Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book outlines and develops normative arguments about issues such as torture and other kinds of political violence. It explores a variety of different theories from the fields of ethics political theory, and IR theory as resources to help us think about the rightness or wrongness of certain kinds of global violence, and it equips us with some intellectual resources to be able to make reasoned, normative arguments one way or the other about them. The book crosses disciplinary boundaries in searching for the intellectual resources to make normative arguments about global political violence. It examines the debate within moral theory among consequentialists, deontologists, and virtue ethicists, and the debate within political theory among cosmopolitans and communitarians. The book addresses the ethics of using nuclear weapons, as well as the ethics of nuclear deterrence.