Beginning the End: Unilateral vs. Collaborative Conceptions of War Termination Ethics

The ethic of cooperation in warfare helps belligerents end wars with greater likelihood of sustainable peace, but there are tradeoffs and lingering questions, and moral expectations for cooperation can be exploited. The importance of cooperation in war points to a conceptual shortcoming of the jus ex bello literature, which approaches war from a unilateral perspective. More so than ethical evaluations of other stages of war (e.g., jus ad bellum, jus in bello), the ethics of ending war (jus ex bello) require taking into account the interactive nature of warfare, which has not only practical but ethical implication.