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Joseph Shaw, The Moral Target: Aiming at Right Conduct in War and Other Conflicts, The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 67, Issue 268, July 2017, Pages 654–656, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqw047
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Extract
This collection of Frances Kamm's articles illustrates both the interest and the difficulties of her moral philosophy. The subject matter is of perennial interest: the ethics of various kinds of conflict, including a number of modern-day challenges, such as the ethics of giving aid to Taliban-era Afghanistan, the amnesty of apartheid-era crimes in South Africa through the Truth and Justice Commission (TJC), and nuclear deterrence.
Kamm's discussion of these and other issues is systematic and often incisive. At its best, it presents readers with a convincing structure of justification for Kamm's favoured conclusion. An example would be her discussion of the South African case, particularly her exploration of the relationship between the outcomes offered by the TJC and conventional Retributive Justice (RJ). Kamm observes, inter alia, first, that what is offered to a victim by the TJC may not be the whole of what is offered by RJ, but it is an important part of it: a public recognition of the crime and the suffering of the victim, with a confession by the perpetrator (p. 140). Secondly, the moral possibility of the TJC derives not from the moral impossibility of RJ, but rather the opposite: it is because the victims could, in principle, have demanded conventional punishment of their tormentors, that they had the right to demand something less (p. 141). Thirdly, that the impetus for the TJC was political: the need for reconciliation, where there was a real possibility of confrontation and even civil war (pp. 137–8).
