PHIL/POLI/PWAD 272.001 – The Ethics of Peace, War, and Defense

Instructor: Krasi Filcheva. This course meets MTWRF 1:15 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. in CW 105.

In this course, we are going to examine the ethical grounds of war practice. We will explore the dominant perspectives on war and its ethical status such as pacifism, realism, and just war theory, the most influential modern ethical model for reasoning about the conditions under which war is justified. Some of the topics of special contemporary interest we will investigate include humanitarian intervention and genocide, the ethics of revolution, terrorism, including cyber-terrorism, the ethically permissible and impermissible ways of countering terrorism with a special focus on torture practices.