Why do we need another book on the morality of war? What makes David Fisher's contribution to the subject fresh and compelling is the unique standpoint from which he writes — as one who has served as a high level defense and foreign policy official in the British government and who is a scholar of western moral philosophy.

Fisher's perch fosters his originality in two ways. First, it enables him to observe a problem that Aquinas, Suarez, and perhaps even Michael Walzer never faced — a climate of moral skepticism. Dating back at least to 1920, skepticism has made its way from Bloomsbury salons and Oxford and Cambridge seminar rooms into mainstream British society. In Fisher's own bailiwick, the British military, he observes moral skepticism among soldiers who lack both a vocabulary to think about justice and the formation to live it out.

Second, unlike armchair theorists, Fisher brings a policymaker's keen and seasoned eye to myriad contemporary dilemmas. He takes the reader on ethical tours of duty through Iraq, Bosnia, and Sudan and through discussions of the responsibility to protect, preventive war, and torture. He never shuns the complexity of these dilemmas and confronts them with realism, honesty and thoroughness.

Bringing these assets together, Fisher delivers a resounding yes to the question of the book's subtitle, Can war be just in the twenty-first century? His experience as a policymaker yields sensitivity to context; his training as a moral philosopher prevents him from being swallowed up by context. Believing that reasoned answers to the problems of war are knowable and performable, Fisher aims to “make war just and to make only just war” (247).

Fisher spends the first half of the book constructing an ethical framework to undergird the traditional just war norms that he calls virtuous consequentialism. It is telling that he takes refuting moral skepticism as his first task, which he does in Chapter Two. To counter skepticism, he draws strong arguments from the western tradition, beginning with Aristotle and Plato. His own framework is an amalgam of deontological, consequentialist, and virtue ethics, “based on the simple insight that each of these theories is partly right and profoundly wrong” (135).

Deontological theories, Fisher explains, assert moral absolutes and stress “internal qualities of acts” (147). What Fisher believes these theories have right is the importance of moral norms, which are integral to the just war framework, including self-defense as the main justification for going to war; prohibitions on actions like killing non-combatants and torture; and others.

Yet Fisher repeatedly criticizes deontological theories for their insistence on the absolute, exceptionless character of norms and for their stress on purity of intention. Sometimes the negative consequences of adhering to a norm accumulate so greatly that they outweigh the value of this adherence. Although commanders and ordinary soldiers ought to give strong presumption to norms, sometimes “ticking bombs,” the probability of aggression, or other scenarios involving massive death tolls justify resorts to torture, the intentional killing of civilians, and preventive strikes, he argues. Further, in real life, moral principles can conflict and moral rules will fail to deliver determinate answers in many situations (48, 147).

Fisher extends his criticism to the just war tradition's rule of double effect, which allows deaths to civilians that are foreseen but not intended, as when the bombing of an urban munitions factory unavoidably also takes the lives of residents living across the street. It is often difficult to distinguish effects that are foreseen but not intended from those that are foreseen and intended, Fisher holds, while in exceptional cases, the targeting of civilians is the morally best decision. Imagine, he proposes, the pilot of a military jet who has the opportunity to shoot down a civilian airliner like the one that terrorists flew into a skyscraper on September 11, 2001. The pilot ought to shoot it down, Fisher judges, but his intention to stop the plane cannot be disentangled from his intention to kill the civilians inside; he intends both.

Consequentialism, Fisher holds, rightfully takes into account states of affairs to which actions lead and grasps that adhering to absolutes could be perverse sometimes. Consequentialism cannot stand alone, however, as an approach to morality, he argues. Expecting soldiers to perform complex calculations of consequences, particularly when faced with snap decisions, is as utopian as moral absolutism. Further, while intentions are not everything, they are still crucial to the moral quality of actions, he argues through extended examples.

If Fisher indeed counsels both following norms in general and violating them exceptionally, how can soldiers be expected to do this, especially in the danger of battle, when tempted to revenge, and the like? Only through formation in the virtues. Here enters Fisher's third school, virtue theory. It is a fallacy of twentieth century moral theories, says Fisher, that they envision problems being faced by people without histories, making decisions about what to do in abstraction from who they are and who they have become (51). Drawing from Aristotle, Fisher argues that ethics must be inculcated into character. He backs up his claim with a discussion of how classic virtues like justice, prudence, and courage find application in military contexts and shows how British soldiers' abuse of Iraqi civilians in Basra resulted from a lack of formation in virtue (125–128).

In Fisher's moral theory, rules, virtues, and consequences mingle to produce his overarching concept and criterion: human flourishing and living together in virtuous communities. What does this ethic offer in turn for today's dilemmas of war? As Fisher leads us through wars in Iraq, humanitarian intervention in Darfur, and the war on terror, his analysis displays a determination to show that just war norms have concrete application, a sensitivity to policy dilemmas, a strong presumption for adherence to norms, and a reluctant willingness to counsel departure from these norms when they are overly rigid. For all of his criticism of moral absolutism, he opposes most actual departures from traditional norms. While he allows the moral possibility of preventive war, he comes down against the war against Iraq of 2003, arguing that the case for Iraqi aggression was not clear enough. While he does not think that torture can be ruled out altogether, he disagrees with Alan Dershowitz's proposal for a controlled legalization of the practice. By contrast, Fisher gives a thumbs up to the Persian Gulf War of 1991, a classic case of defense against aggression.

Fisher's book succeeds in bringing original thinking to the morality of war. It is worthwhile reading for those who already have digested many books on the morality of war as well as those looking for an introduction. Recommending the book further is its nuance, its fluid English prose, and its textured treatment of difficult, sometimes, horrible dilemmas. Fisher's proposals for training British soldiers in the morality of warfare is perhaps the most innovative part of his book, reflecting his diagnosis of Britain's climate of moral skepticism and his appreciation of the need for character formation.

Still, I demur from key strands in Fisher's argument, especially his case against the exceptionless character of moral norms. Absolutism may seem vulnerable to Fisher's warnings about real-world complexity. Still, my view is that moral absolutes can survive his criticisms, especially if rooted in the natural law tradition of Aquinas.

Fisher's justification of departures from absolutes and his (partial) embrace of consequentialism falls afoul of at least one of his own commitments –his respect for tradition. Plato, Aristotle, St. Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Suarez, and the major Protestant reformers did not espouse consequentialism, which, like its variant utilitarianism, was not embraced until modern times and is arguably attendant upon the modern skepticism that Fisher decries.

Fisher also runs afoul of the tradition in posing consequentialism as an alternative to deontological theories that stress purity of intention. Deontological theories as he describes them best fit Kant. However, Kant and Kantians are not history's only proponents of exceptionless moral norms; others include Thomas Aquinas and his legatees. While Aquinas asserts absolutes, his account of morality involves far more than inner intentions and also includes the goods that human actions instantiate. It is the flourishing of persons and communities that Aquinas envisions morality promoting, just as Fisher does. The Thomist tradition also incorporates the virtues, this combining two of Fisher's three theories under one roof.

Fisher's criticism of absolutist theories for failing to deliver determinate guidance for every situation is also problematic. Moral norms, in the thought of Aristotle and Aquinas, were never supposed to do that. That is the job of prudence, the wise application of moral norms to specific situations, which presupposes that norms offer much leeway for application and judgment. But prudence is not consequentialist. It involves the application of norms, not departures from these norms.

Nor does the natural law tradition oppose weighing states of affairs against one another at times. Judgments about proportionality, for instance, are often required. The weighing of states of affairs, however, does not amount to consequentialism, which holds that the states of affairs that result from actions are all that matters in moral decision-making. In Thomist natural law reasoning, weighing must never amount to a rationale for violating a basic moral norm.

Fisher's criticism of double effect — a corollary of the moral norm against intentionally killing the innocent — falls short of refuting the absoluteness of basic moral norms as well. The civilian airliner example that he presents as a problem for double effect is one for which double effect in fact delivers a clear answer: the military jet pilot may justifiably shoot down the plane in order to divert it from its deadly trajectory, while the resulting civilian deaths may be neither an end nor a means in his action (and merit lamentation). The decision is tragic and rightly occasions distress, but it is morally clear. Fisher also argues that, contrary to double effect, agents are responsible for foreseen but unintended consequences (the civilian deaths, for instance) (99). But double effect theorists do not hold that an agent may be oblivious to consequences; rather he is responsible for minimizing them. If he does so, however, and if these effects are proportionate to a just end and are pursued through a just means, then he is no longer morally liable for these effects.

Most of all, Fisher does not respond adequately to consequentialism's biggest problem – namely, the impossibility of the weighing that it envisions. Fisher recounts philosopher Bernard Williams' example of an army captain in South America who asks a lost botanist to make a choice between shooting an innocent captured Indian, which will occasion the release of nineteen other captured Indians, or refusing to shoot the Indian, which the captain says will lead him to shoot the nineteen others (95). Fisher notes that philosophers disagree about what the botanist ought to do, which he takes as a weakness of absolutist theories. But the point of Williams' example, which he offered in an exchange over utilitarianism, is that morality involves more than weighing and numbers, even of lives. It also involves agency, intention, and responsibility. Williams means for his reader to feel the pull of the notion that some things ought not to be done despite the consequences of not doing them. Consequentialism, by contrast, purports to weigh what cannot be weighed — a given state of affairs versus an agent's responsibility never to act against a basic human good, in this case, life. The choice it proposes is one that a person cannot coherently perform. If an absolutist ethic — deontological or natural law — were to allow such weighing to take place, then it would no longer be the moral theory that it purports to be. In that case, however, it could no longer be combined with other theories of morality, as Fisher proposes to do in his tripartite amalgam.