In this talk, I will be running over the central themes of my book, Sparing Civilians (OUP 2015). I'll start by introducing the norm that protects civilians in war, and then explain how recent military practice, as well as trends in contemporary just war theory, have put the protection of civilians in jeopardy. I'll set out my approach to vindicating that protection, and run through my core arguments for that conclusion.

Seth Lazar is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Philosophy, ANU. He works on moral and political philosophy, including the ethics of war and self-defence, the ethics of risk, and moral decision theory. His papers have appeared and are forthcoming in leading philosophy and political science journals, and he is the author of Sparing Civilians (OUP, 2015), and the editor of The Morality of Defensive War (OUP, 2014), and the Oxford Handbook of Ethics of War (OUP, 2016 [online], 2017 [print]).