A Conversation with David Luban

Our guest is David Luban, a distinguished legal philosopher who has written widely about military law and ethics. We use the Trump administration's drone strikes on "drug boats" as the vehicle for talking about the tension--such as it may be--between law and hierarchical authority, for example when ordinary soldiers are instructed that they must disregard unlawful orders. As usual with us, we try to show that the issues are much more complicated than they are typically presented as being--to the point that we end with a brief (and inadequate) discussion of Joseph Raz's ideas about law as offering "exclusionary reasons" for acting without regard to your own evaluation of the rightness of what you're being told to do.