HUM 2395 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Just War Theory, Madeleine Albright, Mary Kaldor
Document Summary
The topic of today"s class is the morality of war. The place to begin these reflections is that if you kill someone as an individual, you are a murderer, unless you can show that you acted in self-defense. But if you kill someone as a soldier, then you are not a murderer, but something of a hero. This distinction, it seems to me, is at the heart of the morality of warfare. In the latter case, killing someone in one"s capacity as a soldier, one is acting in the name of the greater good. One is killing on behalf of the nation or the state. This is really the central question of today"s class: nationalism and killing. He discusses the scourge of nationalism, particularly u. s. nationalism. U. s. nationalism is inflected with the idea of u. s. exceptionalism. This exceptionalism can be traced back to the founding of america.
