Abstract
Kai Draper works in the now dominant individualistic and reductive school of just war theory, according to which the moral justifiability of both going to war and killing in war is to be understood along the same lines as acts of self- and other- defense between individuals. But Draper challenges a central pillar of the moral view embraced by, as far as I know, all the other writers in the same school of just war theory. He argues that what he calls the “principle of double effect” (PDE) and related doctrines — including my own “restricting claims principle” — are false. In their stead, he develops a small set of rights-based principles that he thinks distinguish permissible from impermissible acts of killing in war.
Draper writes with an admirable combination of wisdom, humility, originality, and clarity. The result is an important contribution to just war theory. Nonetheless, I argue that his challenge to the PDE and related doctrines fails, and that the distinctive prescriptions the book offers must also, therefore, be rejected.