Murder in war as an ethical problem

Abstract

The article is devoted to the issue of the principles of moral restraint of warfare according to the division of war participants into legitimate and illegitimate targets of military attacks, which is actively discussed in the ethics of war. The authors analyze two competing ways of differentiating this view, corresponding to two versions of the most popular contemporary ethics of war, the Just War Theory (JWT). One approach assumes symmetric rights for both combatants and non-combatants on both sides of the war, while the other approach allocates rights according to the moral significance of the war in which the actors are involved as well as their contribution to it. The authors show that in both cases an important principle of justice is violated. But the reason for this, they suggest, is that in both cases differentiation is proposed according to a certain distribution of rights. In such a case, the only moral justification for creating a lethal threat to the subject in war is that the subject does not have the right not to be so threatened independent of any of his qualities. However, the authors argue that the proposed justifications for the loss of such a right in war are not sufficient. And from this it must follow that both principles of differentiation are unjust. Nevertheless, they can be fair, according to the authors, if we refuse to consider the presence or absence of the relevant right as the only moral justification for creating a lethal or comparable threat to someone in war.