Rethinking Preemption And Prevention: War, Imminence, And Certainty

Abstract

This paper answers the following two questions: (1) What differentiates preemptive wars from preventive wars? (2) Can prevention ever be a just cause for war? With respect to the first question, it contends that the certainty of unjustified rights violations, as opposed to their temporal imminence, differentiates preemptive wars from preventive wars. To show this, it utilizes two hypothetical cases, which illustrate the certainty-based distinction. It also suggests that Derek Parfit’s “bias towards the near” can explain the literature’s focus on temporal imminence, as opposed to the certainty of unjustified rights violations. With respect to the second question, it argues that preventive justifications for armed conflicts, understood in terms of the certainty of unjustified rights violations, do not justify armed conflicts.