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Showing posts with the label collateral damage

Collateral Damage in War

As someone said recently, there are always going to be gray areas when it comes to moral questions like "How great a risk of harm to innocents am I allowed to impose when defending myself against an attack?" But we can set out obvious cases to act as boundary markers, and then ask which of them a real situation more closely resembles. So: If someone is shooting at me out of the window of an occupied apartment building, I can shoot back at that window. If I hit his hostage inside, that is very unfortunate but I am not culpable. However, I cannot launch a rocket at the building that will take down the whole edifice. In the latter case, I am culpable.