Born to Live, Killed for Nothing: Moral, Strategic & Legal Reasons for Outlawing Collateral Damage

Join the Ved Nanda Center and Professor Jeutner for his lecture on Born to live, killed for nothing: Moral, Strategic & Legal Reasons for Outlawing Collateral Damage. 

At times of war, international law permits states to kill innocent civilians if the killing of those civilians is an incidental outcome of states pursuing a military objective and if the number of civilians killed is not excessive in relation to the advantage states gain by achieving that military objective. Civilians thus killed are colloquially referred to as ‘collateral damage’. 

His talk presents a draft manuscript of a book to be published by Cambridge University Press which argues that there are no good reasons for permitting such collateral damage and, consequently, that collateral damage, i.e. the intentional (albeit incidental) killing of innocent civilians, ought to be outlawed. The talk begins by defining collateral damage and by presenting the mainstream justifications for international law’s current regulation of it (especially the doctrine of double effect). The second part of the presentation argues that the mainstream justifications in favour of permitting collateral damage are unconvincing and that the killing of innocent civilians is both immoral and, in almost all cases, counter-productive from a strategic point of view. The talk’s third and final part outlines how the proposal to outlaw collateral damage could be iplemented and which obstacles, in theoretical and practical terms, such a proposal would face. 

Valentin Jeutner is Associate Professor of International Law at Lund University, Sweden and Retained Lecturer in Law at Pembroke College, Oxford