10nfl1-Nukes-Cover
NUCLEAR WAR WILL KILL CHILDREN AND THAT IS UNMISTAKEABLY
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| NUCLEAR WAR WILL KILL CHILDREN AND THAT IS UNMISTAKEABLY IMMORAL. War, Nuclear War, and Nuclear Deterrence Some Conceptual and Moral Issues. Richard Wasserstrom. Ethics, Vol. 95, No. 3, Special Issue Symposium on Ethics and Nuclear Deterrence (Apr, 1985), pp. 424-444. Published by The University of Chicago Press. Stable URL http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381030 But no matter how either or both of these lines of argument maybe exploited and extended to justify the deliberate killing of many noncombatants in war, they cannot support the intentional or knowing killing of those persons who are both unmistakably and unequivocably noncombatants in causal terms and also wholly innocent in all the morally relevant respects. Children, of whom there are many in all countries, are the clearest example of such persons. They are fully noncombatants in all the relevant causal respects, and clearly so. If they are reasonably young children, they literally cannot fight or engage in any of the other activities that might have the requisite causal connection with more direct war-making activities. Hence, to kill them intentionally or knowingly is not to use deadly force directed against either a culpable or a nonculpable deadly attacker, no matter how relaxed the relevant causal criteria maybe thought to become in time of war. And they are innocent in each and everyone of the senses in which it might be permissible to kill in the course of war those who are not. Given the way social, institutional, and political life is organized in all countries, they play no role in bringing about the war or in supporting it through their actions, commitments, and the like. Nor, typically, have they had any hand or choice in being wherever they happen to be once war begins, or as it continues, so that it can correctly be said that they assumed those risks of being killed that are known to be associated with the occurrence of war. They area large and indeterminate number of them, fully noncombatants and wholly innocent in all of the relevant senses. They are the clearest kind of case, but there are also many other individuals in all countries at war to whom these same descriptions and conclusions apply. Download 1.23 Mb. Share with your friends:
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