The Weight of Authority in War: Comments on Renzo

Abstract

In Massimo Renzo’s paper “Political Authority and Unjust War,” he defends an argument from authority to the effect that in principle, a soldier may be obligated and so permitted to follow orders even if they are understood to order killing of enemy soldiers who ought not to be killed. I propose some clarifications in the use of the ideas of duty and wrong, before turning to the conflict between such arguments from authority and some deep intuitions about the moral gravity of killing. A more restrictive view has come to be influential partly on that basis, but I argue in defense of Renzo that the restrictive view also conflicts with deep intuitions, including about the permissibility of duly commanded military killing in national defense against conquest or annexation. I argue that the national defense example puts arguments from authority in a sufficiently promising light that its tension with intuitions about killing is far from dispositive against it.