Many recent efforts to make belligerents more accountable for the needless suffering they cause take the form of attempts to infuse the law of human rights into that of warfare, sometimes virtually to the point of supplanting rather than merely supplementing the latter. That effort is largely misconceived, as this chapter shows. If bilateral reciprocity is the central fact about social relations, as theorists of widely different persuasions maintain, then no society can afford entirely to contravene this principle within its law. This is especially true of international society, since it lacks the sort of multilateral social contract characteristic of any domestic society with a robust, well-functioning state. And if the effective governance of war, in particular, continues to depend heavily on bilateral reciprocity (as Chapter 10 shows), then it would be unwise for international law to rely heavily on rules affording that principle little place.

The international law of human rights accords it almost none. Indeed, this is one of the chief sources of appeal about human rights ideals to many: Such rights continue to protect people who are unable (or simply unwilling) to reciprocate anything vis-à-vis others who occupy the same society, national or international. One might even say that the very notion of a human right borne by all persons, simply as members of the species, is designed to minimize the importance of differences in our moral character and in the nature of relationships between us.