Debate: Justification and Liability in War*

Abstract

MORAL responsibility for an unjust threat, or a threat of wrongful harm, is, I have argued, a basis of liability to attack in war. Uwe Steinhoff correctly observes that many acts of war by those who fight in a just war (“just combatants”) threaten innocent people with wrongful harm. This, he claims, makes them morally liable to attack according to the criterion of liability I have defended. But if both just combatants and unjust combatants (those who fight without just cause) are morally liable to attack, so that each is permitted to attack the other, the doctrine of the moral equality of combatants, against which I argued in my earlier essay, is not only true but, embarrassingly, true on the basis of my own claims. This is a perceptive and important challenge that raises a number of issues that are important to understanding the morality of war. I am grateful to Steinhoff for raising them, and for providing me with an occasion to contribute to the discussion, and to defend and refine my position. The criterion of liability to attack in war that I have defended invokes the notion of a “wrongful harm.” There are different ways in which harms inflicted by just combatants on innocent people may be wrongful. First, a wrongful harm may be one that is wrongfully inflicted, or inflicted by wrongful action. Just combatants might, for example, attack innocent people intentionally—for example, as a means of coercing their government to surrender—and to attack innocent people intentionally is generally conceded to be wrong, except perhaps in extreme conditions in which such an attack is necessary to avert a greater harm to the same people, or a much greater harm to other innocent people. Or just combatants might harm innocent people unintentionally, but recklessly or negligently—for example, by attacking a military target when this foreseeably causes harm to innocent bystanders that is unnecessary or disproportionate in relation to the importance of destroying the target. Second, a wrongful harm may be inflicted by action that is permissible, or morally justified. In such a case, the action that inflicts the harm is not itself