People are rightly horrified by the killing of an innocent man in the London subway who police mistook for a terrorist. The Philly Inquirer ran a heart-wrenching story today on the man – Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian who came to Great Britain in search of a better life.
What I couldn’t help but think about though, is the thousands of other innocent people we’ve killed “inadvertantly” in the course of our “war on terror.” I put “inadvertantly” in scare quotes not because I think we intentionally kill innocent civilians, but because we knew beforehand that some number of innocents would be killed in the course of our campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Reliable estimates are hard to come by, but one recent report put the civilian toll in Iraq around 25,000. Granted those are not all people directly killed by U.S. forces, but even one-third that number is a lot of Jean Charles de Menezeses.
Now, just war theory tells me that killing civilians may be permissible so long as it is not willed as an end or a means and the evil of those deaths is “outweighed” by the good that is accomplished. But how does one tally up the goods and evils here? How do we weigh those lives lost against the goods we may have accomplished – greater security for ourselves and others who might have been targeted by terrorism or freedom from the boot of Saddam’s tyranny for Iraqis. Even with the best of outcomes (one that is by no means assured) – a free and prosperous Iraq – how do we weigh that good against the evil that was caused as its necessary side-effect?
A Thinking Reed 
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