Innocence, Self‐Defense and Killing in War

Abstract

OST of us believe that there are conditions in which war is justified and M thus that there are conditions in which the individual soldier is morally permitted, and nearly as often morally required, intentionally to attack and even to kill other human beings. Many people, indeed, accept this quite uncritically, often assuming that war is a special condition in which morality, if it applies a t all, is radically transformed. But consider the perspective of the morally scrupulous soldier who is ordered to kill. To what considerations may he appeal for justification ? What I will refer to as the Orthodox View among moral theorists is that, while it is normally or even always wrong intentionally to attack or kill the innocent, people may, because of what they do, render themselves relevantly noninnocent, thereby losing their moral immunity to intentional attack and instead becoming liable, or morally vulnerable, to attack. To be innocent, on this view, is to be harmless; correspondingly, one ceases to be innocent if one poses an imminent threat of harm to, or is engaged in harming, another person. To the modern mind this may seem a curious understanding of the notions of innocence and noninnocence. Yet there is etymological warrant for the use. To be “innocent” is not to be nocentes-a Latin term that refers to one who is harmful or who injures. To distinguish this sense of innocence from the more familiar notion of moral innocence, some writers have stipulated that a person who is harmless is “materially innocent,” while one who is threatening or causing harm is said to be “materially noninnocent.” On the Orthodox View, it is assumed that all those who are, to use Michael Walzer’s phrase, “currently engaged in the business of war” are ips0 fact0