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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   29554 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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Here's a fun historical hypothetical: say you wake up tomorrow and it's May 1944, and Dwight Eisenhower comes to you and says "TheMotte User X, you are our top expert on collateral damage. Our forthcoming invasion of Fortress Europe has to succeed, or else condemn millions more innocents to die at the hands of Nazi Germany. Our plan is to maximize our chances of victory by bombing enemy fortifications, re-supply, repair depots, airfields, road junctions, marshalling yards, rail bridges, training grounds, troop barracks, radio transmitters, telephone exchanges, fuel and ammo dumps, and more. Furthermore once on the ground, our soldiers will make use of their supreme material, technological, and doctrinal advantages in naval and land artillery to crush German resistance in all environments, be their urban, rural, or fortified. Inevitably this will result in the deaths of French civilians, who are not only innocent of Nazi crimes but victims of them, and our allies in this fight. So the crucial question I pose to you is: how many French civilian deaths are tolerable to ensure the success of Operation Overlord?"

What would your answer be? What would you consider reasonable? Could you come up with a specific number as a threshold for what you would deem acceptable civilian deaths? (Ideally don't look up the actual number before coming to an answer for yourself)

This is also not meant to be a direct analogy to any extant geopolitical crisis; its function is primarily a thought experiment and not a commentary upon or justification for acts of any specific government.

Why is Eisenhower asking a Catholic woman? Eh, weirder things happen in wartime.

There are a few criteria for waging a just war according to Catholic doctrine:

  1. The damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave and certain.
  2. All other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective.
  3. There must be serious prospects of success.
  4. The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.

I think your scenario takes for granted #1 and #2. The historical record bears out #3, but it could be an interesting exercise to determine if this could have been known at the time. Your question is getting to the heart of #4.

Then I look at the doctrine of Double Effect. When an action produces both a negative and a positive effect, it is permitted if:

  • The good effect outweighs the bad effect.
  • The action is undertaken with the intention of producing the good effect, not the bad effect.
  • The bad effect is not the direct cause of the good effect.

Given this, the most simple answer to "How many French civilian deaths are tolerable to ensure the success of Operation Overlord?" is one less than the number of lives saved by the success of Operation Overload, as long as the rules of Double Effect are applied. Of course, we don't live in a counterfactual world where we know for certain how many people would have died had we not acted. We should be careful and allow for our knowledge being imprecise.

There would be some actions that could not be tolerated - we could not attack civilians directly in the hope that it would redirect medical supplies from the military and therefore weaken the military. This would violate the "bad effect is not the direct cause of the good effect" clause. But overall, as long as we are attacking legitimate military targets for the sake of attacking legitimate military targets, and we are reasonably certain that each attack will save more lives than cause civilian deaths, it is morally permissible.

The criteria you mention seem to be re the initiation of war, whereas the OP is asking about the conduct of war. This Catholic source discusses both.

Discrimination and Due Proportion seem like they are applications of Double Effect, which is why I went into the more general Double Effect, but for the curious and lazy:

(1) Discrimination — Armed forces ought to fight armed forces, and should strive not to harm non-combatants purposefully. Moreover, armed forces should not wantonly destroy the enemy's countryside, cities, or economy simply for the sake of punishment, retaliation or vengeance.

(2) Due proportion — Combatants must use only those means necessary to achieve their objectives. For example, no one needs to use nuclear missiles to settle a territorial fishing problem. Due proportion also involves mercy — towards civilians in general, towards combatants when the resistance stops (as in the case of surrender and prisoners of war), and towards all parties when the war is finished.

Sure, but they are much more specific to the issue of civilian casualties, which I think is helpful.

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