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Avishai Margalit

Avishai Margalit is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the winner of the 2012 Philosophical Book Award (Hannover) for his most recent book, On Compromise and Rotten Compromises.

  • Obama and the Rotten Compromise

    December 17, 2009

    In reading the reports on President Obama’s Nobel speech in Oslo, one gets the impression that the President was offering a dose of realism to a gathering of fjord-loving well-meaning village idiots. He reminded them that an imperfect world should be governed not only by a pacifist vision of non-violence, but also by a theory of just war that tells us under what conditions a war is morally justified. This invocation of just wars was praised by both conservatives and liberals, who have applauded what they call Obama’s “Niebuhrian realism” and his drawing on a “venerable moral tradition” to give legitimacy to military engagement with “hostile regimes and networks in the world.” But having a realistic view of what a war can accomplish is part and parcel of just war doctrine, and it is precisely Obama’s realism about the war in Afghanistan that we should question.