This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel War Burton.

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If you attempt to burglar house and wake up the owner who points a gun at you,

you would not be within your rights to kill him. Yet if you're a soldier in uniform and

in an army that invades another country, the rules of law do allow you to open

fire on enemy troops. Jeff McMahon, from Rutgers University, a leading moral philosopher, believes the law about war has mistakenly been

taken to determine the moral framework of war too, with dangerous consequences.

The laws of war, he argues, need amending.

Jeff McMahon, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you.

We're going to talk about killing in war.

Now, if it's one area of life when it seems acceptable to kill people, it is when they're wearing uniforms and they're shooting at you.

What could be the philosophical problem there?

Well, the philosophical problem could be that they're wearing a uniform and shooting at you because

you've done something that makes them justified in shooting at you, like for example invading their country and trying to conquer it for your

own purposes. And the mere fact that they are shooting at you with justification seems to me to deprive you of permission to fight back.

So we see this in domestic cases.

If somebody is about to commit a murder and the only way the police

can stop the murder is to shoot the potential murderer if the potential murderer then sees that

he's about to be shot. We don't think that he has a right of self-defense against the police.

We don't think that he can shoot the police.

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