Neither of us is a pacifist. We affirm the sanctity of human life, but we believe that there can be cases in which the use of lethal force—in self-defense, for example, or defense of someone else who is under unjust attack—can be justified. So we believe that there are conditions under which wars may legitimately be waged—these are traditionally called “just wars.” The war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan is an example. The war against southern secession is another.
Even when lethal force can be justified, however, there are moral norms—rules, laws of war—governing what may and not be done in the pursuit of military victory. “Just war” theorists identify rules governing the question of when it is morally permissible to go to war (jus ad bellum) and rules pertaining to what may and may not legitimately be done in the prosecution of a justified war (jus in bello).
In the former category is the norm excluding aggression (for example, wars of conquest to acquire territory or secure markets) and restricting the legitimate use of force to defensive ends. In the latter category is the rule that says the use of force must be proportionate to the good end (for example, protecting potential victims of attack or persecution) for which the war is justified.
Another key principle of jus in bello is the norm forbidding attacks on noncombatants (including prisoners of war). This is sometimes called “noncombatant immunity.” It is in part a specification of the sanctity of life principle—the general norm prohibiting the deliberate taking of innocent human life, whether as an end in itself or as a means to some other end.
Neither the great figures in the tradition of “just war theory” (St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, the 20th-century popes who eliminated the concept of “punitive wars” from the category of just wars) nor either of us, condemn under this principle every act in war that foreseeably results in the deaths of noncombatants. In almost any war, there will be “collateral damage” not just to property, but also to persons—persons whose deaths or injuries are not sought but occur, and were foreseen to occur, as a result of military acts whose objective is something other than those deaths or injuries. These acts can be legitimate.
Can be. Not necessarily will be. Even when it comes to deaths that are properly regarded as outside the scope of intention—that is, side effects of otherwise justified actions, not sought as ends or means—norms of justice, and above all norms of fairness, apply. Unjustly causing collateral damage—above all, unfairly causing the deaths of noncombatants—is profoundly morally culpable. It is as much a sin against the sanctity of human life as intentionally killing innocent people.
The key to thinking through this question in any particular case is to attend steadily and clear-headedly to the moral truth that each and every member of the human family is equally the bearer of profound and inherent dignity. No human being is inherently superior or inferior to any other. No one’s life is worth more or less than anyone else’s. We may have different obligations to different human beings—for example, we, as married men and as fathers, have different and greater obligations to our wives and children than we have to other people; nations and political leaders have certain obligations to their own citizens that they do not have to others. But all of us have the obligation to treat everyone’s life as equal in worth and dignity—to respect the life of every human being equally.
Concretely in the circumstances of war, this means we are strictly obligated to avoid performing acts that will result in the deaths of, say, innocent Afghans, that we would not perform if the likely victims were, instead, our fellow Americans. And so, in contemplating the use of drones, given all the risks they pose to innocent people in the vicinity of the strike, we must ask this question: would we launch the strike if those people were Americans, if they were our neighbors, our friends?
The key thing is to respect—strictly—the equal dignity of human beings. We must recognize, for example, that an elderly Afghan man bears no less dignity than a young and healthy American woman; that the lives of all human beings are inestimably precious—that the life of a Christian child is no less or more worthy or important than the life of a Jewish or Muslim child. What we would decline to do if the likely victim were “like us” we must refuse to do when the likely victim is “different.”
The temptation in warfare, especially where drones can eliminate risks to our own soldiers and make it possible to kill from thousands of miles away, is to undervalue the lives of those “not like us” in lands far away. Their deaths—precisely because we do not see them as “like us”—will seem abstract, and will not engage our concern, our compassion, our pity. Their deaths will seem to us to be “worth it” because a drone strike enables people “like us,” who would otherwise be at risk in carrying out military operations to achieve the objective, to stay out of harm’s way.
In the long history of human affairs and human conflict, undervaluing those who are “not like us”—not of our tribe, not of our culture or religion, not of our race—has been all too common. It is what has given us slavery, exploitation, imperialism, conquest, domination, eugenics and every other manner of injustice. And it has resulted in immoral choices even in the prosecution of justified wars.
It takes discipline—moral discipline—to hold fast to the equal dignity principle and avoid the unfairness of undervaluing the lives of some of our precious fellow human beings in places like Afghanistan. It is this discipline that we, as individuals and as a people, need to muster.
Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. Cornel West is Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at Union Theological Seminary.
The views expressed in this article are the writers’ own.
