Are executions in the town square less moral than air bombing? Consider the following hypotheticals from the international law of war. Suppose that we have intelligence that some indisputablely legitimate military target is in a certain area, say the commanding general of an army, but we cannot recognize the general himself. In the first situation, the only way of reaching the position is via air strikes on the area, which we can be certain will kill the target but will also kill a certain number of bystanders. In the second situation, we simply cordon off the area and then find and shoot everyone inside.<\/p>\n
Under current international law, the first case would not be a war crime but the second case would be. Now there are any number of thoroughly amoral possible reasons for this rule. The first situation looks an awful lot like what the Allies did with strategic bombing in World War II and the second situation looks an awful lot like how the Germans dealt with resistance fighters in World War II. It might not be accidental that most of the current international law of war crimes comes out of the Nuremburg tribunals held by the Allies to try Nazi leaders after World War II. Hence, the rule may simply be a historical memory of victors’ justice.<\/p>\n
I wonder, however, if there is any defensible moral position behind the distinction that the rule makes. Is there any moral distinction between harm and suffering caused from afar and harm and suffering caused up close? Is there any distinction between harm and suffering caused by one who is at risk (the plane in theory can be shot down), as opposed to one who is at no risk (no one can get at the execution squad in the town square)?<\/p>\n
I don’t claim to have answer’s here, but I do think that the question is an interesting one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Are executions in the town square less moral than air bombing? Consider the following hypotheticals from the international law of war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}