How to Think about Proportionality in War

How to Think about Proportionality in War

Prof. Dr. Daniel Statman

Dept. of Philosophy, University of Haifa, Israel

Imagine that A culpably attacks V without justification, and the only way V can defend herself is by very severely harming A. Many people would contend that V is permitted to do so rather than submit to A. Yet on a widespread understanding of the right of self-defense, a victim may not inflict disproportionate harm on her aggressor, which implies that, in some cases, she is morally expected to surrender. A similar view is common in the morality of war: states may resort to war only if the harm they foreseeably impose on their enemies is not disproportionate to the harm thereby averted. And once war is underway, armies are expected to refrain from attacking legitimate military targets when the anticipated collateral harm to nearby civilians would be disproportionate. My aim is to make sense of these different invocations of proportionality, with particular emphasis on proportionality in war. I argue that proportionality-based constraint on going to war is quite limited, and that proportionality in war is deeply indeterminate, best understood as requiring the cultivation of a certain attitude towards enemy civilians.

Professor Daniel Statman teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Haifa and is a former chair of the Israeli Philosophical Association. His areas of specialization include ethics, political philosophy, and moral psychology. He has published extensively on the ethics of war, including his co-authored book War by Agreement (Oxford, 2019).

The lecture will take place in English.

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