Marc LiVecche

Marc LiVecche is the McDonald Distinguished Scholar of Ethics, War, and Public Life at Providence. He is also a non-resident research fellow at the US Naval War College, in the College of Leadership and Ethics.

Marc completed doctoral studies, earning distinction, at the University of Chicago, where he worked under the supervision of the political theorist and public intellectual Jean Bethke Elshtain, until her death in August, 2013. His first book, The Good Kill: Just War & Moral Injury, was published in 2021 by Oxford University Press. Another project, Responsibility and Restraint: James Turner Johnson and the Just War Tradition, co-edited with Eric Patterson, was published by Stone Tower Press in the fall of 2020. Currently, he is finalizing Moral Horror: A Just War Defense of Hiroshima. Before all this academic stuff, Marc spent twelve years doing a variety of things in Central Europe—ranging from helping build sport and recreational leagues in post-communist communities, to working at a Christian study and research center, to leading seminars on history and ethics onsite at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp in Poland. This latter experience allowed him to continue his undergraduate study of the Shoah; a process which rendered him entirely ill-suited for pacifism.

Marc lives in Annapolis, Maryland with his wife and children–and a marmota monax whistlepigging under the shed. He can be followed, or stalked, on twitter @mlivecche. Additional publications can be found at his Amazon author page.

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War & Fine Distinctions

Seventy-four years ago today the United States entered WW II. Knowing what is worth fighting for is just as important today as it was then.

Women in the U.S. military will end the virtue of gallantry
The End of Gallantry

A Nation of men who have abdicated their responsibility to stand between women and the beasts is a nation that has already gone beastly

Cry-bullies: The Coming of Age of the Abuser-Victim

You can tell a lot about a person or group by how they respond to wrongdoing. At the center of the spectrum of options is the golden mean: the proportionate and discriminate rectification of injustice through the recovery of what has been wrongly taken, the rescue or protection of the innocent, the appropriate punishment of the wrongdoer, and the pursuit of a sustainable peace. Not everyone responds to wrongdoing so maturely.

Paris, ISIS, & American Responsibility

What is becoming increasingly clear is that whether concerning the export of terror, the refugee crisis, or the dangers of the maintenance of the caliphate, the only foreseeable end to this crisis is to see the end of ISIS.

Syrian Refugee
Compassion, Yes; (But Security Too)

Mercy need not run roughshod over prudence

After Paris

Morality and interests unite in our duty to destroy ISIS.

Long live the Republic

“liberté, égalité, fraternité”

Marc LiVecche: Just War Theory & When Killing is Morally Obligatory

For soldiers, the burden of having to do that which they believe to be morally evil is devastating. And according to the classic Just War tradition, it needn’t be.

More than Good News

The primary aims of Mark Amstutz’s Evangelicals and American Foreign Policy are twofold. First he intends to provide a “more compelling account of Evangelicals’ influence on America’s role in the world” than has been previously appreciated. The book’s second, and primary, task is to issue both a challenge and a caution.

Moral Common Sense: Or, Mistakes Are Not Terrorism

On Saturday October 3rd, the United States military destroyed a hospital building in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing at least 22 people. Without question, even the accidental destruction of the hospital and the killing of the innocent remains indescribably awful- Was it an act of terror?