The dubious argument for the two inequality doctrines

The clearly most popular and most widely discussed argument for inequality in war proceeds on the assumption that killing in war must be justified as a form of law enforcement or as a form of self- or other-defensive killing, emphasizing the asymmetry between law enforcer and criminal or between culpable aggressor and innocent defender, respectively, and from there drawing conclusions for the ethics of war.Footnote ¹⁰ Hugo Grotius, for example, states that ‘no Man [has] a Right to oppose Force to a just Attack, no more than a Criminal can plea a Right of defending himself against the public Officers of Justice, who would apprehend him, by Order of the Magistrate’ (2005, 417 [II.1.XVIII.1]). And Jeff McMahan states (more than 400 years later) that ‘If a murderer is in the process of killing a number of innocent people and the only way to stop him is to kill him, the police officer who takes aim to shoot him does not thereby make herself morally liable to defensive action, and if the murderer kills her in self-defense, he adds one more murder to the list of his offenses’ (Reference McMahan2009, 14). The underlying assumption here is that if the murderer in the domestic context may not defend himself against a justified law enforcer or defender, soldiers in the international context are not allowed to defend themselves against soldiers justifiably defending their nation or enforcing natural law either.

The problem, however, with Grotius’s and McMahan’s examples are that they abstract from certain realities of many wars. To wit, there are at least two important disanalogies between the examples and many wars. First, domestic police officers can, at least in some states, be regarded as having been in some sense authorized (through democratic and constitutional procedures, for example) by the majority of the population of the very state on whose territory they are operating, while, in contrast, the soldiers justifiably invading another state in order to stop the majority from killing a certain minority group there often cannot be regarded as having been authorized by the majority of the population of the invaded state on whose territory they are now operating. Second (and more importantly for the line of reasoning in this paper), in many wars justified soldiers kill not only culpable aggressors and criminals but also innocent people (‘collaterally’).

If one reintroduces these realities (i.e. lack of authorization by the majority of the population of the very state on whose territory the agent is operating and presence of ‘collateral damage’) into one’s examples, the picture changes. Consider, for instance, this example:

Was Juanita morally justified in killing Bob? Intuitively it seems so. She would also have been justified under the law of practically all Western jurisdictions (as far as I can see), and this would even be the case if she had not been with her daughters. The self-defense justification gives defenders a prerogative to defend themselves against an aggressor even if, from an impartial, consequentialist point of view, the evils produced by the self-defensive act outweigh the goods.Footnote ¹¹

One might object here that Bob was not justified in attacking Carlos in the first place and claim that therefore the example cannot show that there is justified self-defense against justified attackers. Yet, as far as proportionality considerations are concerned, Bob’s act does seem to be justified. Another way of denying that Bob’s act was justified is to claim that his attack was preventive (while Juanita reacts to an imminent or ongoing attack, and thus in self-defense). However, while its preventive nature rules out that Bob’s act can be justified by a self-defense justification – which only applies to force used against ongoing or imminent attacks (see e.g. Ferzan Reference Ferzan2004)Footnote ¹² – it can still be justified by a necessity justification. (Incidentally, even if one allowed for ‘preventive self-defense’, the self-defense justification applies only to inflicting harm on an aggressor, not to inflicting harm on an innocent bystander like Juanita [see Sangero Reference Sangero2006, 117–21; Tadros Reference Tadros2011, 179–81]; therefore Bob’s act cannot be justified by the self-defense justification anyway. If it is to be justified at all, a necessity justification must come in.) After all, it is extremely implausible to claim that all use of preventive force is impermissible, as, for instance, real examples of battered women and a swathe of hypothetical examples demonstrate. An absolute prohibition of preventive force amounts in certain situations to condemning innocent people to death – as it does in the example of Bob. It is difficult to see how this could be justified.Footnote ¹³ Moreover, most killings in war are of course also preventive: soldiers do not, nor are they morally required to, restrict their use of force to situations where they are facing an ongoing or imminent attack. Rather, they engage in ‘seek and destroy’ tactics and prefer to surprise the enemy. They are preventively pro-active, not merely defensively reactive. If such preventive killing were unjustified, it would be difficult to see how wars could ever be justified (see Norman Reference Norman1995, 134–35; Cochran Reference Cochran1996). Intuitively, however, preventive killing, both in and outside of war, is sometimes justified. Incidentally, it does not do to claim that in war soldiers are already faced with an imminent or ongoing attack, namely by the attack of the other state. First, this is not true if the war waged is itself preventive; and second, that the other state has already attacked does not mean that the individual soldiers have attacked – yet, it is killing them that needs to be justified. Moreover, if one declares (for no good reason, it seems) the individual soldiers imminent or ongoing attackers only because they belong to an organization (the state) that has already attacked, then the same is true of Carlos, as his organization, the cartel, has also already attacked.

To avoid confusions and unwarranted suspicions, it might also be worth emphasizing again that while it is indeed an established principle in criminal law that there cannot be justified self-defense against justified self-defense,Footnote ¹⁴ law in many jurisdictions does allow self-defense against other kinds of justified acts (Robinson 1975–Reference Robinson76, 278), for example against acts that are justified by a necessity justification.Footnote ¹⁵ And as far as morality is concerned, McMahan himself once explicitly stated that ‘people are permitted a necessary and proportionate defense of their rights against both violation and infringement’, and with ‘infringement’ McMahan means a justified transgression against a right (Reference McMahan2005, 400).Footnote ¹⁶

If, however, one wanted to object that Bob’s act is not justified precisely because he had no legal authority, then let us modify the example:

It does not seem that the existence of the contract and thus of Bob’s legal authorization undermines Juanita’s moral justification of defending herself and her children.

Proportionality and special responsibilities or prerogatives

If Juanita’s defense against Bob is justified, a reasonable explanation seems to be that there is a special prerogative about killing in self-defense,Footnote ¹⁷ so that normal proportionality considerations do not apply and Juanita can give special weight to the survival of herself and her children.Footnote ¹⁸ This permission to give special weight to one’s own interests also applies, as we will see, to the necessity justification.

That people may give greater weight to their own interests and must give greater weight to the interests of their close relatives and friends than to the interests of strangers in deciding what to do is a common sense assumption. If people were not allowed to give greater weight to their own interests, they would become slaves to the common good; and if they did not have to give more weight to the interests of friends or their own children, friendship would cease to exist and the parent-child relation would be diminished to a purely biological one.

Note that this position is entirely compatible with the well-known tenet that all persons have ‘equal moral worth’.Footnote ¹⁹ Parents who deem themselves justified in caring more for their children than for the children of others need not think that their children are intrinsically or from an impartial point of view more valuable than the children of other parents. They can (and mostly will) simply think that they have an agent-relative prerogative – and probably even obligation – to care more for their children than for those of others. To wit, even someone who as emphatically endorses the equal moral worth of all persons as the ‘social justice cosmopolitan’ Thomas Pogge concedes that human beings ‘need to have the option, at least, to have special relationships with friends and family that cause their conduct to be at variance with the cosmopolitan requirement of impartiality’ (Reference Pogge2012, 328). McMahan himself even expands this idea to the relation between a government and its citizens, stating that a ‘government ought to give greater weight to economic benefits to its own citizens than it should give to equivalent benefits to foreigners’ (and it stands to reason that then the government should also give greater weight to the lives of its own citizens) (Reference McMahan2014b, 437). Likewise, Cécile Fabre (who embraces the moral inequality thesis) endorses a ‘principle of fundamental equality whereby individuals have equal moral worth’ (Reference Fabre2012, 20); yet she also permits ‘patriotic partiality’ (Reference Fabre2012, section 1.3.2) and admits that ‘individuals are permitted to confer greater weight on their own goals, projects, and attachments’ (Reference Fabre2012, 21).Footnote ²⁰ Thus, this latter principle or permission is intuitive and widely accepted, and it stands unrefuted.Footnote ²¹

Accordingly, a defender is not obliged to sacrifice herself or others for the lives of any larger number of people. In self-defense or the defense of others, proportionality simply is not a utilitarian or consequentialist calculus. Even if one accepted that there might be some number high enough to make self-sacrifice obligatory – maybe in a case where one is attacked by a culpable attacker whom one knows is developing a cure for a disease that otherwise would cost thousands or even millions of lives – there is still much room below this threshold, room enough to allow a defender like Juanita to kill a justified attacker like Bob even if she knows that due to her defense someone else will later kill a larger number of people than she has saved now.

In a certain sense, one might say, her self- and other-defense was ‘disproportionate’ – by saving only three innocents she contributed to the death of 15 innocents at the hands of someone else in the near future (and killed one justified attacker now). However, as far as the moral and legal self- and other-defense justification is concerned, it was not disproportionate in the relevant sense.Footnote ²² (For that to be the case, the harm inflicted on Bob would have to have been disproportionate. Of course, Juanita might herself ‘collaterally’ and directly harm innocent bystanders – maybe she also only has a shotgun. Such harm might be covered by a necessity justification, but it could not be covered by the self-defense justification, which only deals with the harm inflicted on an attacker. However, in the example Juanita simply does not, herself, directly harm any bystanders.)

Of course, the claim that an agent may prevent someone from saving a certain number of innocent people in order to save a smaller number of innocent people – maybe simply herself, or those towards whom she has special responsibilities – might be flat-out rejected. That is, one might simply reject the idea that in contemplating the permissibility of interference with justified agents one may give special weight to one’s own interests or the interests of those with whom one has special ties. Yet, such a flat-out rejection appears to be rather implausible. Consider the following three further examples:

It seems to me quite clear that intuitively Anna is justified in Boat to give precedence to the lives of her own children and go ahead and steal the boat,Footnote ²³ although she would thereby not advance the greater good (considered from an impartial perspective) and, moreover, would advance someone’s unjust cause or aim, namely Carlos’s aim to see Betty’s children drown (and given that B has more children, he prefers, if he cannot have both, to see Betty’s children drown rather than Anna’s children). Moreover, it also seems that intuitively Anna is justified to kill Betty in Lions and Clan.

This view can be corroborated by a look at law. This is also important as, of course, part of the force that some might attribute to Grotius’s (and McMahan’s) example is that it is clear that the criminals in that example would not have a legal defense (i.e. a legal justification) for killing the agent of the magistrate or the police officer. Thus, the example need not merely rely on moral intuitions, but can also enlist the authority of the law.

What does law say in the three cases just described? The first example, Boat, would be covered by a necessity justification (also called, depending on jurisdiction, ‘choice of evils justification’ or ‘justifying emergency justification’). The reason is that Anna is infringing Bill’s property rights as well as laws against theft or unauthorized use of other people’s property. Section 3.02 of the American Model Penal Code – which is not law, but has influenced actual jurisdictions (see Hoffheimer 2007–Reference Hoffheimer08) – provides a so-called ‘Choice of Evils’ justification for such cases:

1. (1) Conduct that the actor believes to be necessary to avoid a harm or evil to himself or to another is justifiable, provided that:

1. (a) the harm or evil sought to be avoided by such conduct is greater than that sought to be prevented by the law defining the offense charged; and

2. (b) neither the Code nor other law defining the offense provides exceptions or defenses dealing with the specific situation involved; and

3. (c) a legislative purpose to exclude the justification claimed does not otherwise plainly appear.Footnote ²⁴

Now, the harm or evil Anna seeks to avoid is the death of her three children, and the harm sought to be prevented by the law she breaks is the harm that befalls Bill if someone takes away his boat. It is the case, however, that the first harm by far outweighs the second harm, and thus Anna clearly has a Choice of Evils justification. Thus, a crucial feature of this justification is that not all resulting harms or consequences enter the proportionality considerations, but only the harm or evil sought to be prevented by the infringed law and the harm or evil that the infringement of the law sought to prevent.Footnote ²⁵

But, one might wonder, is there not a law that prohibits doing something (like stealing a boat) if the moral benefits (like the survival of three) of doing it are significantly less than the moral costs (like the deaths of 11 children) of doing it? And would not breaking that law then be what needed to be justified, and not merely the theft of Bill’s boat? The answer is that there simply is no such law. If there were, a defender would be legally obliged to desist from defending herself against someone whom she knows would, but for her defensive action, do a good that would be greater than the harm he would inflict on her if she did not defend herself. Yet, again, there is no such legal obligation.

Section 35.05 of the New York Penal Law also only compares the ‘desirability and urgency of avoiding such injury [the one the agent seeks to avoid]’ with the ‘desirability of avoiding the injury sought to be prevented by the statute defining the offense in issue’, hence leading to the same result in Boat as does the Model Penal Code. Several other American jurisdictions have followed the Model Penal Code and the New York example in this respect (Hoffheimer 2007–Reference Hoffheimer08, esp. 234–40). As regards common law, one sometimes hears that ‘the evil inflicted must not be disproportionate to the evil avoided’ (Card Reference Card2010, 758), but the term ‘infliction’ is narrower than ‘but-for-causing’ (i.e. than ‘causing’ something in the sense that it would not have happened but for one’s own act) – one inflicts death by shooting someone dead, but not by merely not helping him, nor by shooting his surgeon (without whom he will die) in self-defense, let alone by taking something somebody else might otherwise have taken to save him (unless, perhaps, one does these things because one wants him to die). As regards German law, it does not allow (according to majority opinion) weighing lives against lives anyway; so from the German legal perspective, strange as it may sound, 11 children drowning is no greater evil than three children drowning, which leads to Anna’s clearly being justified in Boat under the German justifying emergency statute (Erb Reference Erb2003, 1387–90).

What about Lions and Clan? Betty, to act justifiably, needs a necessity or choice of evils justification here – after all, she is about to throw a grenade in the direction of three children, risking (or even foreseeing) their death. (If you think collaterally killing three children to save 11 is disproportionate and therefore unjustified, you can modify the example accordingly.) She thereby is about to infringe laws against negligent homicide or manslaughter or even murder. Anna, on the other hand, depending on jurisdiction, might well have both a necessity and an other-defense justification to use force against Betty. (I will ignore here the fact that some jurisdictions and the Model Penal Code, clearly for purely pragmatic as opposed to principled reasons, allow a choice of evils justification only for acts that are not already covered by other justifications.) She clearly could avail herself of the choice of evils justification of the Model Penal Code and the jurisdictions that follow it: the evil she seeks to avoid – the death of her three children at the hands of an attacker – is greater than the evil that a law against killing Betty seeks to avoid (namely Betty’s death). In addition, she also can have a self-defense justification if the jurisdiction in question does not demand that justifiable self-defense be directed against unlawful attacks but only at what the defender reasonably believes to be an unlawful attack. Many American jurisdictions do exactly that. Furthermore, one must consider not only written law and its statutes, but also its interpretation in case law. As George C. Christie (Reference Christie1999, 1039) notes: ‘If any of the parties would be free from tort liability, it would be the [innocent potential victim of an attack justified by a necessity or choice of evils justification]. I cannot conceive of any American court holding an innocent person liable in tort for shooting another person to prevent that other person from killing him’. But, in the same vein, is it really (realistically) conceivable that an American criminal court would deny the justification of other-defense to Anna, who tries to defend her innocent children against an attacker? I doubt it. Anna, moreover, also has the common law defense of self- and other-defense. Again, while there cannot be justified self-defense against justified self-defense,Footnote ²⁶ there is no evidence that common law prohibits self-defense against certain other kinds of justified acts (Robinson 1975–Reference Robinson76, 278).Footnote ²⁷

Thus, we see that both the moral and the legal situation as far as relevant domestic cases are concerned is more complex and complicated than Grotius’s and McMahan’s simple example, and the simplistic conclusion drawn from it, suggest.

To avoid misunderstandings, however, let me clarify that I am certainly not arguing here that Anna may directly kill – whether intentionally or as a side-effect – Betty’s children. For example, if Betty has a head start and would take the boat before Anna, and the only way Anna could prevent this from happening is by shooting all of Betty’s children in the lake (thereby removing Betty’s motive for taking the boat), Anna would most certainly not be allowed to do this. Thus, I merely argue that Anna may prevent, as a side-effect of her attempt to save her children, greater numbers of innocent people from being saved by Betty. Thus, one may probably not in all circumstances give special weight to the interests of oneself and those near and dear to one, and not in all circumstances where one may do so may one do so to the same degree. There is (all else being equal: there are exceptions) a difference between intentional killing and letting die and also between intentional killing and foreseeably preventing someone from being saved. The constraints on killing are much stronger, including the proportionality constraints.

Again, some people, in particular defenders of the inequality doctrines, might think that the proportionality constraints on foreseeably preventing someone from being saved are stronger than I make them out to be: they might simply not share my intuitions in Boat, Lions, and Clan. But many will. And while Grotius’s and McMahan’s examples, especially due to their abstraction from ‘collateral damage’, are not applicable to all wars which have a justified side – which, however, they would have to be in order to constitute positive arguments for the inequality doctrines – the Bob and Juanita example is applicable to at least some wars, which is, if Juanita is permitted in killing Bob, sufficient to refute the moral inequality doctrines (remember that I am not defending the moral equality doctrine: I reject both generalizations).

Bob and Juanita is, for instance, analogous to the following example of a war:

It seems that this war of the A against Y can be justified from an ad bellum perspective. This is so particularly as the A will hardly inflict any harms on the innocents of Y. After all, the conflict is taking place on A’s territory (i.e. in X). Nevertheless, one might object that the duties and prerogatives of citizenship cannot be as weighty as one’s duties towards one’s family members and friends. One might muse, for instance, that if a British person can either save 50,000 British people or 60,000 Germans, he should rather save the Germans. In reply, I doubt that this is the case if among the 50,000 British are members of his own family. Moreover, if 500 British people who all have family members among the 50,000 are to cooperate to either save the British or the Germans, I find it hard to accept that they are under a duty to save the Germans. The British rescuers will now have 1000 or even 2000 or more of their friends and relatives among the British who are in need of rescue, and this, it seems, should be quite able to tip the scales (just remember the Anna and Betty examples from above). In other words, the objection overlooks that Y’s war will threaten all the A in the theater of war, and thereby the family and friends of a large number of soldiers (who might be friends with other soldiers willing and perhaps feeling obliged to help them in their defense of their families). In other words, if 500 soldiers can either save a group of 60,000 containing none of their friends or relatives or a group of 50,000 containing 2000 of their children or spouses, then they are justified in saving the latter group, just as a mother is justified in saving her own child instead of saving 10 others.

A final objection might be that the doing/allowing distinction has some weight, and by attacking the soldiers of Y, the A are not only letting them die but they are actively killing them. Yet, one should note that the soldiers of Y are not non-threatening people, but attackers, they are about to kill many innocent A collaterally. This should severely reduce the restraints against killing them.Footnote ²⁸ After all, Anna in Lions seems to be clearly allowed to kill Betty.

Thus, the claim that the war of the A against Y can be justified from an ad bellum perspective is indeed plausible. However, we get to a war that would not be justified from an ad bellum perspective if we modify the example in such a way (call it Resisted Intervention Revised) that parts of ethnic group A itself started the genocide against the C. It would not be justified from an ad bellum perspective since A, as a collective, could simply stop the genocide – then Y would not attack and endanger A’s civilians. However, those individual soldiers of Y who do not take part in the genocide themselves (and could not stop it) but instead fight to divert Y onto the second route can still be justified in participating in the war and in attacking Y’s soldiers. They are analogous to Anna in Clan. The Clan, as a collective, was under an obligation not to fight Betty but to give her the stun gun instead; but Anna, in an attempt to save her children, is nevertheless justified in her individual participation in the unjustified collective use of force against Betty.

In which wars may soldiers participate

The above analysis and further considerations to be provided suggest that the answer to the question as to when soldiers may justifiably participate and kill in war is more complex than assumed by either the in bello inequality doctrine or the in bello equality doctrine.

As already noted in the introduction, traditional just war theorists from Augustine to Elizabeth Anscombe have argued that it is impermissible to take part in a war one knows to be ‘unjust’, that is, unjustified. It is clear, however, that this traditional view must be wrong. Consider, for example, John, who is drafted to serve in an unjust war of aggression (which, however, will without doubt be victorious). He knows that his participation in the war will make only a minuscule contribution to the war effort (in fact, he will see to that), but he also knows that his non-participation would have some terrible consequences: his country’s dictator swore (and he is known to keep his oaths) that for every drafted citizen who refuses to participate he will kill 100 innocent civilians on the other side. It seems that here John would actually save lives by his participation in an unjust war of aggression. It is therefore difficult to see how his participation could not be justified. He not only has a necessity justification, but he actually seems to have a full-blown lesser evil justification to participate in the unjustified war. Moreover, if Bob could only save large numbers of civilians from his dictator if he actually killed some enemy combatants (thereby demonstrating that he ‘seriously participates’, as the dictator demands), he still seems to have a lesser evil justification to do so.Footnote ²⁹ Of course, one might object that the situation described here is highly unlikely to occur. However, that does not change the theoretical point that in principle a soldier can have a lesser evil justification for his participation in an unjustified war. Nor does it undermine the fact that the argument is even strengthened by envisioning a situation where the dictator threatens to kill family and friends of a soldier who does not participate.Footnote ³⁰ Now the soldier might still have the lesser evil justification, but in addition he has also an agent-relative necessity justification for participating in the war.

Consider another example. Evil A tries to murder innocent B. There is C, who cannot stop A alone but can instigate D, E, and F, who are known for their brutality, to stop A. C knows that if she does so instigate D, E, and F, A will become the victim of an impermissible collective act, namely of excessively brutal self- or other-defense. Nevertheless, if the damage done to A is still sufficiently less bad than B’s death would have been, and C has no other means to interfere, then C is clearly allowed to support D’s, E’s, and F’s attack against A. She is also allowed to join them in their attack against A if this heightens the chances of the defensive collective (comprising D, E, F, and now also C) of succeeding in their rescue of B, and does so without making the collective action even more excessive.Footnote ³¹ (You can imagine, if you wish, a group of martial artists known for their excessive force in bar brawls willing to join C in her attempt to stop a muscular racist from beating his victim to death.)Footnote ³² According to the same logic, and all else being equal, soldiers can be justified in joining a humanitarian intervention even if they know that the intervention will be unjustified as the force used will be somewhat excessive. At least as long as by joining the unjustified collective intervention the soldier helps, on the collective level, to avert a decisively greater evil than he helps to produce, and also personally averts decisively more evil than he personally produces, the soldier is justified in his participation. In short, individual participation in unjustified collective acts is not always unjustified, and this is also true for participation in unjustified wars.

The previous examples and the analysis above thus suggest the following more general and pleasantly commonsensical assertions: one may participate in an unjustified war if the moral costs of one’s participation are outweighed by the moral gains. (By ‘moral costs’ I simply mean ‘whatever goes into the proportionality considerations on the negative side’, and by ‘moral gains’ I simply mean ‘whatever goes into the proportionality considerations on the positive side’.) Moreover, this is the case not only when the weighing uses an impartial scale, but also when it is done with a scale that is in a morally proper way adjusted to valid agent-relative considerations. If, however, the moral costs are not outweighed by the moral gains on either of the two scales (i.e. if participation is disproportionate both from an impartial and an agent-relative view), participation in an unjustified war appears to be impermissible.

This is a very general, but nevertheless meaningful principle with practical implications. For instance, while the British war waged against Germany from 1939 to 1945 was unjustified due to an often disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force (terror bombing),Footnote ³³ a British soldier could nevertheless justifiably participate in this unjustified war (see also Steinhoff Reference Steinhoff2012b, 40). On the other hand, German soldiers could not justifiably participate in the German invasion of Poland. Yet, in my view they could, towards the end of the war, participate in the attempt to stave Soviet troops off as long as possible, given the behavior (widespread rape, see Beevor Reference Beevor2003) of these troops and the imperialist intentions of the Soviet Union.

To be sure, how exactly such proportionality considerations will have to proceed is a contentious issue, and even people who do agree on which considerations apply in theory (e.g., is the relevant proportionality consideration one that an omniscient observer would subscribe to, or is the relevant perspective that of ‘the reasonable person’, etc.) might still disagree on the empirical facts pertaining to a concrete case. However, my intention here was to show that there can in principle be circumstances where the participation in an unjustified war is justified. In some circumstances one might only be able to justify it under an appeal to agent-relative considerations, but this is still a justification. In other circumstances, however, one will even be able to justify it under an appeal to agent-neutral considerations and with the help of a genuine lesser evil justification.

In still other, probably in most, circumstances, however, one will not be able to justify one’s participation in an unjustified war. Consider, for example, a variation of Resisted Intervention, namely Counterproductively Resisted Intervention. In this variation, the A’s resisting Y’s army will lead to more A being killed, not less, and no overriding benefits (like, e.g., certain gains in freedom for the rest of the A) will be achieved to overcompensate these losses. Such a war would be unjustified, since it would be disproportionate even from an agent-relative perspective. If a soldier actually knows this, and does not have a necessity justification to participate in the war (like, e.g., the justification that the dictator would kill his family if he would not participate), then he cannot be justified in participating in the war.Footnote ³⁴

Moreover, and obviously, agent-relative considerations work differently in different circumstances: they interact with other normative principles in different ways. For instance, while in cases where you foreseeably prevent someone from being saved, as in Boat, Lions, and Clan, you may give considerably more weight to your own interests and to the interests of those near and dear to you than to the interests of strangers, it seems that you are not allowed to do that in cases where you intentionally or foreseeably directly harm innocent and non-threatening people.Footnote ³⁵ To wit, a mother must not kill the neighbor’s child in order to harvest her organs for the benefit of her own child, nor must states invade other countries to harvest its resources for the benefit of their own country, let alone to harvest their citizens as slaves for their own population. Persons must not participate in such wars – unless, again, there are other factors in play that provide them with a countervailing and overriding necessity justification to participate anyway. That might sometimes be the case. More often, it clearly won’t.

While, as I showed, individual participation in unjustified collective acts is sometimes justified, the converse is also true: individual participation in justified collective acts can under certain circumstances be unjustified. Consider Sartre’s famous example of the son who is torn between his felt duties towards his mother and his felt duty to join the French Free Forces in their fight against Nazi Germany (Reference Sartre2005, 212–13). It is clearly possible that under certain circumstances a person’s duties towards his family and friends would make abandoning them to fight in a war that simply does not need him or her unjustified. In fact, a person might even serve the wider community better by serving it as a scientist or doctor, for example, than by joining a justified war effort, and if his service to the wider community is of sufficient moral importance and he has promised and is relied upon to not simply abandon his post, as it were, then doing so anyway in order to join the war would be unjustified.

Finally, it should be noted that a soldier is not already justified in participating in a war if the objective justifying conditions are fulfilled. Rather, he has to know or be aware or perhaps even reasonably believe that they are fulfilled: that is, his justification would comprise a subjective or mental element, namely (at least) awareness of the objective justifying conditions. After all, there is a presumption against killing and maiming people, and it is the moral responsibility of the very individual who is about to engage in an activity where he or she is supposed to kill and maim people to make sure that the presumption is indeed overcome and the objective justifying conditions satisfied.Footnote ³⁶ To wit, in Anglo-Saxon law there is the Dadson principle (so named after a court case), according to which ‘justified force requires belief in, or knowledge of, the presence of justificatory circumstances’ (Christopher Reference Christopher1995, 229). One author even argues that the rejection of this principle leads to a logical contradiction in certain cases and must therefore be accepted on grounds of logical necessity (Christopher Reference Christopher1995, Reference Christopher1998).Footnote ³⁷ Moreover, Anglo-Saxon law is not alone in accepting this requirement: ‘The consensus of Western legal systems is that actors may avail themselves of justifications only if they act with justificatory intent’ (Fletcher Reference Fletcher1978, 557).Footnote ³⁸ Thus, given this Western consensus, which, moreover, might be backed up by logical necessity, there is no reason to apply more lenient standards to soldiers. ‘They don’t know what they are doing’ is no excuse if they should know. And if they are about to kill people, they indeed should know.

This result, incidentally, cannot be avoided by simply making a distinction between subjective and objective justification here. One cannot answer substantive legal or moral questions simply by making distinctions. To wit, if the question is whether the legal self-defense justification requires a subjective element or not, one cannot answer this question by saying ‘Let’s distinguish between subjective and objective justification’. What we want to know is under which conditions a certain act is actually legally or morally justified, and either actual justification (instead of only believed or imagined justification, which is no justification at all) does require a subjective element or it does not. Derek Parfit, for instance, who makes such distinctions, states that some ‘act of ours would be wrong in the fact-relative sense just when this act would be wrong in the ordinary sense if we knew all of the morally relevant facts’ (Reference Parfit2011, 150).Footnote ³⁹ This definition, however, does not answer any important substantive questions about when someone is, in fact, justified. One reason for this is that Parfit does not give a clear definition of the ‘ordinary sense’ of justification in the first place (compare Bazargan Reference Bazargan2014, 115, n. 2). Another and in the present context more important reason is that this definition of ‘wrong in the fact-relative sense’ does not answer the question whether someone’s subjective state of mind also belongs to the ‘morally relevant facts’ or not. This, however, is precisely what we would like to know if we are interested in substantive answers as opposed to conceptual fragmentation.

Thus, the result remains: soldiers cannot just blindly stumble into a war and hope to be ‘accidentally’ justified. Only if they are at least aware of there being an objective justification for their participation in the war can they be morally justified. This, in effect, is the ‘right intention’ (or, more precisely: mental state) requirement as applied to soldiers.Footnote ⁴⁰ Conversely, if the objective justifying conditions are not satisfied, then the soldier’s participation in the war will be unjustified, however much the soldier believes it to be justified.

To conclude, both the traditional view (from Aquinas through Vitoria and Grotius to Anscombe and McMahan) and the ‘legalist’ Walzerian view on the moral (in)equality of combatants are wrong. To recall, the traditional view states that there cannot be a (morally) just cause for war on both sides, and it also states that combatants participating in a justified war may kill their enemy combatants participating in an unjustified war – but not vice versa (at least not as long as the combatants on the justified side always abide by jus in bello requirements and the unjustified combatants know their war to be unjustified). The opposing Walzerian view, in contrast, claims that as long as the combatants on the unjustified side abide by the jus in bello requirements, they may kill the combatants on the justified side (and, of course, vice versa).

Thus, the reality is more complicated and differentiated. First, the justifiability of a collective actor A’s war against B does not yet imply that B’s war against A is unjustified. Moreover, whether an individual may justifiably participate in a war or not is likewise not already decided by the war’s justifiability or unjustifiability; rather, the concrete circumstances of the individual have to be taken into account too.Footnote ⁴¹ Thus, a conscientious soldier might not only be one who deliberately serves in a justified war or deliberately refuses to serve in an unjustified war, but also one who deliberately refuses to serve in a justified war or who deliberately does serve in an unjustified one.