{"id":7775,"date":"2014-08-12T12:29:29","date_gmt":"2014-08-12T12:29:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/08\/12\/israel-hamas-and-the-doctrine-of-double-effect\/"},"modified":"2014-08-12T12:29:29","modified_gmt":"2014-08-12T12:29:29","slug":"israel-hamas-and-the-doctrine-of-double-effect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/08\/12\/israel-hamas-and-the-doctrine-of-double-effect\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel, Hamas, and the Doctrine of Double Effect"},"content":{"rendered":"

A reader asks whether Israel's actions against Hamas are defensible according to the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE).<\/span><\/p>\n

According to the New Catholic Encylopedia<\/a>, an action is defensible according to DDE if all four of the following conditions are met:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

(1) The act itself must be morally good or at least indifferent.<\/span><\/p>\n

(2) The agent may not positively will the bad effect but may merely permit it. If he could attain the good effect without the bad effect, he should do so. The bad effect is sometimes said to be indirectly voluntary.<\/span><\/p>\n

(3) The good effect must flow from the action at least as immediately (in the order of causality, though not necessarily in the order of time) as the bad effect. In other words, the good effect must be produced directly by the action, not by the bad effect. Otherwise the agent would be using a bad means to a good end, which is never allowed.<\/span><\/p>\n

(4) The good effect must be sufficiently desirable to compensate for the allowing of the bad effect.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

My example.  An obviously hostile knife-wielding intruder breaks into my house.  I grab a gun and shoot him, killing him.  My intention is not to kill him but to stop his deadly attack against me and my family. The only effective means at my disposal for stopping the assailant is by shooting him.   But I know that if I shoot him, there is a good chance that I will kill him. <\/span><\/p>\n

There are two effects, a good one and a bad one.  The good one is that I stop a deadly attack.  The bad one is that I kill a man.  My shooting is justified by DDE.  Or so say I.  As for condition (1), the act of defending myself and my family is morally good.  As for (2), I do not positively will the bad effect, but I do permit it.  My  intention is not to kill a man, but to stop him from killing me.  As for (3), the good effect and the bad effect are achieved simultaneously with both effects being directly caused by my shooting.  So I am not employing an evil means to a good effect.  As for (4), I think it is obvious that the goodness of my living compensates for the evil of the miscreant's dying.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the case of the Israeli actions, the removal of rocket launchers and other weaponry trained upon Israeli citizens is a morally good effect.  So condition (1) is satisfied. Condition (2) is also satisfied.  The IDF do not target civilians, but military personnel and their weapons.  Civilians deaths are to be expected since Hamas uses noncombatants as human shields. Civilian deaths cannot be avoided for the same reason.<\/span><\/p>\n

Condition (3) is also satisfied.  The good effect (the defense of the Israeli populace) is not achieved by means of the bad effect (the killing of civilians).  Both are direct effects of the destruction of the Hamas weaponry.<\/span><\/p>\n

But what about condition (4)?  Is the good effect sufficiently desirable to compensate for the allowing of the bad effect?  The good effect is the protection of the Israeli populace.  But the cost is high in human lives given that Hamas employs human shields.<\/span><\/p>\n

Are numbers relevant?  Suppose that 1000 Gazan noncombatants are killed as 'collateral damage' for every 100 Israeli noncombatants.  Is the 'disproportionality' morally relevant?  I don't think so.  For one thing, note that Hamas intends to kill Israeli noncombatants while the IDF does not intend to kill Gazan noncombatants.  There is no moral equivalence between the terrorist entity, Hamas, and the state of Israel. <\/span><\/p>\n

It would be the same if were talking about fighters as opposed to noncombatants.  If 1000 Hamas terrorists are killed for every 100 IDF members, the numbers are morally<\/em> irrelevant.  They merely  reflect the military superiority of the Israelis. No one thinks that in the WWII struggle of the Allies against the Axis, the Allies should have stopped fighting when the total number of Axis dead equalled the total number of Allied dead.<\/span><\/p>\n

My tentative judgment, then, is that condition (4) of DDE is satisfied along with the others.
<\/span><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Israel might have won; Hamas certainly lost<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A reader asks whether Israel's actions against Hamas are defensible according to the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE). According to the New Catholic Encylopedia, an action is defensible according to DDE if all four of the following conditions are met: (1) The act itself must be morally good or at least indifferent. (2) The agent … Continue reading “Israel, Hamas, and the Doctrine of Double Effect”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,119,375,116],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-islamism","category-terrorism","category-war-and-peace"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7775\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}