Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Double-Double Effect

"Double effect" is a mitigating element in just war theory regarding the killing of civilians. As the claim goes, killing noncombatants unintentionally in an attack on combatants can be justified if precautions are generally taken not to kill noncombatants and even if noncombatant deaths are foreseen as the unfortunate result of a military attack on combatants. Michael Walzer takes the doctrine further and argues that a military must take risks not to kill noncombatants. The effort must be serious, not spurious.

The whole thing is complicated further when we're talking about humanitarian intervention as opposed to outright war. Verbum Ipsum:
This post by the Bull Moose blogger (via Marvin) brings to mind a point made by Robert Holmes in his excellent On War and Morality (I don't have the book in front of me, so I may not get all the details right).

Pacifists and anti-interventionists are often criticized for their unwillingness to take up arms in the defense of the innocent. According to interventionists, the blood of those innocents is on their hands.

However, Holmes points out, interventionists usually deny that they are morally responsible for the innocent lives lost in the course of waging war. But how, he asks, can they fail to be responsible for the deaths of people they actually kill, while pacifists are held responsible for the deaths of people they had no part in killing?

In other words, if double effect is sufficient to get the "warist" off the hook for the innocent deaths the war he supports causes, it should be more than sufficient to get the pacifist off the hook for the deaths he merely fails to prevent by refusing to wage (or support) war....

2 comments:

troutsky said...

The nebulous aspect of any just war theory is HOW MUCH risk needs to be taken in order to prevent innocents from dying,how is that qualified, quantified? Who determines whether an effort was made? Modern warriors try to get themselves off the hook by using smart weapons and claiming techno-fixes. A pacifist needs to insert himself in a shielding position in order to transfer non-violence from a theoretical construction to an effective strategy.

helmut said...

You're right. JWT does some good things - keeps telling us that things like massacres are wrong. But, from a moral theory point of view, it has serious shortcomings, based as it is in natural law, which is pretty much a defunct idea.

As for the practical side, power always plays some role in how the imperatives of JWT play out. You had a nice quote the other day on your site about this.