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First imagine a case in which a person uses violence in self-defense; then imagine a case in which two people engage in self-defense against a threat they jointly face. Continue to imagine further cases in which increasing numbers of people act with increasing coordination to defend both themselves and each other against a common threat, or a range of threats they face together. What you are imagining is a spectrum of cases that begins with acts of individual self-defense and, as the threats become more complex and extensive, the threatened individuals more numerous, and their defensive action more integrated, eventually reaches cases involving a scale of violence that is constitutive of war. But if war, at least in some instances, lies on a continuum with individual self- and other-defense, and if acts of individual self- and other-defense can sometimes be morally justified, then war can in principle be morally justified as well. It follows that the only coherent forms of pacifism are those that reject the permissibility of individual self- or other-defense-for example, those based on an absolute prohibition of violence or killing.
David Rodin, in his illuminating and provocative book, argues to the contrary that war cannot be justified as self-defense, either individual or collective.1 He distinguishes two strategies that seek to defend the permissibility of war by appealing to rights of self-defense. The "analogical strategy" claims that war can be an act of self-defense by the state that is analogous to an act of self-defense by an individual. This strategy develops an account of national defense by simply rewriting the theory of individual self-defense, substituting states for individual persons. Rodin's objections to this strategy are convincing. I would add to them that, because it treats the state as an individual agent, this strategy cannot give a plausible account of the requirement of discrimination.
The "reductive strategy" claims that national defense is reducible to the defense of individuals. Rodin distinguishes two versions. According to one (which I sketched in the opening paragraph), national defense is just many individuals "exercising the right of self-defense at the same time and in an organized fashion." According to the other, it is "the state exercising the right of defense on behalf of its citizens" (p. 140). My aim...