Comments Elsewhere

E. Simon,

I don’t know what you mean by my “contingent position.” Contingent on what?

My position is that warfare as it is conducted in the modern world is almost never justifiable because the circumstances under which you can excusably kill innocent people in the course of protecting yourself from an unrelated menace are very limited, and the number that you can excusably kill is “almost none.” For a more detailed discussion, see Roderick Long’s essay Thinking Our Anger. I’d be glad to discuss the issue at more length if you want, but I’d like to suggest that it’s far less urgent for me to spell out the details of my view than it is for you to spell out the details of yours, because I’m not trying to defend a fucking war as proportional retaliation.

I should note that I am no more ignorant of the doctrine of double effect than you are. I’ve nowhere suggested that civilians were deliberately targeted by the IDF (how would I know?). What I am suggesting is one of the traditional conditions on the doctrine of double effect: that to be excusable, the evils inflicted must not be disproportionate to the goods achieved. So just pointing to double effect does not absolve you of the intellectual responsibility of spelling out how many people can be (regrettably but expectedly) killed and maimed in the course of retaliating against unrelated menaces, and how much killing and maiming of the innocent would make the policy intolerable for reasons of proportionality.

I’ve accused you of dodging the issue because if you do not have an answer to that question, then you can have absolutely no moral basis for endorsing the war. If you don’t even have a ballpark estimate of what a tolerable civilian body count is, then you have no idea whether or not the killing and maiming of innocents has gone beyond the limits of proportional self-defense. And if you don’t know that then you don’t know whether or not the war is legitimate self-defense or a massacre. If you treat the question as some higher mystery beyond your ken, then you have thereby admitted that you have no idea whatever whether justice demands that the IDF continue or that it relent.

If, however, you profess not to be able to answer the question, but then turn around and continue supporting the war, particularly with polysyllabic hand-waving at pacifying abstractions such as “collateral damage” and “appropriately disincentivizing,” then what I have to conclude is that you are quite satisfied with the level of killing, burning, bombing, and maiming being inflicted on innocents, but that you’d rather not say so because it would sound too brutal coming from your lips. If that’s not so, then you could refute my claims by actually coming out and giving us some idea of what you consider acceptable rather than setting the question aside unanswered and trying to describe what happens to men, women, and children when bombs are rained down on their neighborhoods, when their homes or farms are destroyed, when their flesh is burnt by fire or torn up by sharpnel or crushed by rubble, and when their lives are snuffed out or forever marked by permanent wounds, with words like “cost” and “disincentivize” and “collateral damage.” If you want to defend war, then there it is: defend it. And if you don’t like Orwell being quoted at you, then stop writing about real violence being inflicted daily against real people as if it were nothing more than some debit on an accountants’ ledger somewhere in the Ministry of War.

As for States and their boundaries: I am an anarchist, so I don’t give a damn about which side of the bloody line in the sand people are on. But even if I were not an anarchist, it would hardly change my position on this question. However many special obligations a State may have towards its subjects over and above the obligations it has towards the subjects of other States, it is no more entitled to go out and slaughter alien subjects than it is its own subjects. If you accept the legitimacy of the State then you might very well think that governments have more of a duty to rescue their own subjects than to rescue the subjects of other governments from a pre-existing danger; but that does precisely nothing to license going out and actively killing or maiming innocent subjects of other governments in the process of trying to rescue your own subjects from an unrelated menace.