Rosemary Kellison: Expanding Responsibility for the Just War: A Feminist Critique

Abstract

As demonstrated in any conflict, war is violent and causes grave harms to
innocent persons, even when fought in compliance with just war criteria. In
this book, Rosemary Kellison presents a feminist critique of just war
reasoning, with particular focus on the issue of responsibility for harm to
noncombatants. Contemporary just war reasoning denies the violence of
war by suggesting that many of the harms caused by war are necessary,
though regrettable, injuries for which inflicting agents bear no
responsibility. She challenges this narrow understanding of responsibility
through a feminist ethical approach that emphasizes the relationality of
humans and the resulting asymmetries in their relative power and
vulnerability. According to this approach, the powerful individual and
collective agents who inflict harm during war are responsible for
recognizing and responding to the vulnerable persons they harm, and
thereby reducing the likelihood of future violence. Kellison's volume goes
beyond abstract theoretical work to consider the real implications of an
important ethical problem.