ABSTRACT
Having considered some of the most prominent theories of self-defence, we can turn now to the relationship between self-defence and war. As I have already indicated, the nature and extent of this relationship is a source of considerable disagreement. On the one hand, collectivists argue that war is to be understood as a relationship not between persons, but between collectives. We must thus treat the actions of combatants as undertaken on behalf of the collective, which means that we cannot judge these actions by the standards we apply to individuals. On the other hand, individualists argue that the rules governing killing in war can be reduced to the rules governing defensive killing between individuals. Killing does not take on a different moral character simply because it is practised on a large scale or has political ends.
