Combatants on both sides of a war, regardless of the justice of their cause, are equally permitted to kill each other and equally liable to be killed. (In everyday language ‘liable to be killed’ means ‘likely to be killed’ but here the word has a different meaning: it establishes who, morally speaking, may be killed.)
He has joined the army because he thinks his country must be defended. … He can be personally attacked only because he already is a fighter. He has been made into a dangerous man, and though his options may have been few, it is nevertheless accurate to say that he has allowed himself to be made into a dangerous man. (Walzer, 1977, p. 145)
Suppose a malicious person attacks you unjustly. Would you lose your right not to be attacked by him simply by trying to defend yourself? No. People don’t lose moral rights by justifiably defending themselves or other innocent people against unjust attack. (2006, p. 379)
Those who fight solely to defend themselves and other innocent people from a wrongful threat of attack, and who threaten no one but the wrongful aggressors, do not make themselves morally liable to defensive attack. By engaging in morally justified self- and other-defense, they do nothing to forfeit their right not to be attacked or killed. This means that even though just combatants are ‘doing harm’ and ‘pose a danger to other people’ when they oppose the military action of unjust combatants, they do not thereby become legitimate targets of attack but retain their innocence in the generic sense. (McMahan, 2009, p. 14)
It is hard to see how just combatants could become legitimate targets simply by offering violent resistance to unjust attacks by unjust combatants. …to attack just combatants is to attack people who are innocent in the generic sense: people who have not forfeited their right against attack, and thus are not liable to attack. They are therefore illegitimate targets. To attack them is indiscriminate. (McMahan, 2009, p. 16)
Actions of combatants | Conform to JaB conditions | Fail to conform to JaB conditions |
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Conform to JiB conditions |
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Fail to conform to JiB conditions |
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Unjust combatants can seldom satisfy the jus in bello requirement of discrimination, since just combatants seldom make themselves liable to attack and thus are in general illegitimate targets. If just combatants were always to fight according to the moral constraints that govern their conduct in war, they would never be liable to attack and thus unjust combatants would never be able to satisfy the requirements of discrimination. (McMahan, 2009, p. 18)
In various places Walzer also identifies the absence of criminality with the absence of blameworthiness. ‘It would be very odd,’ he claims, ‘to praise Rommel for not killing prisoners unless we simultaneously refused to blame him for Hitler’s aggressive wars. For otherwise he is simply a criminal, and all the fighting he does is murder or attempted murder.’ In short, Walzer claims that if an unjust combatant is blameless, he is not a criminal, that if he is not a criminal, he is the moral equal of a just combatant, and that he is therefore permitted to fight if the just combatant is. The mistake here is to ignore the possibility that blamelessness implies nothing more than that the unjust combatant is excused. That a person is blameless does not entail that he or she has acted permissibly; for both those who act permissibly and those who act wrongly but with a full excuse are blameless. (McMahan, 2009, p. 112)
While it’s sometimes reasonable for unjust combatants to believe that their war is just, it isn’t always. But the doctrine of the moral equality of combatants doesn’t hold that participation in an unjust war can be permissible provided that one reasonably believes that the war is just; it holds, rather, that combatants aren’t responsible for whether their war is just and therefore don’t do wrong if they obey an order to fight even if they reasonably and correctly believe that the war is unjust. (McMahan, 2006, p. 390)
If soldiers on both sides have surrendered their right not to be killed to all enemy soldiers in all future wars, then with respect to each other they are moral equals, each permitted to kill their enemy and liable to be killed by them. The two sides are not completely morally equal, since in most wars just combatants can fight proportionally while unjust ones cannot. But insofar as they target each other, both act permissibly and neither’s acts are wrong. In that important respect they are moral equals.
Arguments for MEC | Accepts | Rejects |
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Material non-innocence | Walzer | McMahan, Hurka |
Voluntariness | Walzer, Hurka | McMahan |
Epistemological argument | Walzer | McMahan |
Protection of non-combatants on the unjust side | McMahan |
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State.
The moral reality of war can be summed up in this way: when soldiers fight freely, choosing one another as enemies and designing their own battles, their war is not a crime; when they fight without freedom, their war is not their crime. In both cases, military conduct is governed by rules; but in the first the rules rest on mutuality and consent, in the second on a shared servitude. Just and Unjust Wars , p. 37.