Counting the Cost

I wrote before, “Since war entails significant evil in the form of death and destruction, the good to be achieved has to outweigh this evil for the war to be considered morally licit.”

Put more concretely, in addition to the 1000+ American lives that have been sacrificed for the current mission in Iraq, it is now estimated that somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 Iraqis have been killed, many of them civilians.

Just war theory makes a moral distinction between directly targeting civilians and civilian deaths that result as unintended side-effects of attacking legitimate military targets. But this isn’t the end of the matter, because the idea is not to offer a blank check for killing civilians so long as those deaths are unintentional. There are limits to what degree of “collateral damage” is morally acceptable. The two key concepts here are “necessity” and “proportionality.” That is, when we can forsee that civilians will be killed, even unintentionally, we have to ask if the military operation or war is necessary to acheive a certain good, and we have to ask if the evil of killing the civilians is outweighed by the good to be acheived.