I would like to begin by thanking three colleagues who have made the most significant intellectual contributions to this book: my lovely mentor and favourite dinner companion, Bob Brecher; my unsurpassable ale-tasting and writing partner, Robin Dunford; and my ‘most awesome’ running and future writing partner, Vicky Margree. You are the best friends and colleagues anyone could...

This book is a critique of contemporary defences of ‘just liberal violence’. I use this term in two senses. First, just liberal violence is violence purportedly committed in defence of human rights and/or in order to minimize human suffering. It is those intentions that are said to render violence in...

In this chapter I introduce the core features of just liberal violence, thus laying the ground for my critiques of moral defences of sweatshops, torture and war. I will go through these core features later in the book: first, the three reductions of violence, agency and perspective – reductions which must be made for the moral defences to work; second, the foundational problems of...

Sweatshops are awful places to work in. As Benjamin Powell writes, they ‘often have long and unpredictable working hours, a high risk of injuries on the job, and generally unhealthy working conditions.

Readers might be familiar with the foundational myth of the liberal defence of interrogational torture: the ‘ticking bomb scenario’.1 Imagine that a ‘terrorist’ has planted a bomb in a metropolis, which is going to detonate in the near future and kill thousands of innocent people (or make it millions if you think the stakes need to be higher than that). Further imagine that ‘we’ manage to capture the terrorist, that they refuse to reveal the location of the bomb, and that it is too late to evacuate. Would it be morally right to torture the terrorist to elicit the relevant information that would enable us to find and defuse the bomb? According to countless pro-torture arguments drafted by a whole army of contemporary liberal philosophers and lawyers, it would indeed be.

Contemporary liberal just war theorists are at least partially concerned with defending the view that it can be just to use the means of war to defend human rights and/or to minimize human suffering. The task of this chapter is to show that the justifications they offer for this view are inadequate. While I focus on two thinkers, Michael Walzer and Jeff McMahan, my critique applies to whomever is happy to be identified as a liberal just war theorist and has contributed to the literature in obedience to the basic parameters set by this signifier. It applies even to those who – like Walzer and McMahan – have used just war theory as a critical tool.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go, is set in England in the late 1990s. It is narrated by Kathy, a thirty-one-year-old woman who – she tells us – has been a carer for eleven years and is going to continue being a carer for eight more months (this is what they have told her). As the reader finds out later, Kathy is a clone who has been created so that her organs can...

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Michael Neu is a senior lecturer in philosophy, politics and ethics at the University of Brighton. His research addresses moral and political questions pertaining to violence. He has published articles in Social Theory and Practice, International Relations and the Journal of International Political Theory. He is also the co-author of Just War and the Responsibility to...

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