Weighing Lives in War- Foreign vs. Domestic

In Larry May, The Cambridge Handbook of the Just War. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 186-198 (2017)
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Abstract

I argue that the lives of domestic and enemy civilians should not receive equal weight in our proportionality calculations. Rather, the lives of enemy civilians ought to be “partially discounted” relative to the lives of domestic civilians. We ought to partially discount the lives of enemy civilians for the following reason (or so I argue). When our military wages a just war, we as civilians vest our right to self-defense in our military. This permits our military to weigh our lives more heavily. Before arguing for this view I first explain why recent accounts attempting to show the opposite – that enemy civilians ought to be weighed more heavily – are mistaken.

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Saba Bazargan-Forward
University of California, San Diego

Citations of this work

Scope Restrictions, National Partiality, and War.Jeremy Davis - 2021 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 20 (2).

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References found in this work

The View From Nowhere.Thomas Nagel - 1986 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Alienation, consequentialism, and the demands of morality.Peter Railton - 1984 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 13 (2):134-171.
The View from Nowhere.Thomas Nagel - 1986 - Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 92 (2):280-281.
Killing in war.Jeff McMahan - 2009 - New York: Oxford University Press.
The View from Nowhere.Thomas Nagel - 1986 - Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 43 (2):399-403.

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