Abstract
‘Do you think he should have sent us in?’ It was April 2003, the ‘he’ in question was Prime Minister Tony Blair and the place to which the question referred was Iraq. The person who asked me the question was dressed, or at least partially dressed, as I was in standard, military issue camouflage uniform. I was a bit older and in the RAF while he was a soldier in the Army. Apart from that we had a lot in common: we were both married and spoke with similar Scottish accents; we were about the same height and build; we loved the same sports and couldn’t stand the same football teams (Rangers and Celtic).
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Notes
In this book the word ‘moral’ is understood as relating to codes, written and unwritten, that govern our behaviour. The word ‘ethical’ relates to the individual choices that individuals make in shaping their own behaviour by either conforming to the codes (including law) or not. These conceptions of morality and ethics are based on ideas articulated by the French philosopher and cultural historian Michel Foucault. See Foucault, M., The Use of Pleasure, Trans. R. Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1984).
These questions are adapted from ideas found in Foucault, M., ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics’, in Foucault, M. and Rabinow, P. (Eds.) The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984 Volume 1: Ethics — Subjectivity and Truth (New York: The New Press, 1997) pp. 263–5.
Rumsfeld, Donald, speech to the United States Senate Armed Forces Committee, 9 July 2003, located at http://news.bbc.co.uk/, accessed 10 July 2003.
Drake, S., Galileo At Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) p. 367.
The concept of a regime of truth is used in this book in the Foucauldian sense. That is, truth does not have an independent existence of its own but is produced and reinforced within societies using political, educational, religious and other mechanisms for deciding what counts as true and what counts as false. Those who wield political and institutional power have a greater means of shaping what counts as truth than those who would oppose them. For further reading see Foucault, M., ‘Truth and Power’, in Foucault, M. and Faubion, J.D. (Eds) The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984 Volume 3: Power (London: Allen Lane, 2001) pp. 111–33.
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© 2012 Peter Lee
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Lee, P. (2012). Introduction. In: Blair’s Just War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230356443_1
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