my own book Morals and Politics, which lays out both foundations for ethics and moral strategies for dealing with some of the greatest political challenges of our time.