Abstract
The individualist nature of much contemporary just war theory means that we often discuss cases with single attackers. But even if war is best understood in this individualist way, in war combatants often have to make decisions about how to distribute harms among a plurality of aggressors: they must decide whom and how many to harm, and how much to harm them. In this paper, I look at simultaneous multiple aggressor cases in which more than one distribution of harm among aggressors is available. I show how such cases pose deep questions concerning the nature, role, and scope of the necessity principle, and its relationship to both liability and narrow proportionality. I argue that a hitherto unrecognised measure – ‘narrow proportionality shortfall’ – and its distribution is relevant in choosing how to distribute harms across aggressors. I then extend this analysis to show how this may help us with a puzzle concerning sequential attacks.
Highlights
The literature on the ethics of war and self-defence will often employ cases in which one attacker threatens one victim
It is tempting to see narrow proportionality and necessity as two limits on defensive harm, with the main difference between them being that narrow proportionality is concerned with features of the threat (‘what you did was out of proportion given the threat I posed!’) while necessity is concerned with the comparative merits of the options available to the defensive agent (‘you didn’t need to do that, you could have done this!’)
All else equal, necessity demands that we maximize narrow proportionality shortfall, it shows morality to be sensitive to how close harms get to the narrow proportionality threshold
Summary
The literature on the ethics of war and self-defence will often employ cases in which one attacker threatens one victim. Since it is usually thought to be the necessity principle’s job to compare our defensive options, this topic poses some important, and under-investigated, questions about the necessity principle These include important questions about necessity’s relationship to liability and narrow proportionality, and the scope of the necessity principle’s application, which is possibly a lot more expansive than has been traditionally thought. Having explored these issues through simultaneous-aggressor cases, I show how the positions reached potentially have implications for a puzzle generated by sequential threat cases. The necessity principle applies most clearly in this kind of case: Imagine I can only fend off an attacker with 20 units of harm This is narrowly proportionate, and it is permissible. Think from cases of gratuitous harm, and, as we shall see, its relationship to liability is a matter of controversy.[6]
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