Comment by beedeebeedee
Comment by beedeebeedee 2 days ago
Hi Terr, the "you" was singular (and in reference to you, in particular). You paraphrase the subthread well enough, but your first comment within it misinterpreted what Abalone said.
> > Conducting a military operation that has a fully predictable rate of civilian casualties is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians.
>By that logic only the absolute number of (expected) civilian deaths matters... which can't be right.
Abalone (as well as myself, many others, including the signers of the Geneva Convention) is concerned about the use of force against a civilian population where it is predictable that there will be a high rate of civilian death. Abalone says that is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians and Abalone is correct (it is, in fact, a war crime). It is not necessarily about absolute number of civilian deaths, so your counterexample does not succeed.
I think the argument boils down to "what does it mean to target civilians?"
if 100 die to get 1 soldier, that sounds like targeting civilians. If 1 dies to get 100 soldiers, that sounds like (to me and many others) a successful and targeted attack with minimal collateral damage.
The argument being made sounds like if you know there could be 1 death that you should not target the soldiers and that there is no difference in that case to the 100 civilians to 1 soldier and as such, if any civilian could have been estimated to be collateral damage then no military action should have been made.
I think that is supercilious and discounts reality. Civilians are going to get killed and war is terrible. There is a difference in targeted ratios.