In the years since 9/11, the United States entered an age of endless war. In this lecture, based on his recent book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Samuel Moyn asks a troubling but urgent question: What if efforts to make war more ethical—to ban torture and limit civilian casualties—have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier? 

Humane is the story of how America went off to fight and never came back, and how armed combat was transformed from an imperfect tool for resolving disputes into an integral component of the modern condition. As American wars become more protracted, they are also becoming more humane. This lecture argues that this development might not represent progress at all.

Samuel Moyn is Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University.