Kida Ling: 'Minor Threateners and Wrongful Killings in War'
Abstract: Most killings in war are wrongful, or so I will argue. Most unjust noncombatants and combatants are, in important ways, morally analogous to “minor threateners” – while they together threaten significant harms, each individually threatens only minor harms. It would thus typically be disproportionate to kill a single unjust noncombatant or combatant. Killing a larger number, on the other hand, may be unnecessary. The takeaway is that most killings in war are both evidence-relatively and fact-relatively impermissible; we should all be pacifists.
