Child Soldiers in the Age of Fractured States

Chapter 2. An Ethical Perspective on Child Soldiers

27 Moral philosophy obviously has nothing to say about the urgent practical problem of preventing unscrupulous recruiters from forcing children to fight their unjust wars for them. That is a question of political and legal policy on which philosophers have no special competence to pronounce. But the problemofchildsoldiersdoeshaveanormativedimensionandraisesquestions thatphilosophersarespecially qualified to address. Do conditionsof ignorance and duress in which child soldiers normally act ever make their action morally permissible, even if the war in which they are fighting is unjust and even if they commit war crimes? Even if their initial action in fighting is wrong, is it permissible for them to kill in individual self-defense when they are threatened? Or is their action somehow exempt from moral evaluation altogether? Might it be that even though they act wrongly, they are fully exculpated by their nature as children, in conjunction with the conditions in which they act? Can they be seen as morally responsible agents at all? Can they deserve punishment or blame? Perhaps most important, how do the answers to these questions bear on how morally conscientious adult combatants should fight against them? Is there a moral requirement to exercise restraint in fighting them? Should adult combatants, for example, accept greater risks to themselves in order to minimize the harm they inflict on child soldiers? ChAPter 2 AN ETHICAL PERSPECTIVE ON CHILD SOLDIERS Jeffmcmahan 28 Jeff mcmAhAn TheorthodoxTheoryoftheJustwar To address these questions, it would be helpful to have some guidance from moral theory. Many of the resources needed are available, but they cannot be found in the theory of the just war in its currently orthodox form. According to this theory, the jus in bello requirement of discrimination holds that while it is impermissible for combatants intentionally to attack noncombatants, all enemy combatants are legitimate targets, irrespective of whether they have a just cause for fighting and irrespective of whether they can be held morally responsible for their action. For the currently orthodox theory of the just war follows the international law of war in treating combatant status as the ground of liability to attack, though it offers a different and supposedly deeper rationale for distinguishing between combatants and noncombatants. In international law, the rationale is primarily pragmatic. Given the inevitability of war, it is necessary to have a neutral rule that grants all combatants the right to attack certain targets and assures them that if they confine their attacks to those targets, they will not be held criminally liable for the harm they cause and will be treated well if they are captured. Both in granting combatants the right to attack other combatants and denying them permission to attack noncombatants , international law aims to limit and contain the destruction of war, insulating ordinary domestic life from the effects of war to the greatest degree possible. Just war theory, by contrast, grounds the significance of the distinction between combatants and noncombatants in a certain conception of the right of self-defense. In this view, when a person poses a threat to another, he thereby makes himself liable to defensive attack. It is therefore because combatants pose a threat to others that they are legitimate targets of attack; and it is because noncombatants threaten no one that they are not legitimate targets. This view is reflected in the language of just war theory, which endorses the venerable principle that it is wrong intentionally to kill the innocent, but interprets innocence in accordance with the etymology of the term. In Latin, the innocent are those who are not nocentes—that is, they are not those who are injurious or threatening.1 Because child soldiers pose a threat in exactly the same way that adult combatants do, they have combatant status and are therefore legitimate targets of attack according to contemporary just war theory. Whether they are morally responsible for the threat they pose is irrelevant, as is the fact that they are children . It is permissible to fight against them in exactly the same way one would fight against adult combatants. I think the orthodox theory is right on three points: The principal justification for killing in war appeals to the idea that the target of attack is liable An eThicAl PerSPecTive on child SoldierS 29 to attack. Liability is individual rather than collective. And—a closely related point—liability derives from individual action and not merely from membership in a group. Yet I think the orthodox theory...