CNN and the Doctrine of Double Effect

Speaking as a lawyer, and not a philoosopher, I would suggest that people ought to be deemed to have intended the natural and probable consequences of their actions . . .

”Or simply a doctrine which is very, very useful in writing off bad effects of an action, when those in power (and their paid propagandists) desire that action. Or further still, when they desire the bad effects, but don’t want to admit it.”

Something that holds true for both sides, which makes ‘support’ of Hamas tenuous at best since the outcome they are getting was a reasonably sure thing based on recent history.

Hmm, I’ve become rather bogged down in a discussion over at Unspeak with Steven Poole about the meaning of “intend” and “intentional” (my intuitions are the opposite of Velleman’s about the meaning of “intention” etc). But the key thing here obviously isn’t linguistic, so better to substitute “aim” or “purpose” in the formulation of double effect.

Velleman writes:

bq. I know that the Catholic doctrine of “double effect” would excuse these
killings as unintentional.

Velleman “knows” no such thing, since the Catholic doctrine of double effect would not permit “civilian casualties vastly disproportionate to the Israeli civilian casualties that they are trying to prevent.”

See for example the formulations at the SEP here:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/

Of course, something that looks superficially like double effect is often appealed to (in bad faith) by military spokespersons, wingnut commentators and bellicose bloggers. But that isn’t a strike against DE as such. It may still turn out to be “bad philosophy” in its best incarnation, but it deserves a better presentation than Velleman gives it.

And even if we don’t like double effect, we will surely need a principle that supports similar conclusions in some cases. So, as Elizabeth Anscome discussed in “Mr Truman’s Degree”:http://www.anthonyflood.com/anscombetrumansdegree.htm , soldiers, aircrew etc fighting a just war will often attack targets knowing that, statistically, they are bound to kill some noncombatants. Now the principle of noncombatant immunity says that you can’t have harm to such as your aim or purpose. So unless we have something like DE then we ought to be pacifists and eschew war even against grave injustice. Is Velleman a pacifist? I’d be surprised.

As Anscome remarks, some such deaths are not murder, but recklessness or unscrupulousness about them becomes murder, even if they are not aimed at.

As a philosopher of language, I say that Professor Velleman is being obtuse. Like many people, he believes that the Israeli killing of civilians is morally indefensible, or at least not actually excused by the Israeli description of same as “unintentional.” Fine, I don’t disagree. But it is no help to his position to dispute that description.

That description employs a perfectly good use of “intentional/unintentional”. Here’s what it means. It marks an asymmetry in the [presumed] Israeli attitude toward the results of their actions (A = stopping the Hamas rocket attacks; B = killing civilians). Their concern – their “intent” – is A, but they see no way to do that without also doing B.

That is, we might have an exchange like this:

Q: If there were a way to stop the rockets without killing anyone, would you do that?

A: Of course.

Q: If there were a way to kill people without stopping the rockets, would you do that?

A: No, of course not. What would be the point of that? We want to stop the rockets, not to kill people.

This is meant to explain the motivations behind the actual performance of (A & B), which could have any of four distinct motivations (A, B, both, neither). (Of course that last one is nuts.) So we say, perfectly intelligibly, that A (i.e. the A part of (A & B)) is “intentional” and B is not.

Now the real issue, of course (as Chris also says) is whether one is morally responsible for “unintended” actions of this sort (when they are easily forseeable, etc.), and of course Professor Velleman believes that one is indeed so responsible. But you can make this point without demanding that everyone hew to his technical usage of “unintentional” (i.e. by denying that B is “unintentional”). That’s just dogmatic.

Sorry you felt it as a bogging-down, Chris, but here’s the link to the discussion in case anyone else is interested.

If the doctrine of double effect is so “counterintuitive” and such “bad philosophy,” how come it’s central to the international law of war, which distinguishes sharply between targetting civilians, which is very strictly forbidden, and harming them as a side-effect of actions aimed at legitimate military targets, which is not forbidden if the harm to civilians is not disproportionate. (See e.g. Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions.) The targeting/side-effect distinction is precisely the distinction between effects intended as an end or means and effects foreseen but not intended in that strict sense — i.e. precisely the double effect distinction.

And David Velleman’s last example, about disproportionate Israeli losses, cuts no ice against this distinction, proponents of which will agree that the Israelis are responsible if they knowingly incur disproportionate costs. But the wrong will be that of knowingly causing disproportionate harm, which is different from the wrong of intending harm as an end or means. For this reason, it is misleading of Velleman to use the word “excuse” in connection with the doctrine. It says only that merely foreseeing harms is less morally objectionable than intending them as an end or means; it can still be very objectionable if the harms are disproportionate, as they are in Velleman’s example and arguably also are in the real world. Many believers in the doctrine think recent Israeli actions against Hezbollah and the Palestinians have been seriously disproportionate and therefore seriously morally wrong. No excusing whatever being done.

Finally, an elementary point. There’s a looser sense of “intentionally” in which whenever you knowingly cause an effect you do so intentionally. The double effect doctrine doesn’t deny that current Israeli actions have killed Palestinians intentionally in that sense, because it uses “intentionally” in a stricter or more technical sense, to cover only cases where the effect is aimed at as an end or a means. And the claim that it is morally more objectionable to cause bad effects intending them in that stricter sense is far from counterintuitive — it yields the intuitively right result in many cases, including CT’s favourite the trolley case. And it seems to have been intuitive enough to get itself into the core of the international law of war.

I suppose I’m just piling on, and know less about the subject than most here, but really, that Israeli-soldiers comparison seems like nonsense. Sure, you’d blame the authorities for sacrificing too many soldiers, but you’d still recognize a difference between that and intentionally killing them. Imagine how much more you’d blame them if you found that, rather than making a “bad bargain”, they had started the war specifically in order to thin the ranks of their own army! David (to refer to an earlier “Israeli authority”) generally gets blamed for murdering Uriah, but not the various other soldiers killed in the same wars; because Uriah’s death, unlike the others, was intended by David.

Anyone who understands what is happening in Gaza realizes that Hamas has intentionally goaded Israel into killing Palestinian civilians. That is what this war is about. On the day before the attack began, Olmert went on Al-Arabiya TV and virtually begged Hamas to stop firing the rockets. He explicitly promised that if the rockets stopped, there would be no attack. Hamas responded by firing 70 rockets.

Why? Because Hamas has decided that it is willing to take a hit to its forces – so far, about 1% of its men under arms have been killed – in order to assure that sufficient numbers of Palestinian civilians are killed so as generate outrage against Israel. Hamas wants to discredit Fatah and to make a peace agreement impossible. Hamas’ s short-term enemy is not Israel, it is Fatah. The best way to defeat Fatah is to de-legitimize it, and the best way to do that is to make peace negotiations impossible by goading Israel into attacking. This is the strategy that Hezbollah used to great success in Lebanon, and Olmert appears to be incapable of learning from past mistakes.

Hamas has shown itself perfectly willing to kill Palestinian civilians in order to defeat Fatah, as when its forces opened fire on a pro-Fatah rally in November 2007. http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jan/02/world/fg-gaza2

Obviously Israel is implicated in the deaths of the Palestinian civilians it has bombed. But its intent is to kill Hamas fighters. Hamas’s itent is for Israel to kill Palestinian civilians.

I personally don’t find these moral/philosophical debates particularly interesting or illuminating, but those who do might ask Mr. Velleman whether Hamas, by goading Israel into attacking, bears any responsibility for Palestinian civilian deaths.

The siege of Gaza has gone on for years. Chris Hedges quoted some statistics at Truthdig. A majority of Gazans now suffer some form of malnourishment. Almost one fifth of all children have stunted growth. Almost half suffer from acute anemia. Half of children under the age of 12 suffer severe depression, with “no will left to live”. This horrific siege has been condemned again and again as brutal collective punishment by human rights organisations. That is the context in which the current attack is taking place.

I can’t see why speculation about the inner life of Israeli decision makers or the meaning of intention is particularly relevant. The lawyers’ response @2 seems quite apt and less morally distracting. And even if we do speculate, why do we not consider that the civilian casualties might be intended? To teach Gazans a lesson? To break their will? Doesn’t that hypothesis fit even better in the context of collective punishment?

It strikes me Velleman is running together threeissues here. At least he is running them together in the email, although he may not run them together elsewhere.

One question is whether or not the Israeli killing of civilians in Gaza is unintentional. Another issue is whether, if the killings are unintentional, they are thereby morally excused by the doctrine of double effect. A third issue is whether, if the doctrine does excuse the actions, that constitutes a compelling moral objection to the doctrine.

Velleman apparently has action theory-oriented reasons for holding that the actions are intentional. But in that case, his criticism of the doctrine of double effect is mooted, or is at least incidental to his point about the killings being intentional. A counterexample to the doctrine of double effect would require, I presume, showing a case in which some actions are unintentional, and thereby excused by the doctrine of double effect, but in which powerful moral intuitions would have it that the actions really are not excusable, thus calling the doctrine of double effect into question. But if Velleman thinks the Israeli killings of civilians is actually intentional, then the doctrine of double effect doesn’t excuse them, so he hasn’t produced an objection to the doctrine.

Maybe by the “doctrine of double effect” Vellman means to refer broadly to a body of scholastic philosophical lore and casuistry that contains both the moral doctrine proper, and some additional semantic or action theory judgments about which actions are and are not intentional. It appears his main issue is really with the latter judgments.

Velleman also, I gather, has some moral objections to the doctrine of double effect itself, which appear to be independent of the action theory issue about whether actions such as the Israeli killing of civilians in the present Gaza conflict are intentional or unintentional, objections which are brought out by his example of the Israelis hypothetically accepting disproportionate casualties on their own side. Or maybe this is just an example designed to show how the doctrine is often hypocritically and selectively applied only to those cases where it produces the desired effect. Either way, good for him in challenging the doctrine of double effect.

But he wraps up the brief discussion confusingly when he says, “So it is with killing of Gazan civilians, which is clearly intentional.” Does he think his example shows that the Israeli actions are actually intentional, and that’s why the doctrine of double effect is wrong? That doesn’t make sense, since if the actions are intentional, the doctrine doesn’t apply. Does he think the doctrine is wrong, for moral reasons, but that many purported applications of the doctrine misfire anyway, because the so-called unintentional actions they invoke are actually intentional? Maybe that’s it.

What actions does Velleman think are intentional? I’m guessing he wants to defend something along these lines: If one directly intends some end, and directly wills certain actions to achieve those ends, and one knows (at least with a high degree of probability) that certain causal consequences of those directly willed actions will flow from them, then those consequences are produced intentionally.

I think this probably plausibly captures parts of our common-sense distinction between intentional and unintentional action. But it obviously brings out the vagueness of that distinction as well, connected with the reference to the “high degree” of probability. A similar vagueness attends our uses of terms such as “might” and “will”.

I have a question for you sagacious philosophers. How would you stop the horrible casualties on both sides ? Please, one of you respond.

For those who doubt that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza was intended: why have the amounts of basic food supplies and medication been allowed into Gaza been diminished to a trickle over the past months? Why not just let them in? The supplies are there. They are being prevented from going into the strip by the Israeli army. http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/news/gaza-reduced-bare-survival-20081205

How can Israeli generals (Dov Weisglas) brag about how the IDF “put them [the palestinians] on a diet”, when they are going hungry? Do they have any conscience at all? Why will my respondents exclusively blame Hamas rather than the IDF for carrying out the siege? Is the IDF somehow forced to make people go hungry? In the meantime, why are we philosophically debating the undecidability of human motivation?

I’d like to publicly thank, well publicly for as long as this stays up, Bertram the Moderator for contributing so greatly to the public discussion by censoring the hell out of this thread, thus leaving the way clear for sensible minds like Bloix.
Bloix who has done the world a great boon, by making the distinction between Israel as represented by Olmert and the Palestinians as represented by Hamas so vividly distinct.
Israel wants to stop killing Palestinians, but the Palestinians want them, the Israelis, to keep on killing them, the Palestinians.
Thanks to both Bertram and Bloix for their yeoman efforts, and may they be justly rewarded, and soon.

OK — I plead guilty to citing the doctrine of double effect without re-reading the relevant literature. When I last looked into it, I thought the doctrine was hooey. But I cited it here carelessly. Mea culpa.

My main point was that the Israeli killing of civilians is not unintentional, as some are claiming. The claim that they are unintentional is clearly meant to deflect condemnation and blame, and I believe that the attempt fails.

In general, whether an action is intentional is not a direct function of whether it is intended. These are two different matters. I readily grant that the Israelis do not intend to cause civilian casualties. But not intending to cause those casualties does not acquit the Israelis of causing them intentionally. And it is whether the casualties are caused intentionally — not whether they are intended — that is most relevant to the question of wrongness and blame.

If the Israelis did intend to kill civilians, their behavior would be not just immoral and blameworthy but vicious — that is, a manifestation of vices such as cruelty, bloodthirstiness, or whatever. To that extent, then, the fact that they do not intend the civilian casualties acquits them of something — namely, the relevant vices. But it does not affect the wrongness of what the they are doing, nor their blameworthiness for doing it. And surely, the claim that the civilian casualties are unintentional is meant to accomplish more than to acquit the Israelis of being barbarians.

I don’t think that references to law are relevant. Sometimes the law encodes morality, sometimes it merely reflects what is practicable given the imperfections of large institutions. If the Israeli actions are illegal, then so much the worse; but even if they are legal, they are clearly wrong.

There is no such thing as a just war.

Yeah, Israel’s intentions are unclear here. Part of the purpose of the violence is to send a message to Palestinian society more broadly about the costs of supporting Hamas, right?

rea: Speaking as a lawyer, and not a philoosopher, I would suggest that people ought to be deemed to have intended the natural and probable consequences of their actions . . .

cb: That might be a sensible policy in the area of criminal responsibility – hence your “deemed to have” – but it is obviously false as an account of action and intention.

No, it’s not just a policy of criminal responsibility, it’s a judgment about what it means to “intend” something. The distinction between, “I wanted to kill those people” and “I knew those people would be killed if I did what I did, and I did it anyway” is essentially meaningless

Hi, Kenny (Easwaran):

Yes, exactly — it’s a case for Josh Knobe.

As Knobe showed (testing an intuition that was published by Gil Harman back in the 1970s), whether an agent is judged to have produced foreseen consequences intentionally depends, not only on the psychological antecedents of his action, but also on the normative significance of those consequences. Untoward consequences are more likely to be judged intentional — and rightly so.

An agent need not act on the basis of all the reasons he knows in favor of acting. For example, he can save a drowning child solely for the sake of the child, despite knowing that he will also be earning praise for heroism. He can exclude the praise from his deliberations, and he is rationally permitted to do so, provided that he decides to save the child anyway, for other reasons. He can then say, “I knew that I would be praised, but I didn’t do it for that reason.”

In contrast, an agent is rationally obliged to consider all of the reasons he knows against a proposed action. If he proceeds to take the action, he will have acted in spite of these reasons, given that he knew them. Since the Israelis knew that they would cause civilian casualties, they cannot say, “We knew that we would cause civilian casualties, but we didn’t act in spite of that consideration.”

Reasons-for and reasons-against are therefore asymmetrical in the following respect: if an agent knows reasons for doing something and does it, he may or may not have done it for those particular reasons; but if he knows reasons against doing something and does it, then he has necessarily done it in spite of those reasons.

This asymmetry produces the aforementioned asymmetry in our judgments of what is intentional. The mere fact that an agent knew a reason for acting does not determine whether he acted for that reason, and so it doesn’t determine whether his fulfillment of the reason was intentional. The life-saver can say, “I earned praise for heroism, but I didn’t do that intentionally.” (Or, if he acted solely for the sake of the praise rather than the child, we can say, “Well, he did a good deed, but not intentionally.”) By contrast, the fact that an agent knew a reason against acting entails that he acted in spite of that reason, and so it entails that he contravened the reason intentionally.

So the Israelis cannot say, “We knew that we would cause casualties, but we didn’t do that intentionally.” Their causing those casualties is intentional, and they are to blame.

FWIW, I have extended Josh’s work, with explicit reference to DDE. Paper posted on the experimental philosophy blog back a while ago.

I find Bloix @15 sheds real light on the situation, for me, because it makes the conflict follow what I call the Clausewitz/O’Neill Principle: “War is the continuation of politics by other means” and “All politics is local” means that “Even foreign wars are fought for domestic political reasons”.

For instance, Al Qaeda attacked the US not to “defeat” the US, but to show other factions in Islamdom that it was the strongest, that it called the literal shots. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, his goal wasn’t necessarily to “send a message” to Kuwait or the Saudis or the US, it was to strengthen his position in Iraq, to reward his friends with wealth.

I don’t know enough about Israeli internal politics to know how Clausewitz/O’Neill is playing out there, but I’ll bet you bagels to sandfleas it is.

It is, maybe, worth noting that the law makes much of the same distinction that Vellman does- you can do something intentionally w/o intending to do just that thing. So, if you steal a bag, and you meant to steal it, and the bad has enough money in it that it qualifies as grand theft, you have intentionally committed grand theft even if you did not intend to steal that much money, and perhaps intended not to. That seems right to me both as a matter of policy and as a moral judgment.

Now let’s see if philosophers (and the rest of us, for that matter) can make heads or tales of the doctrine of proportionality in international law: cf. here: http://www.ejiltalk.org/israeli-raids-in-gaza-proportionality-and-the-status-of-hamas-policemen/
here: http://www.ejiltalk.org/a-follow-up-on-israel-and-gaza/
and here: http://opiniojuris.org/2009/01/03/dershowitz-on-israel-and-proportionality/

Let me get this straight: Israel’s not responsible for its actions, Hamas is, because Hamas goaded Israel into killing civilians in order to generate outrage and sympathy.

That’s a rapist’s argument if I’ve ever heard one.

Steven, #31, no, I don’t think so. Judges and lawyers are asking a technical legal question (about _mens rea_) and are using “intention” in a techical legal sense, and that doesn’t have to track the facts about what people intend non-technically speaking. I think you already conceded engels’s point on that (at your blog) wrt to the question of what gamblers intend (you reformulated in response). They don’t intend to lose their money, even thought that’s a natural and probable (rea’s formulation at #2) consequence of their action. Given that humans are often imprudent and are bad assessors of risk, they will often not intend the natural and probable causes of their actions.

@40: you see, the thing is, hardly anyone is prepared to accept that both Hamas and the Israeli govt are doing bad things. For the life of me I don’t know why that is so hard to grasp, but apparently it is. There can only be goodies and baddies, us and them, the Light and the Darkness, even in the most ‘intellectual’ discussion of the topic.

David Velleman at comment 25 seems to think that if someone is shown not to have intended deaths of innocents but only to have foreseen them as likely consequences of actions they did intend, that person’s actions are “immoral” and “blameworthy” but not “vicious” or “barbaric.”

This is a genuine instance of exactly the sort of problem he (like S Poole) erroneously claimed to find with the doctrine of double effect when he misunderstood it: spurious exculpation on the basis of a distinction that makes no difference. If one acts with sufficient indifference to innocent suffering and death one can certainly make oneself as vicious and barbaric as pretty much anyone, even though the suffering and death is foreseen rather than intended. Indeed, an agent may qualify as vicious and barbaric even if the horrific effects are not even foreseen, as they may not be if she takes care not to think too hard about the case. Negligence can stand proxy for virtually any other vice. As Anscombe said, a fool can be as much of a knave as he likes.

This is a case where the common sense usage of language is perfectly fine and things become needlessly overcomplicated when philosophers take over.

Coincidently or not, Philosopher of Action is the title of the next Keanu Reeves movie.

Steve Poole asks:

bq. What would be the point of their asking a “technical legal question” if it were not supposed to get at the truth about what intention actually means in the real world?

Because it is supposed to get at the truth concerning a different question, namely, whether the subjective conditions for attributing responsibility are in place.

Well yes, Steven, _mens rea_. I’m not a lawyer, but it is interesting that different jurisdictions use different conditions to express the view that a person foresaw a consequence that wasn’t their purpose. The UK has “oblique intention” the US has “knowingly” etc. They aren’t in the business of trying to explicate the folk concept of intention.

55: well, it’s a risk, yes, but I think that the reasonable man comes in at this point: a reasonable man could expect to drive his children to their granny’s house without injuring them. (There’s a risk, but it’s very small.) But a reasonable man would know that it is a statistical near-certainty that, if you take lots of people rock climbing, you will get some of them injured. As soon as he starts up the charity, he is intending to injure someone -almost inevitably. (Or to get them injured, if that’s a meaningful definition.)

Of course, given that the stated targets, again, include police and government infratructure, isn’t this all beside the point? No philosophical effort is required to show that the deaths of civilians in Gaza are intentional. Israel has publicly announced that it intends to kill civilians– no, not little children, but police officers are unambiguously civilians too.

What I took to be obviously false is (#2) the doctrine that people always intend the natural and probable consequences of their actions. You yourself actually believe this doctrine to be false, for reasons that you formulated on your blog: people don’t always foresee the natural and probable consequences. We might, as a matter of policy concerning criminal responsibilty want to “deem them to intend”, but they don’t intend, do they? (And there are other counterexamples some of which you accept and others you don’t: e.g. Lois Lane intends to marry Superman but not Clark Kent.) The success of any of these counterexamples (foresaw/foreseeable; referential opacity; lottery cases) is enough to sink the proposition that I objected to.

Lemuel #57: Yes, abolutely, I’m starting to feel disgusted at our philosophical quibbling in the light of what’s actually happening. See

http://www.btselem.org/English/Gaza_Strip/20081231_Gaza_Letter_to_Mazuz.asp

ajay ~
As soon as he starts up the charity, he is intending to injure someone -almost inevitably. (Or to get them injured, if that’s a meaningful definition.)

Steven Poole ~
A doctor in a emergency triage situation who leaves one person to die because he judges himself to have a better chance of saving another does indeed intend to let the first person die — and (which is a different question) he is justified in doing so.

Soory to be rude, perhaps even dense but BS to both of those. There was no intent in either to cause harm, that it can be so comfortably twisted for some to read it into those situations is perhaps a far bigger issue than a climber falling or patient #2 expiring. What a wonderful world we have, eh?

If I walk across the caldera in Yellowstone there is risk, much is done to mitigate it, though idiots and accidents do happen which circumvent those attempts. There is no intent by the Ranger who flushed out trail details, by staff who worked on the trail, by the folks manning the entrance gate[s] to have done me harm if for example I step through the crust and boil my foot in acidic water or get eaten by a brown bear while smelling like a fresh stick of fried bacon. The intent of the doctor is not to let one patient die but to try and keep one from dieing – that he saves one and not the other is not intent to have one die. The intent of the climbing school charity founder[s] is to cause injury – that they happen does not prove there was intent for them to. [this assumes the ranger did not purposely guide me to a spot of known to have a crust thickness of 2mm; that the doctor did not choose to treat a cold over a knife wound to the chest; that the climbing school did hire Michael D Brown as headmaster and supply him with hemp twine and safety pins… … …]

but police officers are unambiguously civilians too.

Is it really that clearcut? On paper it is obvious…

Is it really that clearcut?

Yes. From Chris’s link above:

yesterday’s bombing of the government offices…. included the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Labor, Construction and Housing. An announcement made by the IDF Spokesperson’s Office regarding this attack stated that, “the attack was carried out in response to the ongoing rocket and mortar-shell fire carried out by Hamas over Israeli territory, and in the framework of IDF operations to strike at Hamas governmental infrastructure and members active in the organization.”

If Gaza’s housing ministry does not employ civilians, then the term civilian just has no meaning.

I don’t think that is implicit at all, hence the “deeming” – they jolly well ought to have known, and we’ll treat them as if they did. So whether X actually intended A comes apart from whether the legal system treats them as intending A.

”If Gaza’s housing ministry does not employ civilians, then the term civilian just has no meaning.”

I thought it’s meaning was/is shield, no? We do know that Hamas has a tendency to co-locate its weapons. We also know that civilians can willingly help and migrate in status. Of course what we don’t know prior is when it’s willing. We also know that all parties seek advantage in this area for many reasons and one only need look at the US use of private contractors in a conflicts to see how it can twist things coming and going. What we don’t know with any certainty is what else went on in those ‘gov’t’ locations. Our W House would be a prime military target even though it mostly houses civilians.

Is-real will of course claim it/they housed proper military targets; a housing inspector who says #10 Bombeddown St is destroyed and that there are IDF tanks across from it BTW does become a combatant in the eyes of some and if that info is transmitted from Housing Inspector Civil HQ then it also becomes suspect, does/can it not?

Hamas of course will deny any such info transfer took place, and especially not from Housing Inspector Civil HQ as it is strictly civilian. But if it did it only because they are crammed tighter than a Warsaw Ghetto and had to plug in the radio somewhere.

The other players in Gaza will of course curse both IDF and Hamas and are not unlikely to say whatever they feel will aid their POV’s cause the most.

We’ll skip the roles of the Big others for now, but those hands are stained as well.

The black and white in all this has been relegated to mere specks easily dismissed as eye floaters and all the gray is tainted with red. We are so far beyond civility here [there] that determining civilians is almost moot due in large part of actions /likely outcomes of containment by Israel and the helpers.

What we still don’t know is who cast the first stone, and it seems no one wants to ask that any longer.

Markup, if you read the linekd article — or anything else on the conflict — you would know that Israel is *not* claiming that the Housing Ministry housed weapons. What they are actually claiming is that “Anything affiliated with Hamas is a legitimate target,” regardless of whether it is being used for military purposes or not.

Again, the IDF is *not* claiming that government buildings in Gaza are targets because they are housing weapons or soldiers; it is claiming that they are targets *simply becasue they are oeprated by Hamas* (which is, after all, the government of Gaza.) There is no he-said she-said here; this is what the IDF itself says it is doing.

And yes I think that quite apart from any of the points disputed here the action Israel is currently taking is morally indefensible.

Chris, you write [regarding the discussions of lawyers and judges on ‘intent] :

“Because it is supposed to get at the truth concerning a different question, namely, whether the subjective conditions for attributing responsibility are in place.”

and

“Well yes, Steven, mens rea. I’m not a lawyer, but it is interesting that different jurisdictions use different conditions to express the view that a person foresaw a consequence that wasn’t their purpose. The UK has “oblique intention” the US has “knowingly” etc. They aren’t in the business of trying to explicate the folk concept of intention.”

First, they pretty much are in the business of trying to explicate the folk concept of intention. All of the legal wranglings (both in legislatures and in courtrooms) are fundamentally about that. The question is fundamentally “Is it fair to hold someone morally and legally responsible in some tangible way when they had thinking X which didn’t track exactly with consequence Y”. The legal discussion of that has been very far ranging and detailed. The fact that it arises in a legal context, and has legal consequences, does not mean that the findings regarding community understandings of responsibility are strictly limited to that arena. Legislators are responsible to the community in the long run, which is why the generally bad crime/punishment theories of the 1970s in the US have been discarded (though perhaps too firmly discarded, as they weren’t ENTIRELY without useful insight).

The question of whether or not Israel should be subject to certain consequences for the results of action X which has additional conseqence Y is very similar to the criminal responsibility case. Of course it is, as many want Israel to stop doing action X or face international consequences.

[The international consequences to be faced by Hamas for engaging in similar action X seem to be different. This is interesting in a discussion of *intention* as it is clear that Hamas *intends* to kill Israeli citizens, they are just bad at it because of lack of good weapons and because of relatively good Israeli defences. Attempting to do a wrong thing and failing is in ‘folk concept of intention’ considered worse than attempting to a permitted thing and having bad consequences (see for example attempting to kill your wife and failing vs. allowing yourself to be distracted by the kid in the back seat of your SUV and running someone off the road to their death). This folk understanding seems to be reversed in the example of the international treatment of Hamas.

dsquared you respond to “We do know that Hamas has a tendency to co-locate its weapons. We also know that civilians can willingly help and migrate in status”

with

“And if we’ve read Geneva Protocol 51(8), we know that “Any violation of these prohibitions shall not release the Parties to the conflict from their legal obligations with respect to the civilian population and civilians”

Quite. But if you believe that Parties under the Geneva conventions have a legal obligation not to target military sites which co-locate civilians, you are incorrect.

So your quotation of that language isn’t on point.

Now if you want to argue that a tendency to co-locate doesn’t let Israel off the hook in showing that this particular site was a co-location, I’m right there with you. But you seem to be saying more than that.

engles in 71- I think that’s just about right.

Tom (#45)

Yes, that’s what I thought the DDE said, and I say it’s hooey. You’re right that I gave no argument for this view. That’s because my comment about the DDE was an aside. My main point was that the Israeli killings of civilians are intentional, in a sense that bears on their moral status.

To others who have addressed comments to me: sorry that I can’t reply. I’m writing this from a phone, and won’t have better connectivity soon.

a) ‘I have a question for you sagacious philosophers. How would you stop the horrible casualties on both sides ? Please, one of you respond.’

I’d like to think that if anyone on this thread had an answer to *that* question, they wouldn’t be working in academia.

‘an intuition that was published by Gil Harman back in the 1970s’

b) It’s a while since I read it, but doesn’t Ryle make a similar point about uses of the word ‘voluntary’ in ‘The Concept of Mind’?

c) Am I the only person here to be more than a little surprised that someone well-known for their work in action theory and working in what is widely thought to be one of the world’s leading philosophy departments should be a bit hazy about what DDE actually says?

That’s not intended as a personal attack on David V., much of whose work I greatky admire. But if something like that is happening – without comment – isn’t it a sign of academic specialisms slicing too fine?

I agree with Engels at #71.

(for example, Israeli soldiers often travel on civilian buses; the simple presence of a couple of soldiers “colocated” on a bus full of civilians does not make that bus a legitimate target for suicide bombers, because the damage and death caused to noncombatants is excessive relative to the military advantage anticipated).

Ah but what if those same two Israeli soldiers on the bus full of civilians was hanging out the windows taking pot shots at any arabs they passed, and there was a Palestinian nearby with an RPG, would he be morally okay to fire on the bus now?

You don’t incidentally store arms at a civilian location and certainly not rockets, the way a soldier might use a bus on leave.

And that doesn’t mean all that much. Look, people are tending to treat DDE (and its derivations) as if it’s some no-cooties-no-backsies idea, where all you have to say is “but I didn’t meeeeean to” and point to something else that you did (or to something They did) intend in order to escape culpability for the foreseen-but-unintended side effects. But that’s just not how it works. The point is to minimize the effect of war on civilians insofar as that’s possible given legitimate military ends.

And that means things like proportionality matter. We could probably kill Osama bin Laden by nuking quite a lot of Pakistan, but no one would say that would be justified, even if it wasn’t our intention to nuke lots of innocent people. And it works in other examples, too. If the military target is small (say, a couple of rockets) and not worth the loss of a school’s worth of children, the fact that your enemy decided to hide the small target in the school does not give you carte blanche to blow up the school while it’s in session.

If we’re talking about actual events in Gaza and not hypothetical scenarios, Andrew Whitley of the UN relief team in Gaza (I forget his actual title) says there were no Hamas weapons or fighters at the school where the dozens of civilians were killed–

Link

“They dropped a million pounds of bombs,” Kissinger briefed Nixon. “A million pounds of bombs,” Nixon exclaimed. “Goddamn, that must have been a good strike.” “That shock treatment [is] cracking them,” Nixon declared. “I tell you the thing to do is pour it in there every place we can…just bomb the hell out of them.”

The conversation, secretly recorded by both Kissinger and Nixon without the other’s knowledge, reveals that the President and his national security advisor shared a belief in 1972 that the war could still be won. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB263/index.htm

Maybe in a non-hypothetical sense “we” have gotten better and just don’t know it yet. Perhaps we’ll get lucky and Henry and his gravitas will provide some commentary on the present day situation.

ajay – good point. Can I reformulate to “we can however statistically expect that some children will be killed on the way to or from school – this doesn’t mean that anyone who advocates schools is intending to kill kids”.

Thank you too, Chris. My reponse here.

All very good but at some point you try to get home early, tidy up, buy a bedside light or sleep on the couch.

The DDE doesn’t seem that significant in the Gaza situation in that it wouldn’t move things on much further than a comparison of body counts (The fourth test in either formulation in the SEP) and it raises the question of whether the tactics would be at all effective without the apparently collateral damage. It suggests that the predictable body count is what needs to be considered — the DDE does not discount the not directly intended deaths in any way, if they are foreseen they are in the mix.