BOOK: Morality and Political Violence
Date: 01 April 2008
Morality and Political Violence
C. A. J. Coady
Published by
Cambridge
University
Press
RRP: $47.95
Political violence in the form of wars, insurgencies, terrorism, and violent rebellion constitutes a major human challenge today as it has so often in the past. It is a challenge not only to life and limb, but also to morality itself. In this book, C. A. J. Coady brings a philosophical and ethical perspective to the subject. He places the problems of war and political violence in the frame of reflective ethics.
In clear and accessible language, Coady reexamines a range of urgent problems pertinent to political violence against the background of a contemporary approach to just war thinking. The problems examined include the right to make war, the right way to conduct war, terrorism, revolution, humanitarianism, mercenary warriors, conscientious objection, combatant and noncombatant status, the ideal of peace and the right way to end war, pacifism, weapons of mass destruction, and supreme emergency exemptions from just war prohibition.
Coady attempts to vindicate the relevance of the just war tradition to contemporary problems without applying the tradition in a merely mechanical or uncritical fashion.
THE AUTHOR
C.A.J. Coady is an Australian philosopher with an international reputation for his research in both epistemology and political and applied philosophy. In addition to his academic work, he is a regular contributor to public debate on topics having to do with ethical and philosophical dimensions of current affairs. A professor of philosophy at the University of Melbourne, he has served as the founding director of the Centre for Philosophy and Public Issues and the deputy director of the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics and head of its University of Melbourne division. In 2005, he gave the Uehiro Lectures on practical ethics at Oxford University.
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