ABSTRACT
The language of the ethics of war is often appropriate by states and other political actors to give a veneer of morality or virtue to what is, very often, unjustified killing on a grand scale. Both war and most of the thought experiments philosophers use in discussing war (and defensive harming) involve departures from the principles of justice. The war on terror is also interesting from the perspective of how citizens view their relationship to the wars their governments fight. Despite embodying the notion of civilian control of the military, modern democracies, on the whole, sharply divide the military from civilian life – again, something that is often advantageous to states. The nature of a war on ‘terror’ is that it has no real end, which meant that captured fighters could not be released at the end of the conflict, as they would usually be in a ‘normal’ war.
