The fate of heritage in war has attracted considerable attention in recent years, due in no small part to ISIS's campaign of destruction across the Middle East and, in 2012, the International Criminal Court's first prosecution of heritage destruction as a war crime. Regular armed forces have been criticised for both failing to protect and damaging heritage sites. In response, heritage organisations urge the better implementation of existing international laws on heritage protection in war. This book argues that any such law or policy will require combatants to choose between safeguarding heritage and safeguarding other goods, including human life. It thus challenges the view, repeatedly expressed by heritage professionals, that the choice between protecting heritage and protecting lives is a false dichotomy. Existing international law not only implies such choices but also, more worryingly, gives no indication of how they should be resolved. 

Drawing on contemporary work on the ethics of war, this book develops an account of the permissible protection of heritage in war. It argues that heritage is not morally special; rather, heritage is one of many goods that contribute to individuals' lives going well and that we routinely trade off against each other. By drawing on these more familiar dilemmas, we can make progress on how to balance the protection of heritage against risks to human life. Amongst other things, the book considers the different ways in which heritage might contribute to individual flourishing, the role of consent in justifying the imposition of risk on combatants and civilians, the permissibility of forcefully defending heritage and what, if anything, could compensate for the loss of heritage in war.

Drafts of this paper were presented at a workshop on the Ethics of Refugee Policy co-hosted by the Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace and the Institute for Futures Studies; the Bled Conference on Ethics; the Political Theory Workshop at Nuffield College, Oxford and colloquia at the Central European University, the London School of Economics, and the Centre for Human Values at Princeton University. I am grateful to the audiences for their comments. I'm also very grateful to the two anonymous Associate Editors at Philosophy & Public Affairs, whose comments significantly improved the paper. Special thanks to Victor Tadros for very helpful written comments on, and discussion of, an early version and to Derek Matravers for helpful conversations. Work on this article was supported by a Knut and Alice Wallenberg Scholarship. 

The Inseparability Thesis holds that protecting heritage is inseparable from protecting people and therefore cannot conflict with protecting people. This chapter argues that we ought to reject this thesis. Conflicts between protecting heritage and protecting people are rife, both within and without war. Most obviously, these conflicts occur in cases of scarce resources. But they also occur when we distribute the risks of war. Protecting heritage can require combatants to impose risks on civilians and to incur risks to themselves. Judging the permissibility of imposing such risks and ordering combatants to incur them demands not only that we recognise conflicts between protecting heritage and protecting people but also that we develop a rubric for comparing the moral significance of harms to each. Implementing the provisions of the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in Times of Armed Conflict also demands the use of such a rubric.

This introduction describes the overall aim of the collection and then gives short summaries of each of the papers. The starting point of the collection is a dissatisfaction with ‘the inseparability thesis’: namely, the view that the value of heritage and the value of persons is intertwined to the extent that a comparison between the two values does not (or cannot) arise. Chapters 1 to 7 of the collection directly or indirectly concern comparisons of value of this sort. The remaining four chapters consider consequences of the damage to heritage in war. The nature of such a loss is considered, as well as suitable ways in which to react to its loss.

The destruction of cultural heritage in war is currently attracting considerable attention. ISIS’s campaign of deliberate destruction across the Middle East was met with widespread horror and calls for some kind of international response. The United States attracted criticism for both its accidental damaging of Ancient Babylon in 2015 and its failure to protect the Mosul Museum from looters in 2003. In 2016, the International Criminal Court prosecuted its first case of the destruction of heritage as a war crime. While the destruction of heritage is widely condemned, there has also been condemnation of calls to mobilize our resources for the sake of heritage protection when human beings face threats to life and limb. Such issues are both philosophically rich and personally significant to a wide range of people. And yet they have been largely neglected by academic philosophers. This book makes a substantial contribution to developing this new philosophical territory. The contributors are a mixture of internationally recognized authorities in their fields and early-career researchers working in this area. Their eleven original essays investigate a variety of philosophical and ethical issues arising from the phenomenon of heritage destruction in war, including conflicts between protecting heritage and protecting people, how we ought to respond to heritage that is damaged in war, the nature of the harm caused by such damage, and the morally appropriate treatment of sites of war and conflict that have themselves become heritage sites.

 The Ethics of War and Peace is a lively introduction to one of the oldest but still most relevant ethical debates. Focusing on the philosophical questions surrounding the ethics of modern war, Helen Frowe presents contemporary just war theory in a stimulating and accessible way.

 This third edition has been revised and updated throughout, with additional material covering belligerents’ duties to refugees, the scope of jus ad bellum, indirect intervention and alternatives to intervention, and the withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan. The book also covers key topics, including:

 theories of self-defence and national defence

jus ad bellum, jus in bello and jus post bellum

the moral status of combatants

humanitarian intervention

weapons and technology

the principle of non-combatant immunity

the nature of terrorism and the moral status of terrorists. 

Each chapter uses examples and concludes with a summary, discussion questions and suggestions for further reading to aid student engagement, learning and revision. A glossary covers the full range of relevant terminology.

This is the ideal textbook for students of philosophy and politics approaching this important area for the first time.

Adam Hosein has recently proposed that a sufficient degree of intervening agency between a person’s contribution to an unjust lethal threat and the posing of that threat can exempt the contributor from liability to defensive killing. Hosein suggests that this will exempt most civilians from liability to lethal defence even if they contribute to unjust killings. I argue that intervening agency does not bear on a person’s responsibility for a threat, and does not exempt her from liability to defensive killing.

Several states, including the United Kingdom, the United States, and France, have recently engaged in the high-profile supporting of foreign rebel fighters, providing them with training, weapons, and financial resources. Justifications for providing this assistance usually invoke, at least in part, our obligations to prevent harm to the citizens of oppressive and violent regimes. Providing such assistance is often presented as a morally safe 'middle ground' between doing nothing and putting one's own troops at risk. Yet this assistance typically enables rebels to cause unjust harms, since armed uprisings almost invariably cause harm to innocent people. I argue that enabling these unjust harms can render the provision of assistance unjustified. When a state could prevent at least as much harm by using its resources in other ways, such as preventing disease, without thereby causing comparable unjust harm and without incurring a (significantly greater) supererogatory cost, the state acts unjustifiably if it nonetheless funds the rebellion. When assistors unjustifiably enable unjust harms, they are morally liable to bear costs for the sake of people who suffer those harms. This is true even if the rebels act justifiably in directly inflicting those harms.