Zippy on the Curious Alliance Between Hawks and Doves in Muddling Thinking about War

I think there is a perverse alliance between hawks and doves when it comes to distinguishing between accidental deaths and on-purpose deaths. Both hawks and doves would prefer to keep the distinction unclear, for different reasons. Doves want to be able to call all deaths in wartime murder; conversely, hawks want to be able to take what is really deliberate murder and categorize it as morally licit collateral damage.

The moral reality is more difficult than either would like to concede. If I use a modern weapon to indiscriminately blow up a whole group of people, some of whom I know are innocent and some of whom are terrorists, the deaths of the innocents are not an accident. I killed them on purpose, precisely because they got in the way, and the technical capabilities of my weapon did not allow me to kill the terrorists without killing the civilians. On the other hand it is not merely permissible but noble and valiant for me to risk death and kill the terrorist himself, to defend the innocent from him. If I drop a smart bomb on his safe house, to the best of my knowledge clear of innocents, that is, clear of individuals who are not engaged in attacking behaviors, then I have done a good and noble deed. If my smart bomb misfires and kills some civilians, it is indeed an accident: the attack did not go according to my plans, and innocents were killed. There is such a thing as morally licit collateral damage.

If my plans for this specific attack entail killing some specific identifiable civilians, even if I wish I could make different plans which did not entail killing those particular civilians, then what I am planning is murder.

In non-military situation that don’t involve Israeli or American interests, we still get this. A cop who proposes to resolve a hostage situation involving a terrorist and a schoolroom full of kids does not win a favorable hearing if he says, “Well, we *have* to get the bad guy, so we just have to treat the children as collateral damage and open up our Uzzis on the classroom.” But when the IDF opens fire on a school they know to be full of kids and slaughters a bunch of them to get at bad guys, readers fall all over themselves to try to justify this deliberate choice to kill innocents in pursuit of the greater good (see “Consequentialism, Veritatis Splendor reiterate Ancient Catholic Condemnation of”). They also choose to say things like “Gazans are far from innocent“.

That’s why the Pope calls for an end to the violence from both sides. Hamas is evil to hide behind civilians. But that does not make it justifiable to blast a school full of kids with tanks, nor for Catholics to justify it by making a muddle of the difference between accidental civilian casualities and intentionallly targeting civilians to get at combatants. These are the monstrous rules that Hamas and similar Bronze Age thugs play by. For Catholics to excuse such thinking on behalf of Israelis is to excuse it for Hamas. It is excusable for nobody. That is why the sanest voice on the world stage right now is Benedict’s and not those making excuses for the violence on either side.