Or, as Bernard Avishai said the other day at TPM Cafe: All along, Israel might have made a strong statement of a different kind. It might have endorsed the obvious features a two-state solution, like the ones worked out with President Clinton just before he left office in 2001. It might have helped strengthen the Palestinians’ immunity to Hamas ideology, creating a stronger civil society, new businesses, new schools, new Palestinian cooperation with international peace-keepers and investors.

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.

That said, I was trying very early this morning to construct an example which involved me going to the bathroom in the middle of the night and waking my partner, and then found that Michael Bratman uses a very similar example in a discussion of … David Velleman. Since Bratman says clearly what I’d merely stumble towards I think I’ll rely on him:

I arrive home late at night and wonder whether to turn on the light even though that will, unfortunately, wake up Susan. On reflection I decide to turn it on, for I worry I will otherwise trip over something. I intend to turn on the light – and expect but do not intend – that I will thereby wake up Susan. I have an intention and a related self-prediction that is not an intention.

Why say that I expect but do not intend to wake up Susan, even though I made my decision in full awareness that I would wake her up by turning on the light? The answer is that I do not satisfy any of a trio of conditions, satisfaction of which seems characteristic of intention: I am not at all disposed to explore alternative means to waking Susan if it turns out the light bulb isn’t working; nor am I disposed to rule out other options because of their incompatibility with my waking of Susan; nor do I see myself as faced with a problem of what means to use in order to to wake up Susan. (“Cognitivism about Practical Reason”, in Bratman’s Faces of Intention p. 258.

That seems about right to me. On the other issues, I think we’ve at least established consensus that intention doesn’t track culpability and that “unintentionally” is not exculpatory.

So, if a son that is by his father sent about merchandise do sinfully miscarry upon the sea, the imputation of his wickedness, by your rule, should be imposed upon his father that sent him: or if a servant, under his master’s command transporting a sum of money, be assailed by robbers and die in many irreconciled iniquities, you may call the business of the master the author of the servant’s damnation. But this is not so: the king is not bound to answer the particular endings of his soldiers, the father of his son, nor the master of his servant; for they purpose not their death when they purpose their services…

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.

So should we sue both sides in to bankruptcy and throw the lot in debtors prison, divide up the Holy sites and send them to those most in need of tourist attractions? There is plenty of fault to go around here but little that realistically gets accomplished in meting out punishment except to the weakest of the parties. Too many supply the weapons willingly. Too many provide cover of excuse willingly. One side seems unearthly afraid of having become Goliath knowing how that story played out not only in days of yore, but appears to be with its’ puppet[master]. There are no new crimes here just repetitions with more timely media. Perhaps that will make a difference this time but past experience bodes not well for that. Until the Lancet goes in for an excess deaths count what do we really know? Perhaps after that we can get a new resolution out of the UN for US to block. And life goes on for some.

‘’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.’’

When some one is punished for that kind of act then you will be correct.

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.

This has nothing to do with the protected status of noncombatants, which (as the quoted text makes it very clear) is absolute in nature, is not altered for either party by the failure of its opponent to do its duty in protecting that status, and which makes it illegal to carry out an attack causing incidental damage to those civilians which is excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage obtained. Stop blowing smoke.