Justifying defensive war against mitigated aggression

This dissertation defends the view that a nation is justified in undertaking a defensive war -- conceived of in terms of collective personal self-defense -- against mitigated aggression. A nation commits mitigated aggression when its goal in invading another nation is only to conquer and rule; it's not to kill or enslave the victim population. A nation committing mitigated aggression will employ lethal military force if and only if the victim nation does not submit to the invasion. My contention is that this kind of aggression is sufficiently egregious to justify a defensive lethal military response. In Chapter 1, I adjudicate between competing accounts of personal self-defense and argue for the plausibility of a certain rights-based account. In Chapter 2, I show how national-defense is thought to be analogous to and justified in terms of personal self-defense. I then go on to discuss the purported problems of conceiving of national-defense in terms of personal self-defense, specifically, the problem of how a defensive war against mitigated aggression can be proportionate. In Chapter 3, I evaluate three arguments in the literature for why a defensive war against mitigated aggression can be proportionate. I conclude that these arguments are less than compelling. In Chapter 4, I give my own account for why defensive war (conceived of in terms of self-defense) can be a proportionate response to mitigated aggression. I go about doing this by asking: what makes something sufficiently valuable such that a person is permitted to kill in defense of it? Seemingly one answer to this question is that X is sufficiently valuable if it is a primary interest i.e. an indispensably necessary condition for one's overall well being. I discuss two kinds of "primary" interests: welfare interests and central interests, and I suggest that their natures are such that they can be lethally protected. I then argue that what mitigated aggression threatens to destroy (which is the victim nation's 'common way of life') is both a central and a welfare interest.