Articles by Dr Alexander Moseley

Aerial Bombing
In this article Moseley reviews the emergence of aerial bombing in the early twentieth century and its relationship to legal codes and the just war conventions With the advent of planes, it was not long before they were being used by pilots for ...
Justifications of the Armed Forces
A primary consideration that should be raised in military ethics, once we have accepted that military acts are a viable subject for ethics, is whether the armed forces possess any moral justification for existing in the first place. After all, arming...
Legal Positivism
Behind much military ethical discourse is the question whether the use or threat of force against another can be legitimized? If so, then the armed forces would achieve a professional justification that could in turn provide a moral umbrella for cert...
Militarism
Militarism (Sketch article) Militarism assumes that the martial order provides the primary explanation and directive of ethics – that life in all its forms (sexual, commercial, aesthetic, religious, etc.) should bow to the martial order. War and ...
Moral authenticity in the armed forces: what we can learn from Aristotle and Sartre
(This is from a talk given at St Cyr, France, 2008). What can the military learn from two – what we may readily call – quintessential philosophers? Aristotle – the man of enormous intellectual capacity and breadth of learning, and Sartre – the ver...
No Fly Zone
Introduction A no-fly zone is an area in which aircraft are not permitted; domestically, this may be over areas deemed to be of national or personal security, so that flying aircraft over Buckingham Palace in the UK or the Taj Mahal in India are p...
Total Warfare
Total warfare describes the negation of principles of just conduct in war, although the war is typically fought between combatants rather than against non-combatants (see Totalitarian War)....
Totalitarian Warfare
Totalitarian War and Ethics Those who assert that ethics cannot exist in warfare may be alluding to what can be called ‘totalitarian warfare,’ a form of warfare that rejects any possibility of ethical action. On this account, any action in war is ...
Why Military Ethics
A sketch Clausewitz, the great war logician, famously referred to the ‘fog of war’ – that war generates such confusion that generals soon lose contact with their forces and hence the minutiae of strategies and logistics on the ground. Ethically,...
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Web design by Island Webservices.