ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on explication, defense, and amplification, not persuasion, much less demonstration. It begins by explicating the claim that each human being has basic worth, respond to a clarifying objection, and then articulates a number of implications of that claim for the morality of war, for the Just War Tradition's (JWT) exclusive focus on human beings, human rights, forfeiture and the permissibility of military violence, collateral damage, and harmless wronging. Basic human worth is a function of three distinct normative facts: each human being has great worth: excellence is a degreed property; the feature that gives each human being great worth provides each with a degree of worth no lesser or greater than it provides to any other; no human being has it within her power to make it the case that she lacks great and equal worth. The chapter describes an important formative consequence of incorporating a commitment to basic worth and human rights into the JWT.
