Killing Innocents

Richard John Neuhaus asks good questions about whether it is ever right to take innocent life in a piece called Speaking About the Unspeakable in the March issue of First Things. After spending a few paragraphs on the topic of torture (See our commentary here), he writes:

There is a related development that has also not received the attention it would seem to deserve. It is a generally accepted moral maxim that it is always wrong to deliberately take innocent human life. Yet after September 11 it is the policy of our government to shoot down hijacked airplanes, thus killing the innocent passengers, if there is reason to believe that, as in the case of the World Trade Center, the hijackers intend to use the plane as a weapon. One can, of course, stretch the rule of "double effect"-the distinction between what is directly willed and what is only indirectly willed-but it is a stretch that teeters on the edge of simplistic intentionalism.

Father Neuhaus is calling, in this brief essay, for more attention to be paid to these matters by Christian ethicists and moral theologians, and his plea is certainly timely, as we noted in our comments on his post on torture.

The moral agony involved in the scenario Fr. Neuhaus offers for our consideration is perhaps mitigated somewhat by the fact that the passengers on the plane will likely die in any event. The question is whether they will be killed by crashing into a skyscraper at the hands of the terrorists or by crashing into the earth at the hands of an Air Force pilot. It is a choice fraught with anguish, certainly, but if there is reason to believe that the hijackers will murder even more people, and the only way to stop them is to shoot down the airliner, then it seems that shooting it down is the morally right thing to do. Even so, the morally right thing, in a case like this, seems almost heinous.

A more vexing question, though, is whether it is ever right to deliberately target innocent civilians in a time of war. It is vexing because the occasion for it arises with much greater frequency than does the occasion for shooting down hijacked airliners and the temptation to do it must be very strong on at least some of those occasions. Although targeting civilians violates just war theory, it has been done by virtually every nation ever to fight a war in modern times, including the United States.

The moral dubiousness of the Hiroshima bombing, to take but one example, does not derive from our use of a nuclear weapon, but rather from the fact that we deliberately targeted the civilian population for death. More people died from our use of conventional ordinance in the incendiary raid on Tokyo than died from our use of a fission bomb at Hiroshima, but both raids targeted civilians, and that's what makes them morally problematic. Had we dropped the bomb on the Japanese fleet out at sea or on massed troops on Iwo Jima, there would have been little reason to question the decision (In hindsight, of course, we can see that using the weapon crossed a threshold that might have been better left uncrossed), but if there was adequate justification for the wholesale incineration of civilians in Tokyo, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, I for one don't know what it was.

There may be situations in war in which intentionally killing non-combatants may be for some reason necessary (although I can't think offhand what such circumstances would be), but we should never allow ourselves to return to the WWII mind-set which permitted us to kill innocent children and women with so little distress in our own souls. President Truman is said to have stated that he never gave the use of the bomb a second thought once the decision to use it was made. If that is so, it's a very difficult thing to understand, and very troubling.

Christians have written much about just war theory, but, as Fr. Neuhaus suggests, perhaps there is a need for them to write much more.