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1. Introduction
One critically important issue in applied moral philosophy is the identification of the conditions under which violence can be morally justified. This issue needs to be clearly distinguished from that of the conditions under which the agent of violence can or should be excused for having performed the act. In the former case, we are asking about the moral permissibility of the act of violence, whereas in the latter we are assuming that the act is morally impermissible and asking about the culpability of the agent.1 Unfortunately, the issue of identifying the conditions under which violence can be morally justified is complicated by difficulties with how we are to understand the concept of moral justification. When we ask for an account of these conditions, what exactly are we asking for? What sorts of things are to count as justifying conditions?
Consider the following alternatives: Is an act of violence justified by certain facts that hold in the world, such as the fact that an agent's life is genuinely threatened by an act of unjust aggression? Or is it justified by the relevant epistemic situation of the agent-in other words, by what the agent knows or justifiably believes about the world (more specifically, about the context within which the violent act is performed)? Put more simply, is moral justification more properly construed as an ontic or as an epistemic matter?
The significance of these questions is best appreciated in the context of an actual dispute over the moral justification of violence. In what follows, I look carefully at one such dispute-between James Sterba and myself over the justifiability of war-and show how the dispute is rooted in alternative conceptions of moral justification. While I treat the moral justification of violence as an optic matter, such that violence is permissible only if certain conditions in the world hold, Sterba takes the moral justification of violence to be essentially epistemic-that is, he thinks that in order for an act of violence to be morally permissible, it is necessary and sufficient that the agent have the right sorts of beliefs and the right sort of warrant for those beliefs.2 While Sterba's approach here is not atypical, I show that it has unacceptable implications. To avoid these implications,...