Acknowledgments
Early versions of the argument made here were presented at West Point and to the faculty colloquium of the Conflict Resolution program at the University of Massachusetts Boston. While writing, I received invaluable feedback from many colleagues and friends. I am particularly grateful to Maria Granik, Greg Fried, Jeremy Wanderer, Chris Zurn, Kenneth Greenberg, Fred Marchant, Dan Feldman, Steven Levine, Chad Finsterwald, Vladimir Petrovic, Jean-Philippe Belleau, and Alan Zebek. Some of them read earlier drafts, others commented on arguments I tried out with them. I learned a lot from what they told me.
I’m also indebted to the students in my seminars on the philosophy of war at the university over the last few years for the opportunity to discuss the ideas that animate this book. I have greatly enjoyed reading the classical texts that inform this work – from Homer to Clausewitz – with them.
I’m grateful to Hilary Gaskin of Cambridge University Press for her enthusiastic embrace of this project and for her expert guidance. Her encouragement made this work both more philosophical and wider ranging than I thought possible. Sections of some of the chapters were published in other venues. Small parts of the arguments offered in Chapters 5 and 6 appeared in my article “Proportionality and Self Interest,” Human Rights Review 11(2) (2010). A short section of Chapter 4 appeared in “Embarrassment and Political Repair,” in Thomas Brudholm and Johannes Lang (eds.), Emotions and Mass Atrocity: Philosophical and Theoretical Explorations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Another brief section of Chapter 4 appeared in Jacob Burley and Nir Eisikovits, “Workplace Automation and Political Replacement: A Valid Analogy?” AI and Ethics 3(4) (2022). Parts of Chapters 4, 5, and 8 appeared in “Political Humiliation and the Sense of Replacement,” in Graham Parsons and Mark Wilson (eds.), How to End a War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).
I’m grateful to my in-laws, Tanya Nosik and Sasha Granik, for their warmth and generosity over the years, and to my parents, Zvi and Rivka Eisikovits, who have been a constant source of love and support, who patiently read numerous versions of these arguments (and showed them to their friends), and have always insisted that everything I do is great. It’s not true, but it’s very nice to hear. My daughters Sasha, Nina, and Naomi are wonders – they bring no end of delight into my life. Spending time with them is the best antidote to the dark materials I think and write about.
There are a lot of references to poetry in this book, and I hope they shed some light on the moral psychology of war. But sometimes it’s best to keep things simple. I’ll stick with Nat King Cole. “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn,” he sings, “is just to love and be loved in return.” I dedicate this book to my wife, Masha, the best person I know, who taught me the greatest thing I’ll ever learn.
