On June 15, 1917, Captain Siegfried Sassoon of the Royal Welch Fusiliers drafted a statement declaring his opposition to Britain’s continued prosecution of World War I. Sassoon began as follows:
I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this War, upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered upon this War should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible for them to be changed without our knowledge, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be obtainable by negotiation.1
This declaration led directly to Sassoon’s referral for treatment at Scotland’s Craiglockhart War Hospital. It later supplied the climax for his 1930 Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. Though condemned by one recent biographer as “quite startlingly naïve,” Sassoon’s statement raises questions that remain relevant today for students of the ethics of war and peace. It also offers a starting point for thinking about how norms—specifically, moral norms—can help constrain large-scale crimes.2
This chapter examines the action-guiding role of moral norms in the practical deliberations of soldiers, humanitarian aid workers, and other individuals active on the front lines of war, civil upheavals, or other intergroup conflicts. Such individuals stand in the vanguard of what James Waller has called “midstream prevention strategies”: “real-time relief efforts … to slow, limit, or stop the continuation or escalation of genocidal violence.”3 Although societies on the brink of genocide or other kinds of large-scale crimes are, as we have seen, frequently beset by the erosion or evasion of previously accepted moral norms, I believe norms of this kind also provide crucial support to individuals seeking to impede mass atrocities. Moral norms, I contend, count among the most important “moral resources” available to individuals actively working toward atrocity prevention.4
Assessing the preventive power of moral norms requires that we consult the same sorts of documentary and testimonial sources that ground explanations of large-scale crimes. Contemporary statements, whether publicly aired like Sassoon’s or privately recorded in letters, reports, or diaries, offer clues to the kinds of moral deliberations that occur during war and humanitarian emergencies.5 At the same time, such sources point up disagreements surrounding specific moral norms currently accepted by soldiers, aid workers, and other agents directly exposed to mass violence. Accordingly, this chapter also examines debates among philosophers and other scholars about the moral norms that ought to govern the decisions and actions of these agents. Studying these debates clarifies the ways in which moral norms come to be accepted by individuals and groups. It also further illuminates the distinguishing features of moral norms.
The central argument of this chapter is that moral norms against deliberation are of particular importance for individuals on the front lines of large-scale crimes. Norms against deliberation block specific paths of practical reasoning. They occur most commonly in groups that face recurring practical dilemmas; their justification depends on higher-order normative considerations. Moral norms against deliberation seek to secure morally valuable goods by constraining agents’ deliberations in specific ways—saying, in effect, that certain courses of action are not fit even to be considered.
To date, little empirical work has been done on the power of moral norms to prevent mass atrocities. One book-length study of this issue, Alex Bellamy’s Massacres and Morality, identifies a clear, if fragile, trend toward universal acceptance of a moral norm prescribing civilian immunity in war.6 His account differs from mine insofar as he focuses on the ability of moral norms to guide the actions of high-ranking military leaders and politicians, whereas I am concerned with the power of moral norms to guide the actions of front-line agents before and during mass atrocities. Despite this difference, I share Bellamy’s view that “there is simply no room for complacency” when it comes to understanding how moral norms can constrain large-scale crimes.7
The chapter proceeds as follows. In section 3.1, I provide a preliminary analysis of moral norms against deliberation. In section 3.2, I demonstrate the significance of such norms for soldiers fighting wars in accordance with the moral tenets set out in traditional and revisionist versions of just war theory. I also explain why the killing of large numbers of healthy soldiers during war, when carried out by permissible means, should not count as a case of mass atrocity. Section 3.3 turns to consider another set of actors on the front lines of atrocity prevention, namely, humanitarian aid workers. Here, the traditional humanitarian principles of impartiality and neutrality furnish further examples of moral norms against deliberation. Section 3.4 critically examines Jonathan Glover’s claim that broad educational campaigns about past mass atrocities can empower ordinary citizens to help prevent large-scale crimes.
In their 2013 book Explaining Norms, philosophers Geoffrey Brennan, Lina Eriksson, Robert Goodin, and Nicholas Southwood single out a special set of “norms concerning how we are supposed to think about—deliberate about, judge, value—certain kinds of things.”8 Although the authors do not offer a full analysis of such norms, they do discuss one telling example. Starting from standard moral prohibitions on killing, they note that most societies not only have moral norms prohibiting the act of killing itself, but “also norms about how one is supposed to think about killing people: one should not think about it; not at all.”9 Brennan et al. suggest that we should interpret this type of norm as removing certain courses of action from the agenda of agents engaged in practical deliberation. Although they remain neutral on the question of whether this norm complements, or is somehow entailed by, the basic moral prohibition on killing, I believe we see here a clear example of what I am calling a moral norm against deliberation.10
Moral norms against deliberation hold that agents are morally required to disregard certain considerations, or to avoid contemplating certain courses of action, when dealing with specific practical problems.11 In some cases, these norms work in tandem with other legal, moral, or social norms requiring that agents explicitly examine certain facts before taking action. In other cases, they exercise an independent influence within the practical point of view. Like all other moral norms, moral norms against deliberation are distinguished from legal and social norms by their independence from real or perceived social practices, combined with the absence of standing procedural rules governing their emergence, modification, or elimination.12
It is easy to multiply examples of moral norms against deliberation—examples much more likely to affect the everyday lives of agents than the prohibition on thinking about killing already discussed.13 It remains to ask under what conditions agents are justified in following such norms, despite the countervailing considerations that may arise in any given scenario. Why should norms against deliberation not be open to criticism, or subject to revision, during the very deliberations they help guide?14 This question is especially pressing if one thinks that the moral norms that individuals accept and follow must always in principle be open to rational reflection if they are not to transform into mere taboos.15
One answer to this question comes from considering the temporal character of practical deliberation. Within the practical point of view, agents are centrally concerned with discovering, assessing, and embracing specific courses of action.16 These courses of action are typically time limited. Failing to decide on and undertake some particular action in a reasonable amount of time is often just as consequential, from the practical point of view, as choosing to act would have been.17 For this reason, agents generally accept that their practical deliberations cannot be drawn out indefinitely, as full-scale theoretical reflections on moral principles might require.
The time-limited nature of practical deliberation goes some way toward justifying agents’ reliance on norms against deliberation when comparing various courses of action. Two other factors offer more substantial support for this distinctive form of norm guidance. The first concerns the position of agents who face recurring moral problems. The second concerns agents who are subject to extraordinary pressures during practical reasoning.
Within a wide range of institutions, from hospitals to prisons, colleges to accounting firms, agents confront certain recurring moral problems. These include problems of how to administer care to patients who lack knowledge of relevant medical facts, problems of how to reconcile obligations to shareholders with duties to employees, and problems of how to determine whether students’ work was produced honestly. Where such problems predictably recur, norms against deliberation can serve the valuable purpose of rendering responses to those moral problems consistent across the many members of such institutions or across various phases of individual agents’ careers.
Related to the role of moral norms against deliberation in resolving recurring moral problems is the role of such norms in insulating agents against extraordinary adverse pressures on practical deliberations. These pressures may arise from considerations of self-interest, group or organizational biases, or situational factors. Moral norms against deliberation insulate agents against such pressures by committing them to prescind from specific considerations or to rule out certain courses of action. The value of such norms is especially evident when we consider the lack of standing procedural rules governing changes in moral norms, which tends to amplify the pressure agents face to adjust their existing moral commitments and attitudes when confronting difficult practical dilemmas.
The several benefits of moral norms against deliberation that I have identified provide only conditional justifications for withholding those norms from scrutiny. Some individual commitments lack meaningful connections to moral ideals or values. Some organizations achieve consistency only by making wrongdoing standard policy. Given these dangers, moral norms against deliberation cannot ultimately be immune to criticism. The point is that in order to play their distinctive action-guiding roles, these norms must be held fixed during specific instances of practical deliberation, coming in for reevaluation only afterward. As we shall see, one context in which norms against deliberation are particularly valuable is the sphere of war, with its attendant risk of mass atrocity.
In his 2015 essay, “Military Means of Preventing Mass Atrocities,” retired US Army Colonel Dwight Raymond distinguishes two paths by which soldiers and their commanders can contribute to the prevention of large-scale crimes. One path consists of “deliberate actions” aimed at atrocity prevention, such as safeguarding vulnerable populations, gathering vital intelligence, and forcibly deterring perpetrators. The other path is summed up by the slogan “Do no harm.” It requires soldiers and their commanders to abide by specific legal and moral prescriptions and prohibitions in order to protect innocent parties and prevent unnecessary suffering.18
While Raymond centers his discussion on the positive actions soldiers can perform, my concern in this chapter is with the “do no harm” side of his distinction. Here, I argue, we find clear evidence of the ways in which moral norms against deliberation can contribute to atrocity prevention. At the same time, we encounter substantive philosophical debates about the justifiability of widely accepted moral norms.
Two different kinds of moral questions regularly encountered by soldiers structure my analysis: questions about the morality of going to war in the first place, which often reduce to questions about the justice of one’s own party in a potential conflict, and questions about the morality of actions taken in war, especially actions intended to spare civilians. Following a long tradition of philosophical thinking about just and unjust wars, I shall refer to these as ad bellum and in bello questions and divide my discussion accordingly.19
Siegfried Sassoon’s 1917 statement notwithstanding, ordinary soldiers and junior officers are not generally required by the laws of armed conflict to form independent judgments about the justice of the causes for which they fight. Many philosophers hold that these agents are not morally required to undertake searching investigations of this issue either. The reasons offered for this conclusion differ. Some philosophers stress the youth and limited education of most ordinary soldiers.20 Others emphasize the general epistemic challenges that war creates, citing the prevalence of propaganda, restrictions on access to classified information, and other aspects of the “fog of war.”21 Finally, some philosophers observe that even the best informed, most experienced statesmen frequently fail to reach agreement on the justice or injustice of particular conflicts, and they infer from this that low-ranking officers and common soldiers cannot be expected to succeed where these epistemically privileged agents fail.22
The authors I have cited typically speak in terms of a lack of obligation to investigate the ad bellum justice of wars. I think it is more precise to refer to a permissive moral norm against deliberation. A mere assertion of nonobligation carries no implications about the practical commitments or normative attitudes of the agents in question. A permissive norm against deliberation suggests, by contrast, that ordinary soldiers generally do believe that they are morally permitted to follow the judgments of their superiors on such matters, except in cases of manifest injustice.23 Furthermore, while soldiers who accept such a permission may believe that they are in no way prohibited from undertaking more extensive investigations, they can at the same time believe it would be wrong for other parties—say, war protesters, or opposition leaders—to criticize them for not making independent inquiries.24 Indeed, soldiers may plausibly regard it as part of their professional duty to accept, in all but the most extreme cases, the ad bellum decisions made by their civilian or military leaders and to focus their deliberations on issues more in keeping with their distinctive professional identity.
It is not my aim to explain how the permissive norm against deliberation that I have described came to be part of what Michael Walzer calls the “war convention”: “the set of articulated norms, customs, professional codes, legal precepts, religious and philosophical principles, and reciprocal arrangements that shape our judgments of military conduct.”25 A full history of the emergence of this moral norm would have to comprehend the classical and medieval antecedents of current moral theories of war, the transition from professional to democratic armies that began around the time of the French Revolution, and the substantial increases in soldiers’ literacy and educational attainments achieved in the modern period. My point is that this permissive moral norm against deliberation emerged well before the experience of twentieth-century mass atrocities and that in reaction to this experience, substantial philosophical challenges have been raised against this permissive norm. Those challenges are worth considering for two reasons. First, they help us understand how moral norms against deliberation are assessed at the level of theoretical, rather than practical, reasoning. Second, they illustrate my basic claim that moral norms are not subject to standing procedural rules governing their emergence, modification, or elimination.
In his 2009 book, Killing in War, philosopher Jeff McMahan offers a vigorous critique of the standard permissive view of soldiers’ ad bellum moral responsibilities. “That most people appear to have few scruples about setting off unquestioningly at the behest of their government to kill members of other nations,” McMahan begins, “is a phenomenon that has been studied by psychologists and historians” but rarely by philosophers.26 The aim of philosophical inquiry, on his view, is to replace unreflective and unjustified moral beliefs held by individuals with justified beliefs. Ultimately this process might result in “institutional accommodation to people’s changed moral beliefs.”27 Recasting these claims slightly, McMahan contends that philosophical inquiry can eventually prompt changes in the moral norms that individuals and groups accept and follow. The urgency of such inquiry is heightened by the historical connection between unreflective participation in war and mass atrocities.
McMahan rejects the traditional view that soldiers are morally permitted to defer to the judgment of their commanders about the justice of the cause for which they fight. He rejects, in other words, the permissive moral norm against deliberation. Instead, McMahan contends that ordinary soldiers are not morally permitted, but at best morally excused, for deferring to their leaders’ judgments that a particular war is just. To be clear, he does not condemn deference to leadership in all cases. He suggests that soldiers are rightly prohibited from following their own judgment and making war in cases where their leaders deem such a war unjust. Acknowledging that this account of the moral norms that ought to govern soldiers’ ad bellum moral reflections is asymmetric, McMahan suggests that this asymmetry does not affect soldiers’ first-order practical deliberations, but rather the ways in which they resolve conflicts between their own moral judgments and those of their superiors.28 Ultimately, McMahan argues, soldiers do not have the right to decide unilaterally to resort to war, but they do have the right, and indeed the duty, to decide for themselves whether the wars their leaders have launched are just.29
What practical effects, what “institutional accommodation,” might we expect to occur if McMahan’s revisionist account of soldiers’ ad bellum moral obligations ultimately succeeds in replacing the permissive moral norm against deliberation? One result, according to philosophers Michael Robillard and Bradley Strawser, is that the bar for states to launch just wars would rise considerably. They write:
If revisionist just war theory is correct, the moral demands on individual soldiers are radically higher than the traditional view takes them to be, for those demands include ad bellum responsibility. As these demands are ratcheted up, the likelihood of just behavior occurring in the real world goes down. … But this difficulty does not make those moral duties any less true. Even on a strong commitment to an “ought implies can” principle, just war theory reminds us that refraining from war in the first place if it cannot be waged justly is something that can (and should) be done. It is no objection to just war theory (revisionist or traditional) to argue that its high demands make fighting war justly very difficult.30
Let us assume that this interpretation of the institutional consequences of rejecting current permissive norms against deliberation is correct. What then are the implications for mass atrocity prevention? Quite possibly the increased difficulty of waging just wars would lead, practically, to an increased reluctance to wage war at all.31 Then one way of answering the question is to return to Dwight Raymond’s distinction and ask whether the active use of military force, or the passive avoidance of unjustifiably using force, is more effective as a means of preventing large-scale crimes.
McMahan explicitly frames his revisionist account of soldiers’ ad bellum deliberative duties as a contribution to mass atrocity prevention. He remarks, “We as individuals are protected from becoming Nazis by ideas, and by the cultural and political institutions they inspire.”32 Nevertheless, the bulk of McMahan’s discussion focuses not on the role of moral theory in preventing mass atrocities, at least as traditionally conceived, but rather on transforming traditional views about the morality of killing soldiers in war.33 Furthermore, certain elements of McMahan’s analysis cut against common scholarly understandings of mass atrocity, as when he argues that civilians who are not themselves armed, but contribute causally to unjust war efforts (for example, by developing new weapons or technologies) are liable to attack in war.34 Indeed, based on the argument of Killing in War, it is hard to see why episodes of large-scale killing of “innocent” soldiers who are not hors de combat should not themselves be considered cases of mass atrocities.35 These features of McMahan’s account make it difficult to draw conclusions about the power of the particular moral norms he defends to constrain mass atrocities.
At this point, I want to turn from considering soldiers’ ad bellum moral deliberations to discuss their in bello decisions and actions. Doing so promises to bring us closer to discovering connections between norms against deliberation and the project of atrocity prevention. It also sheds further light on the concept of mass atrocity itself.
Soldiers’ deliberations about the justice of their nation’s cause for going to war are vulnerable to propaganda, patriotic fervor, and official secrecy concerning relevant facts. Traditional just war theorists, as we have seen, respond to these adverse conditions by endorsing a permissive moral norm against deliberation; revisionist just war theorists repudiate that norm. But how do the conditions of practical deliberation change for soldiers who are already engaged in war and must make morally consequential decisions about targeting and risk taking while exposed to potentially lethal violence?
I start by citing one specific testimonial account. The philosopher J. Glenn Gray, a veteran of World War II, provides the following description of a soldier’s experience “in an exposed position on the battlefield during action”:
All the time, he acts as he feels he must, swept by moods of exultation, despair, loyalty, hate, and many others. Much of the time he is out of himself, acting simply as a representative of the others, as part of a super-personal entity, on orders from elsewhere. He kills or fails to kill, fights courageously or runs away in the service of this unit and unity. Afterwards, he hears no voice calling him to account for his actions, or, if he does hear a voice, feels no need to respond.36
This description might seem to tell against the account of practical deliberation that I have relied on so far in this study. The picture Gray presents is not one of individual agents carefully considering the reasons, moral or otherwise, that count for or against certain actions. Instead, it parallels what social psychologists call a state of deindividuation, involving “decreased focus on personal identity, loss of contact with general social norms, and the submergence of the individual in situation-specific group norms.”37 In fact, however, Gray’s description underscores the significance of norms against deliberation in war, for norms of this kind, as I have argued, are most valuable in circumstances where situational factors place extraordinary pressure on practical reasoning. We should, then, consider which particular moral norms against deliberation are most salient in these circumstances and how they affect efforts at atrocity prevention.
Current international law contains clear prohibitions on many actions soldiers and their commanders might consider strategically valuable.38 Despite this broad coverage of legal norms concerning in bello deliberations, many important moral questions remain unaddressed. These include questions about the degree to which soldiers must actively take greater risks on themselves in order to reduce the risk of collateral harm to noncombatants during war, as well as questions about whether healthy soldiers in the field can ever be so vulnerable as to make their killing morally impermissible.39 Far from being mere armchair quandaries, these are real problems that soldiers and junior officers face in war, which moral norms against deliberation promise to resolve.
In his 2016 book, Sparing Civilians, philosopher Seth Lazar provides a novel defense of a widely accepted moral principle that he believes rightly informs soldiers’ responses to such practical quandaries.40 He argues further that this principle underlies existing international legal norms that afford protection to noncombatants in war.41 Lazar defines this principle as follows:
moral distinction: In war, with rare exceptions, killing non-combatants is worse than killing combatants.42
Lazar’s main aim in providing new defenses for the principle of moral distinction is to safeguard its acceptance among people who believe that many combatants who fight in wars are not themselves liable to be killed. Put differently, Lazar hopes to vindicate the intuition that “killing innocent civilians is worse than killing innocent soldiers.”43 It is for this reason that his arguments are relevant to our study of mass atrocity, for if it is possible to identify features that make the killing of innocent civilians morally worse than the killing of innocent combatants, then it may be possible to show that those same features justify excluding most cases of large-scale killing of combatants from the analytical category of mass atrocity. This is just the issue that our study of McMahan’s revisionist account of soldiers’ ad bellum moral obligations raised but did not resolve.
Of the five arguments Lazar advances for the principle of moral distinction, some are more relevant to the project of mass atrocity prevention than others. One argument Lazar considers holds that killing noncombatants is morally riskier than killing combatants due to the greater likelihood that any given noncombatant is innocent than any given combatant. This argument seems unlikely to tell us much about mass atrocities, since the wrongfulness of such large-scale, systematic acts of violence does not seem to be a function of mere recklessness or inattention to the moral risks involved.44
Another argument Lazar offers for moral distinction is more promising. This is the argument that noncombatants are generally both more vulnerable and more defenseless than combatants and that harming vulnerable and defenseless persons is morally worse than harming persons capable of defending themselves.45 Lazar defines vulnerability in terms of the harm that an agent is likely to suffer from a given threat.46 He defines defenselessness as the inability of an agent to reduce, for herself, her vulnerability to that threat.47 With respect to the threats that arise in war, Lazar argues, noncombatants will generally be both more defenseless and more vulnerable than combatants. But attacking innocent parties who are comparatively more vulnerable and more defenseless is morally worse than attacking innocent parties who are less vulnerable and less defenseless. Hence, killing innocent noncombatants is morally worse than killing innocent (but armed) combatants.48
I think the distinctive wrongs involved in killing persons who are both substantially vulnerable and substantially defenseless give us good reason to exclude the large-scale killing of soldiers who are not hors de combat from the concept of mass killing within studies of mass atrocity. This exclusion does not entail that no wrong is done to soldiers in the field who are killed unnecessarily or are killed despite their nonliability. Those soldiers may be wronged, but the wrong is not of the distinctive kind involved in mass atrocities, to which the testimonial accounts cited elsewhere in this study attest.49 This argument preserves the standard scholarly inclusion of “combatants removed from fighting” within the set of persons who may become targets of mass atrocity.50 At the same time, it allows that soldiers who are not hors de combat may be the victims of other kinds of legally and morally prohibited attacks, such as killing or maiming via weapons that are legally forbidden due to the extraordinary suffering they cause.51 What it rules out is the idea that the deaths of large numbers of soldiers in battle, who are killed by permissible means, should count as a case of mass atrocity.52
Some readers may doubt the moral or conceptual significance of the greater vulnerability and defenselessness of noncombatants. But there is, I think, another reason to ground a distinction between combatants’ and noncombatant’s susceptibility to mass atrocity on these qualities. Planners of genocide, mass killing, and other mass atrocities themselves tacitly admit the moral significance of these features of noncombatants when they use propaganda, euphemism, and dehumanization to try to make targeted groups seem formidable rather than vulnerable, dangerous rather than defenseless. Where these techniques of norm evasion are in play, in bello moral norms against deliberation, of the kind Lazar seeks to shore up, may provide soldiers with a last defense against pressures to participate in large-scale crimes.
Empirically minded scholars of mass atrocity prevention may be surprised by my focus in this section on ad bellum and in bello moral norms against deliberation. Compared to legal or social norms, moral norms seem to resist integration into comprehensive prevention strategies.53 But I believe a full survey of strategies for constraining large-scale crimes must consider the norms that can, and at times do, deter agents on the front lines of armed conflict from using their specialized training in violence to engage in mass killing, forced removal, or other large-scale crimes. Parallel considerations give us reason to attend to the moral norms accepted by another set of actors regularly present on the front lines of atrocities, namely, humanitarian aid workers.
Humanitarian aid workers, acting in a voluntary capacity or employed full time by nongovernmental organizations, spend significant periods in war zones and sites of civil upheaval. Like soldiers, these aid workers face recurring moral challenges and have adopted a variety of norms for dealing with them. In this section, I analyze two traditional moral principles governing actors in “humanitarian space” and explain how those principles are realized in specific moral norms against deliberation. My goal is to show that these norms aim at constraining large-scale crimes while making clear that, here too, significant debates exist concerning their capacity to do so.
In an anthology published on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières), sociologist Marc Le Pape identifies a recurring moral dilemma faced by members of this pioneering humanitarian aid group. This is the choice between “provid[ing] medical assistance” to vulnerable populations, on the one hand, and “issu[ing] public criticism” of the conduct of domestic or occupying authorities, on the other.54 A “tension between medical action and speaking out,” Le Pape contends, “is, in fact, inherent to the organization’s work and may always provoke contradictory judgments that are, to a greater or lesser degree, inflexible.”55 Rather than trying to resolve this tension by arguing for the greater value of one or the other form of action, Le Pape concludes that Doctors Without Borders, like other humanitarian groups, “must reach a compromise” between these competing goals.56
The moral significance Le Pape attaches to the act of speaking out against political authorities’ involvement in humanitarian catastrophes cuts against a core principle in an older tradition of humanitarian thinking: the principle of neutrality. Articulated as early as Article 1 of the First Geneva Convention of 1864 and expanded to include more than doctors, nurses, stretcher bearers, and other medical personnel during the rapid growth of humanitarian activity that took place over the twentieth century, the principle of humanitarian neutrality has been endorsed by many front-line actors during historical large-scale crimes.57 By studying this principle and the debates surrounding it, we can gain insights into the processes by which particular moral norms against deliberation are justified and by which they may subsequently be transformed.
In his 2015 book, Humanitarian Ethics, written “to help humanitarian workers apply their ethics more consciously and effectively on the ground,” political theorist Hugo Slim characterizes neutrality as a “political principle” of humanitarian action, one that traditionally encompasses both military and ideological forbearance.58 Neutrality, as Slim points out, is not usually seen as a virtue in everyday moral life. Instead, humanitarian neutrality paints a role-specific picture of the focus of practical deliberations for actors trying to relieve suffering during war or mass atrocities.59
So far, Slim’s description of the traditional humanitarian principle of neutrality accords with philosophical accounts of professional codes more generally. Mike Davis, as we saw in chapter 2, defines professional codes as “morally permissible standards of conduct governing members of a group simply because they are members of that group.”60 What Davis’s definition does not capture, and what much of Slim’s analysis addresses, is the persistence of disagreements among members of particular professions concerning both the basic acceptability of received moral principles and the realization of those principles in specific action-guiding norms. Slim documents disagreements among contemporary humanitarians concerning both of these aspects of neutrality. Here I focus on disagreements about some specific moral norms against deliberation meant to help humanitarian actors maintain their neutrality.
Norms prescribing military neutrality on the part of humanitarian actors are less controversial than norms prescribing ideological neutrality.61 It is not up for debate, among most humanitarian actors, whether they should share military intelligence derived from behind-the-lines relief work with the opposing side in a conflict. Nor are bona-fide humanitarians inclined to defend colleagues who supply weapons to belligerents. By contrast, many humanitarian actors and organizations do contest prevailing moral norms that prescribe ideological, or expressive, neutrality. Most significant, traditional norms of ideological neutrality bar humanitarian actors from stating publicly which side(s) they consider blameworthy for ongoing conflicts.62
In a study like Slim’s, which focuses on the hard choices humanitarian actors are likely to face in the field, it is natural to find that most of the discussion concerns methods for deepening deliberation rather than norms against deliberation. Nevertheless, Slim’s remarks on the widespread humanitarian commitment to military neutrality help fill out my picture of moral norms against deliberation. These norms differ in content from the norms accepted and followed by soldiers and junior officers, but structurally they are quite similar. Adapting the language Geoffrey Brennan and his coauthors employ to sum up this sort of moral prohibition, we may say that the principle of humanitarian neutrality is reflected not just in norms against giving weapons to fighters on any side of a conflict but also in “norms about how one is supposed to think about [supplying weapons]: one should not think about it; not at all.”63
In contrast to the moral prohibitions rooted in the principle of military neutrality, considerable debate surrounds the principle of ideological neutrality and its attendant norms. The impetus to rethink restrictions on the views humanitarian actors can publicly express stems from various sources, including the growing size and resources of humanitarian organizations; the retreat of traditional state actors from providing many of the relief services required in contexts of war or natural disasters; and the controversy surrounding responses of nongovernmental organizations to particular humanitarian crises, such as the Haitian earthquake of 2010 or the Rwandan genocide of 1994.64 This last example is especially important for my purposes, since it indicates doubts about the connection between humanitarian neutrality and the prevention, or mitigation, of large-scale crimes. While humanitarian actors have long claimed a right to denounce such crimes whenever they occur during war, the debate about neutrality is directed chiefly at the question of whether remaining neutral as to the ad bellum justice of states’ participation in war fails effectively to constrain mass atrocities. Hugo Slim seems to believe that ideological neutrality is an acceptable price to pay for gaining (or retaining) the “access and trust” required for humanitarian relief in circumstances of mass atrocity.65 But the very existence of competing opinions on this issue reveals that there is no strongly established norm against deliberation to speak of here, but at most a very weak one.66 Humanitarian actors may still largely refrain from speaking out about the ad bellum justice of particular sides in inter- or intrastate conflicts, but speaking out is increasingly something they think about, write about, and otherwise express doubts about. Those doubts center, as I have suggested, on the preventive efficacy of this policy.
The different degrees of acceptance evident in norms surrounding military and ideological neutrality among humanitarian aid workers point up one of the distinguishing features of moral norms: the absence of standing procedural rules governing their emergence, modification, or elimination. As Slim notes, much of humanitarian ethics falls in the category of “soft law,” consisting of policies drawn up voluntarily by humanitarian organizations over the past several decades and increasingly embodied in the governing principles of the largest humanitarian nongovernmental organizations.67 Particular aid agencies may choose to reject specific norms, thereby incurring sanctions that may include exclusion from certain coalitions or denial of funding but not the more stringent penalties associated with hard law. Even these quasi-legal sanctions do not extend to norms against deliberation, however. Instead, as I have suggested, such norms have the structure of moral norms, developed in conjunction with certain deep moral principles, but subject to revision or rejection when those principles come under suspicion. As with the ad bellum deliberative responsibilities of soldiers already discussed, moral arguments may ultimately succeed in transforming the moral norms against deliberation accepted and followed by humanitarian actors. If that happens, we should expect institutional changes to follow.
Despite its verbal similarity, humanitarian impartiality differs from humanitarian neutrality in important ways. Impartiality does not prohibit humanitarian actors from ranking beneficiaries according to their respective merits or expressing the results of such comparisons. Rather, it bans the use of unfair or arbitrary criteria for making such judgments. In the actual practice of humanitarians, we can observe a further difference: whereas neutrality usually affects how humanitarian agents conduct themselves toward states or other large-scale actors, impartiality applies more commonly to decisions about how to treat individual recipients of aid or protection.
Political scientist Janice Gross Stein claims that the principle of impartiality helps aid workers operate more efficiently in contexts of war and mass atrocity. Traditionally, she observes, “impartiality was not only principled, it was functional: on the ground, it helped facilitate access to all sides in a conflict zone, and it avoided explicit discussion of difficult political choices.”68 This final phrase suggests how the principle of impartiality is expressed in the form of norms against deliberation, where the difficult choices involved may concern which wounded or diseased patients to treat first in field hospitals, which refugee populations to prioritize with deliveries of food or water, or where economic assistance for rebuilding in the wake of war or forced removal should focus. To reiterate, impartiality does not require humanitarians to disregard any comparative factors that could inform such choices, only those deemed unfair or arbitrary. So the race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion of aid recipients count among the qualities that are supposed to be excluded from humanitarian deliberations, but relative need, likelihood of success, and comparative accessibility are factors that can and should be taken into consideration.69
The principle of humanitarian impartiality bears on mass atrocity prevention in several ways. In the first place, it helps aid workers resist the invidious categorizations that often dominate government actors’ preferred divisions of scant resources before, during, and after large-scale crimes.70 This is valuable both in cases where humanitarian actors operate at the discretion of existing states and in cases where humanitarian agencies become the only effective governing agencies after total state collapse.71
At a second level, the principle of humanitarian impartiality, and the related norms that prohibit dividing aid according to political convenience, may help inhibit mass atrocities by calling attention to patterns of violence that state actors and foreign allies would prefer to ignore. It is here that the analysis of state leaders’ moral commitments provided by Alex Bellamy and my own analysis of moral commitments and attitudes held by front-line actors intersect. Whereas Bellamy’s account highlights the interest state leaders have in preserving “sufficient legitimacy” even in the face of persecutory policies, norms against deliberation furnish humanitarian actors with a standing defense against the ethnic, racial, or religious biases of their political sponsors.72 It is this defense that Janice Gross Stein has in mind when she writes of the “functional” value of impartiality for humanitarian actors. By cultivating norms against deliberation, humanitarians can tell state actors who would prefer their silence or complicity that their rules forbid even considering such courses of action. This does not remove humanitarian actors from the pressures of politics—far from it—but it does provide a distinct form of leverage in the fraught political debates that accompany mass atrocities.73
As political theorist Jennifer Rubenstein has observed, humanitarian actors face an array of ethical predicaments, recurring across contexts and conflicts, that cannot all be settled simply by applying traditional humanitarian principles.74 In some cases, as when aid organizations take on the responsibilities of local or national governments, this is because the guidance offered by norms rooted in those traditional principles proves contradictory.75 In other cases, as when relief workers must decide whether to release emotionally charged images in order to raise badly needed relief funds, this is because those traditional principles are largely silent.76
I agree with Rubenstein that there are substantial areas where traditional humanitarian principles do not supply clear norms capable of guiding humanitarian actors’ practical deliberations. In this section, I have explored how two of the longest-standing humanitarian principles provide important moral resources for front-line actors seeking to prevent or mitigate mass atrocities. Those resources take the form of moral norms against deliberation.
The moral norms I have considered in the course of this chapter circulate within highly specialized populations. Those populations—common soldiers, junior officers, and humanitarian aid workers—were selected because of their firsthand experience dealing with recurrent moral dilemmas in contexts of real or threatened mass atrocities. My analysis of the various moral norms against deliberation accepted and followed by members of these groups was enhanced by attention to debates among philosophers and other theorists concerning the justifiability of those norms and their ability to help constrain large-scale crimes.
Some readers might suppose that our investigation should go further and consider the preventive potential of moral norms circulating within political societies at large. Over the past few decades, a number of philosophers have argued that this is precisely the level at which we should focus when cultivating defenses against mass atrocities. By sharing “sympathetic stories” and publicizing the deeds of “moral exemplars,” these authors hope to induce changes in the moral norms accepted and followed by ordinary citizens around the globe, which will assist those citizens in resisting large-scale crimes whenever and wherever they occur.77
One of the more careful efforts to identify such macrolevel opportunities for atrocity prevention appears in philosopher Jonathan Glover’s book Humanity.78 Glover starts from the premise that in the absence of transcendent moral laws, it is necessary to show that human moral psychology can sustain absolute prohibitions on mass killing, mass rape, and other mass atrocities. Reviewing a range of twentieth-century cases of moral dilemmas encountered by individual agents in such contexts, Glover discerns two distinct “moral responses” to these dilemmas. First, there are attitudinal responses such as sympathy, shame, and respect occasioned by encounters with the suffering of others.79 Second, there is the effort to sustain a coherent self-image, or identity, in the midst of real or threatened atrocities.80
How do these moral responses inform specific strategies for preventing mass atrocities? Glover sketches two preventive pathways and claims that both can help constrain large-scale crimes. The first pathway is fairly clear-cut: Glover believes that sharing stories of historical mass atrocities with broad audiences can increase democratic support for international efforts to prevent future large-scale crimes.81 The types of international efforts he has in mind include humanitarian interventions, international administration, and monitoring by peacekeeping forces in contexts where atrocities are likely. In general, this proposal coincides with the active component of Dwight Raymond’s “military means of preventing atrocities.”82
The second preventive pathway Glover outlines is less straightforward. In several places, he suggests that by spreading “awareness of collective disasters,” historians, philosophers, and other educators can help ordinary individuals avoid participation, or complicity, in large-scale crimes.83 Beyond this general description, it is difficult to say exactly what Glover has in view, though the historical case studies at the heart of his text draw attention to many different individual actors whose responses (or nonresponsiveness) to prevailing attitudes and policy have changed the trajectory of particular mass atrocities. In many cases, it should be noted, these individuals occupied the kinds of specialized social roles I have highlighted rather than being mere private citizens.84
While I admire Glover’s historical discussions and support his call for popular moral education concerning large-scale crimes, I am skeptical about the specific preventive pathways he defends. It is not that Glover fails to offer robust empirical evidence for his preventive claims; like my own study, he is concerned chiefly with identifying possible preventive pathways, which may later be taken up for empirical confirmation. My concern is, rather, that the particular pathways he sketches are unpromising on their own terms. Three central objections stand out. They concern (1) the fragility of individual and group moral identities, (2) the uneven distribution of mass atrocities, and (3) the inherent riskiness of military intervention.
Glover’s call for cultivating more robust moral identities among ordinary citizens seems to me unlikely to increase most individuals’ ability to resist participation in, or publicly oppose, large-scale crimes. At the end of his book, Glover acknowledges the malleability of moral identities, citing cases of apparent dynamic moral norm inversion among German National Socialists, Soviet party members, and other groups in order to make the point that agents’ “self-images” can and sometimes do become detached from the “human responses” of sympathy and respect, and thus prove “useless or worse” for preventing mass atrocities.85 But the fragility of moral identities, and of the practical commitments and normative attitudes that compose them, runs deeper than this. As I argued in the previous chapter, inversions of moral norms help to explain some, but by no means all, mass atrocities. The techniques for norm evasion and norm erosion that I analyzed may in many cases leave individuals’ moral identities largely intact—for example, by suggesting that victims of large-scale crimes are less than human or by concealing the real import of perpetrator’s actions. Beyond these explicit cases of manipulation of citizens’ moral responses, government agencies and other institutions frequently use censorship, geographic remoteness, and other forms of concealment to prevent most citizens from knowing that mass atrocities are underway. In these cases, individuals may sense that something unusual is happening without knowing exactly what or even how to find out definitively.
This points to one way in which soldiers and humanitarian aid workers differ from the ordinary citizens whom Glover wants to enlist in the cause of atrocity prevention. Such front-line agents generally possess more direct knowledge of real or threatened acts of persecution than the public at large. The ability to know what actions to take in response to the persecution of others does not only depend on correct weighing of relevant moral norms; it also requires sufficient acquaintance with the facts on the ground.86 It is one thing to ask whether ordinary citizens have a moral responsibility to pursue such information in light of their political leaders’ decisions about war. It is another to ask whether atrocity prevention efforts can succeed absent such knowledge.
My second concern about Glover’s proposal to advance mass atrocity prevention is related to the first.87 It hinges once again on a distinction between the experiences of soldiers and humanitarian aid workers, on the one hand, and ordinary citizens, on the other. This objection starts from the fact that mass atrocities are unevenly distributed: for individuals living in some countries, these events are troublingly common, whereas for individuals living in more stable nations, they are exceptionally rare. Even indirect exposure to those contexts of war or civil conflict where large-scale crimes most frequently occur is unusual for many people today, especially in nations that lack compulsory military service.
I have argued throughout this chapter that the moral norms against deliberation accepted by soldiers and humanitarian aid workers gain their practical relevance from their power to resolve recurring moral problems. For individuals working in these specialized professions, the objection from the uneven distribution of atrocities does not apply. But it seems to me a defect of the preventive pathway proposed by Glover that the moral capacities he hopes to cultivate will only rarely, if ever, be confronted by the challenge of real or threatened large-scale crimes. Support for this claim comes from the fact that the kinds of stories Glover tells are most commonly used in the United States and other developed countries today to address more quotidian moral challenges that children and adults may face, including bullying, police brutality, corporate malfeasance, and whistle-blowing. If the general goal of telling compelling stories about large-scale crimes is to help individuals resist wrongdoing, then these common moral problems are more likely to show results than the extraordinary circumstances of mass atrocity.
Glover might respond that, however rare large-scale crimes are in any given nation, they are not rare in the world at large. Indeed, this points to the importance of his first, and more straightforward, preventive pathway, according to which popular education about past large-scale crimes will make ordinary citizens more likely to support their governments in undertaking military and diplomatic action to prevent future mass atrocities. This is precisely the sort of decision that citizens of stable democracies are likely to face repeatedly in the course of their lives. The problem, from the perspective of mass atrocity prevention, is that it does not seem right to counsel ordinary citizens to withhold skepticism concerning their governments’ claims about the motives for military action, or the necessity of armed intervention to prevent large-scale crimes. In part, this is because humanitarian wars have yet to establish a successful record of atrocity prevention. In part, this is because the risks of unsuccessful military action are so severe; indeed, humanitarian interventions sometimes occasion or accelerate mass atrocities despite their directors’ honest efforts to prevent them. Finally, it seems to me that if it is doubtful whether soldiers should accept a permissive moral norm against deliberating about the justice of their nation’s cause for going to war, then it is even less plausible to say that ordinary citizens should refrain from serious reflection on this point. For the same reason that I am skeptical about Glover’s proposal, I worry about discursive strategies that seek to use the human responses of sympathy produced by shocking descriptions or images to quell skeptical doubts about humanitarian intervention.88 Moral norms circulating among specialized agents, such as soldiers and humanitarian aid workers, are in my view far more plausibly linked to atrocity prevention than efforts to engage the moral sensibilities of mass publics for the purpose of constraining large-scale crimes. This is why philosophical debates about the justification of such norms, and empirical investigations of their efficacy, deserve our ongoing attention.
1. Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (New York: Penguin, 2013), 229.
2. Max Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon: A Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 145.
3. James Waller, Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), xxx.
4. For the notion of “moral resources,” see Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999). See also section 3.4.
5. Sassoon did not initially publish his statement himself, but instead arranged for it to be read out in the House of Commons by Liberal MP Hastings Lees-Smith. See Egremont, Sassoon, 163.
6. Alex Bellamy, Massacres and Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 8–9.
7. Bellamy, Massacres and Morality, 14.
8. Geoffrey Brennan, Robert Goodin, Nicholas Southwood, and Lina Eriksson, Explaining Norms (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 248.
9. Brennan et al., Explaining Norms, 251.
10. Note, too, that there is no corresponding legal norm against thinking about killing, as there is in the case of the moral norm against the act of killing.
11. Joseph Raz has argued that all “mandatory norms” have the structure of exclusionary reasons—those that agents have to set aside, rather than assess the strength of, particular practical considerations. To take one of Raz’s examples, soldiers who accept a norm of obedience to their superior officers thereby acquire a reason to exclude considerations of personal well-being, the strategic value of maneuvers, and perhaps even the legality of proposed actions from their decisions. Although I doubt this succeeds as a general analysis of norms—and although I tend to think that norms should be understood as sources of reasons rather than as reasons themselves—I do think some norms exhibit the exclusionary quality Raz identifies, and these are among the norms that I am calling norms against deliberation. See Joseph Raz, Practical Reason and Norms (London: Hutchinson, 1975).
12. There may be another way of distinguishing moral norms against deliberation from legal norms, for it is unclear whether there can be binding legal prohibitions on deliberation. Of course, many legal norms, including those most relevant for our thinking about war and peace, require that individual and group actors actually take certain factors into account, with civil or criminal liability attaching if they fail to. But it is less clear whether legal prohibitions on merely deliberating about certain courses of action are tenable. The notion raises worries about criminalizing (or otherwise penalizing) thoughts. As far as I can tell, no similar worries confront the proposal that it may be immoral to deliberate about certain actions—even if, as I have suggested, such thoughts must be allowed at a theoretical or critical level.
13. Not all moral norms directly concerned with deliberation are prohibitive. Some seek to ensure the quality of deliberations by prescribing that they proceed in a particular way, or follow a certain model. Other moral norms are permissive, such as norms of academic freedom that allow researchers to pursue whatever lines of inquiry seem relevant for their research.
14. Note that this is a normative, not a descriptive, question. It seems to be an empirical fact that some individuals or groups are committed to observing particular moral deliberative norms, even to the point of holding them above criticism. What we want is an account of how such a position can be justified and where it is justified. Jerry Gaus takes up a similar question in his discussion of rule following in The Order of Public Reason. See Gerald Gaus, The Order of Public Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
15. Indeed, in chapter 1, I suggested that such openness to rational reflection is the key factor that distinguishes norms generally, and moral norms specifically, from taboos.
16. Raz, Practical Reason.
17. This is not to say that acts and failures to act are morally equivalent, but that their practical effects may be comparable.
18. Dwight Raymond, “Military Means of Preventing Mass Atrocities,” in Reconstructing Atrocity Prevention, ed. Sheri Rosenberg and Tibi Galis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 297. For a discussion of the same issue framed specifically around the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P), see Sarah Sewall, “Military Options for Preventing Atrocity Crimes,” in The Responsibility to Prevent: Overcoming the Challenges of Atrocity Prevention, ed. Serena Sharma and Jennifer Welsh (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 160–188.
19. Given the focus of this study, it is important to point out that mass atrocities can occur before, during, or after wars; that particular wars (including so-called humanitarian conflicts) may begin precisely because of reported atrocities; and that particular atrocities (such as forced removals) may occur as a consequence of recently concluded wars. Hence my discussion of the deliberations that soldiers take in war, and before entering war, can be instructive about the relationship between war and mass atrocity prevention but cannot be complete.
20. David Luban, “Knowing When Not to Fight,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of War, ed. Seth Lazar and Helen Frowe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 185–203.
21. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 5th ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 127, 344.
22. Seth Lazar, “The Responsibility Dilemma for Killing in War: A Review Essay,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 38, no. 2 (2010): 194. This is not to deny that military and civilian leaders face distinctive epistemic challenges of their own when deliberating about going to war.
23. On the exception for cases of manifest injustice, see Luban, “Knowing When Not to Fight,” 195–197.
24. This analysis accords with Neil Roughley’s characterization of permissive norms as establishing “prohibitions on others to apply pressure on someone not to do or omit something.” See Neil Roughley, “Might We Be Essentially Normative Animals?” in The Normative Animal? On the Anthropological Significance of Social, Moral, and Linguistic Norms, ed. Neil Roughley and Kurt Bayertz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 11n6.
25. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 44.
26. Jeff McMahan, Killing in War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 7.
27. McMahan, Killing in War.
28. McMahan, Killing in War, 92–95.
29. McMahan suggests such norms should be grounded in “principles that govern the distribution of rights of decision-making—in this case the right to make decisions about the resort to war.” McMahan, Killing in War, 94.
30. Michael Robillard and Bradley Strawser, “The Moral Exploitation of Soldiers,” Public Affairs Quarterly 30, no. 2 (2016): 186.
31. This assumption is justified if it is true, as Alex Bellamy has argued, that political leaders who make decisions about war are concerned to be perceived as having acted legitimately, whatever their actual interests or incentives for conflict. Cf. Bellamy, Massacres and Morality.
32. McMahan, Killing in War, 3. Other recent contributions to the ethics of war also contemplate revising existing norms concerning liability to attack. See Cécile Fabre, “Guns, Food, and Liability to Attack,” Ethics 120 (2009): 36–63; Helen Frowe, Defensive Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 164–187.
33. Elsewhere, McMahan frames his revision of ad bellum deliberative norms in terms of “preventing unjust wars,” a goal related to, but not identical with, atrocity prevention. See, for example, Jeff McMahan, “Can Soldiers Be Expected to Know Whether Their War Is Just?” in Routledge Handbook of Ethics and War, ed. Fritz Althoff, Nicholas Evans, and Adam Henschke (New York: Routledge, 2013), 21.
34. McMahan, “Can Soldiers Be Expected,” 215.
35. It should be clear that episodes of large-scale killing of soldiers who are in fact hors de combat are rightly counted as mass atrocities. The 1940 Katyn massacre, in which roughly 20,000 captured Polish military officers were executed on Joseph Stalin’s orders, provides one infamous twentieth-century example. As I will point out, it is also possible for attacks on healthy soldiers in the field to count as atrocities if the means used to kill them is morally impermissible. But we should note that this distinction between morally permissible and impermissible means of killing does not exist in cases of large-scale killing of noncombatants.
36. J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 1998), 177. For a provocative critique of Gray’s account from the perspective of a soldier more directly exposed to front-line combat, see Paul Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 13–37.
37. Waller, Becoming Evil, 216.
38. For discussion of these legal prohibitions, see chapter 5 of this study.
39. For the philosophical debate over risk taking, see David Luban, “Risk Taking and Force Protection,” in Reading Walzer, ed. Yitzhak Benbaji and Naomi Sussmann (New York: Routledge, 2014), 277–301. For the morality of killing vulnerable soldiers, see Larry May, “Killing Naked Soldiers: Distinguishing between Combatants and Noncombatants,” Ethics and International Affairs 19, no. 3 (2005): 39–53. I should note that I am not referring here to soldiers whose vulnerability stems from the fact that they have been rendered hors de combat. In this case, well-established moral and legal norms prohibit their killing.
40. Seth Lazar, Sparing Civilians (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). For a critique of Lazar’s account of this principle, see Victor Tadros, “The Moral Distinction between Combatants and Noncombatants: Vulnerable and Defenceless,” Law and Philosophy 37, no. 3 (June 2018): 289–312.
41. Lazar, Sparing Civilians, 7.
42. Sparing Civilians, 2. Like Lazar, I italicize this term in the discussion that follows in order to show that I am referring to his specific conception of this principle.
43. Sparing Civilians, 19.
44. Sparing Civilians, 74–100.
45. Sparing Civilians, 101–122.
46. Sparing Civilians, 102–104.
47. Sparing Civilians, 105.
48. Sparing Civilians, 113–116.
49. Because my application of Lazar’s distinction focuses specifically on its value for explaining the distinctive moral wrong done to targets of mass atrocities, it avoids some of the paradoxes raised by Victor Tadros concerning the comparative liability of combatants versus noncombatant perpetrators of genocide and other large-scale crimes. See Tadros, “Moral Distinction,” 295–296.
50. Scott Straus, “What Is Being Prevented? Genocide, Mass Atrocity, and Conceptual Ambiguity in the Anti-Atrocity Movement,” in Reconstructing Atrocity Prevention, ed. Rosenberg and Galis, 26–27.
51. This kind of large-scale crime does not generally receive as much attention from scholars like Straus who seek to identify key conceptual features of mass atrocities. I agree with Straus that it falls outside the “core conceptualization” of mass atrocity, but it remains worth noting.
52. This conclusion assumes that the combatant/noncombatant distinction can be maintained in practice, without soldiers and commanders resorting to morally dubious proxies such as the sex and age of targeted individuals. For a critique of the existing principle of noncombatant immunity in war that suggests that this distinction cannot be maintained, see Charli Carpenter, “Innocent Women and Children”: Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians (New York: Routledge, 2006).
53. For an example of attempts at empirically measuring the preventive power of legal norms and the criminal sanctions that stand behind them, see Hyeran Jo and Beth Simmons, “Can the International Criminal Court Deter Atrocities?” International Organization 70 (2016): 443–475. I engage more closely with empirical approaches to atrocity prevention in chapters 5 and 7.
54. Marc Le Pape, “Epilogue,” in Humanitarian Negotiations Revisited, ed. Claire Magone, Michael Neuman, and Fabrice Weissman (London: Hurst, 2011), 244–245.
55. Le Pape, “Epilogue,” 249.
56. Le Pape, “Epilogue.”
57. Notably, MSF traces its very foundation to the rejection of this principle during the Nigerian Civil War (also known as the Biafran War) of the late 1960s. See Joel Pruce, The Mass Appeal of Human Rights (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2018), 85.
58. Hugo Slim, Humanitarian Ethics: A Guide to the Morality of Aid in War and Disaster (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 19, 66–69.
59. Slim, Humanitarian Ethics, 67.
60. Michael Davis “What Can We Learn by Looking for the First Code of Professional Ethics?” Theoretical Medicine 24 (2003): 438.
61. Slim, Humanitarian Ethics, 70.
62. Slim, Humanitarian Ethics, 69.
63. Brennan et al, Explaining Norms, 251.
64. Janice Gross Stein, “Humanitarian Organizations: Accountable—Why, to Whom, for What, and How?” in Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, Ethics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 128; Larissa Fast, Aid in Danger: The Perils and Promise of Humanitarianism, ed. Thomas G. Weiss and Michael Barnett (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 158–159; Jennifer Rubenstein, Between Samaritans and States: The Political Ethics of Humanitarian INGOs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
65. Slim, Humanitarian Ethics, 70. One aim of Slim’s book, it should be noted, is to distinguish the ideals and methods of humanitarian activism from those of human rights activism. As Slim notes, humanitarian activists who follow traditional norms “often feel bound to stay silent in the face of human rights violations and cooperate closely with evident human rights abusers, both of which count as cardinal sins in human rights orthodoxy.” Slim, Humanitarian Ethics, 17.
66. For more discussion, see the various contributors to Magone et al., Humanitarian Negotiations.
67. Slim, Humanitarian Ethics, 55–56.
68. Stein, “Humanitarian Negotiations,” 129.
69. Slim, Humanitarian Ethics, 56. Slim points to fundamental moral considerations as the basis for the traditional humanitarian principle of impartiality. It reflects, he suggests, a commitment to the universal (and equal) value of human life.
70. I will have more to say about these forms of categorization in my discussion of legal norms and the explanation of mass atrocity in chapter 4.
71. By “direct governance,” I mean what political scientist Jennifer Rubenstein calls “conventional governance,” for example, “being the sole or almost sole provider of basic goods and services … shaping the rules of coercive institutions, and making large-scale decisions about resources.” This contrasts with the forms of global governance I discuss in the next paragraph. See Rubenstein, Between Samaritans and States, 8.
72. Bellamy, Massacres and Morality.
73. The case humanitarian actors can make for such impartiality is bolstered, as Hugo Slim notes, by the fact that they can always claim it would violate the due process of victims who are themselves suspected of large-scale crimes to deny them aid before they have gone through legal judgment. Slim, Humanitarian Ethics, 60.
74. Rubenstein, Between Samaritans and States.
75. Rubenstein, Between Samaritans and States, 45.
76. Rubenstein, Between Samaritans and States. See also Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno, “‘A Horrific Photo of a Drowned Syrian Child’: Humanitarian Photography and NGO Media Strategy in Historical Perspective,” International Review of the Red Cross 97 (2015): 1121–1155.
77. Richard Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, Sentimentality,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 3: Truth and Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 167–185; Lawrence Blum, Moral Perception and Particularity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 65–97.
78. Glover, Humanity.
79. Glover, Humanity, 23–25. Not all of the attitudinal or emotional responses triggered by such encounters are constructive. Whereas Glover suggests that the disgust often reported by perpetrators at the sight of helpless victims’ suffering may count as a final defense against atrocities, Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic has argued that such disgust often serves instead to distance perpetrators from victims, and so ease violent acts. See Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic, “Perpetrator Disgust: A Morally Destructive Emotion,” in Emotions and Mass Atrocity: Philosophical and Theoretical Explorations, ed. Thomas Brudholm and Johannes Lang (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 145–148.
80. Glover, Humanity, 26–30.
81. Glover, Humanity, 42.
82. Raymond, “Military Means.”
83. Glover, Humanity, 42.
84. So, for example, Glover describes in some detail the actions of helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson in ending the killing of civilians at My Lai, an episode of indiscriminate killing that would become the most infamous case of American military atrocity in the Vietnam War. Glover attributes Thompson’s actions to his memories of instruction concerning earlier twentieth-century mass atrocities—instruction that he no doubt shared with other members of his generation. But it was the fact that Thompson was positioned on the front lines of war that made it possible for him to respond to this moral education in a way that actually worked to mitigate atrocity. Glover, Humanity, 62–63.
85. Glover, Humanity, 404.
86. For the distinction between moral and epistemic ignorance, which tracks the distinction I am making, see Gideon Rosen, “Skepticism about Moral Responsibility,” Philosophical Perspectives 18 (2004): 295–313; Elizabeth Harman, “Does Moral Ignorance Exculpate?” Ratio 24, no. 4 (2011): 443–468.
87. Glover, Humanity, 42.
88. See Paul Morrow, “A Theory of Atrocity Propaganda,” Humanity 9, no. 1 (2018): 55.