The March 6, 2008 issue of the New York Review of Books contains a review of the thinking of contemporary political philosopher Michael Walzer on such topics as torture (sometimes justified, as in the “ticking bomb” case), terror (he condemns it as a rule, but, admits that states have made exceptions in order to save lives down the road: Hiroshima as a means of forcing the Japanese to surrender in 1945, for example), and when states have the right to invade others (as a rule, never, he says, but permissible when defending other states who have been invaded (for example, when Kuwait was invaded by Iraq in 1990; conversely, the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq was not a just act because there turned out to be no weapons of mass destruction and we violated the sanctity of the political sovereignty of another nation, one of Walzer’s axial principles).
See Jeremy Waldron, “When is it Right to Invade?,” The New York Review of Books, March 6, 2008, 30ff.
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