The articles in this special section examine the multifaceted and complex ways experiences of war inform, challenge, and illuminate the ethics of war. For example, in “Just War Theory Today: Experience Required?,” Cian O’Driscoll argues that just war theory has lost touch with combatants’ experiences, whose testimony and written reflections provide crucial insights into the nature and conduct of war.Footnote 1 Yet, while soldiers’ experiences are undoubtably important to the ethical understanding of war, such approaches may de-prioritize the experiences of the most vulnerable in armed conflict—noncombatant civilians.Footnote 2 In this article, I argue for the inclusion and prioritization of civilian perspectives—including research on civilian experiences as well as first-person testimonies—in academic, policy, and legal analyses of war. Doing so, as I explore in the final sections of this article, radically disrupts traditional just war thinking and has important implications for broader social, legal, and policy approaches to armed conflict and its aftermath.
In the first section, I show that the prioritization of belligerent perspectives at the expense of civilian protection and welfare has a long history in just war theory and practice, from (at least) the works of early Christian just war theoristsFootnote 3 to the legal and scholarly defenses of colonial conquest. This brief historical survey reveals, first, that norms of civilian protection and norms of restraint in relation to enemy combatants were mutable according to belligerents’ interests and perspectives and, second, that against certain groups (both civilian and combatant), conceptions of warrior virtue enabled the violation of constraints within war by framing such violations as a tragic necessity or even a civilizational duty.
Section two demonstrates how much of the contemporary moral injury discourse within military ethics and military psychology echoes this history by almost exclusively focusing on combatants’ experiences and wellbeing. This discourse frames combatants’ experiences of moral emotions such as guilt and remorse in relation to their wartime service as a form of injury warranting treatment and care, while sidelining the moral, physical, and emotional harms suffered by noncombatant civilians.
Section three explores the devastating consequences of the prioritization of belligerent interests on civilian lives and welfare using the case study of drone warfare and the war in Gaza. Research on, and testimony about, the impact of these conflicts on civilians illustrates the multi-dimensional, long-term, and severe physical, psychological, and moral harms caused by these conflicts, including PTSD, displacement, loss of home, and destruction of community. The direct causal relationship between these conflicts and these harms reveals the pressing importance of incorporating civilian experiences into ethical analyses of war and into discourse on the moral injuries that war inflicts.
Finally, section four explores the implications of incorporating civilian perspectives for just war theory and the ethical analysis of war through the example of in bello collateral damage assessments. I argue that the collateral harm calculations used by military actors, which typically only include deaths and injuries, inflict an egregious injustice on civilian victims of war by excluding foreseeable and predictable forms of severe harm. Incorporating civilian perspectives would therefore radically alter both ad bellum and in bello proportionality calculations to such an extent that contingent pacifism may be the only theoretically defensible position on the possibility of a just war in today’s world.
Just War Theory, Honorable Soldiers, and Protecting and Killing Civilians
The development of just war theory has been largely driven by the interests and perspectives of belligerents.Footnote 4 The long and complex history of the just war tradition has its roots in religious and humanitarian traditions that recognized the need to address the prima facie wrongness of inflicting death and injury on others. So, many early just war thinkers placed heavy emphasis on the moral status of combatants’ characterFootnote 5 while, as I explain below, according only contingent immunity to civilians. Today, this emphasis on combatants’ character continues in both the moral injury discourse (as I explain in the next section) and in much military ethics scholarship and educational materials, which focus predominantly on virtue ethics as a model for cultivating moral character.Footnote 6 As David Luban explains:
Warriors’ honor was and remains the central concept of military ethics as militaries understand it. The dignity of the warrior may be the prototypical conception of human dignity in warfare. Warriors had agency; civilians would be treated mercifully as a matter of policy or compassion, but that would be the warrior’s prerogative, a matter of warrior’s virtue and not of the dignity and rights of civilians.Footnote 7
In this section, I trace the concern for combatants’ moral character from early Christian just war theory and chivalric codes through the era of colonization. This brief historical survey demonstrates the vulnerability of norms of civilian protection and restraint in war not only to belligerents’ economic, political, and social interests but also to warped conceptions of moral decency that could, paradoxically, legitimize atrocities.
Early Just War Theory and the Era of Chivalry
The early Christian just war theorists were concerned with reconciling the killing and maiming required by warfighting with good Christian moral character. Augustine, for example, rejected pacifism by arguing that fighting in a just war was compatible with Christianity if it was done with right intention and in the service of the good.Footnote 8 Yet, as Helen Kinsella explains, Augustine’s concern for soldiers’ moral character did not extend to a concern for civilians. Rather, as she puts it, he was focused more on “the innocence of the soldier than . . . the innocence of the one who may be killed.”Footnote 9 Thomas Aquinas similarly focused on soldiers’ innocence, expanding and developing Augustine’s conception of right intention and developing the doctrine of double effect—a doctrine that, today, is frequently used to absolve combatants of guilt for foreseen but unintended (proportionate) harm caused to noncombatants in pursuit of a legitimate military goal.Footnote 10 Thus, as Kinsella explains, while Augustine and Aquinas recognized the need for “moderation in victory . . . agreeing that women, children, and trees should not be wantonly destroyed,” this was not because of a belief in the intrinsic immunity of women and children from attack but rather “because of the potential they possess for use—sex, reproduction, labor, and sustenance.”Footnote 11 As Kinsella points out, “The caveats of immunity found in the international law of antiquity were premised not on a universal right of personhood but on distinctions of sex, age, and use.”Footnote 12 The mutable nature of norms of civilian protection continued during the age of chivalry.
During the Middle Ages, chivalric codes regulated forms of warfare, weapons, and the treatment of prisoners, but only in relation to conflicts involving other members of the nobility and only in relation to conflicts between Christian nations.Footnote 13 For example, Kinsella describes how, in the Peace of God and the Truce of God movements during the tenth and twelfth centuries, the Catholic Church aimed to limit the “endemic warfare of the Middle Ages” by “setting aside certain goods, people [including clergy, peasants, and merchants], and sites as specifically protected and defended against feuds and plunder.”Footnote 14 Yet this was motivated primarily by the Church’s desire to protect its property: the “Church inveighed against the horrors of war . . . but it was the economics of landowning that really mitigated the horrors of war,” as historian John France explains.Footnote 15 Similarly, conceptions of knightly duties of protection were tied to the social, economic, religious, and moral status of those to be protected, such as noblewomen and the elderly. The act of extending protection was then construed as a manifestation of knightly virtue, rather than a moral duty owed to those who possessed a right not to be harmed.Footnote 16 Kinsella makes a similar point: “knightly prowess, courage, and honor are fundamentally self-referential, having less to do with the actual value of those defended.”Footnote 17 So, while knights had duties toward each other and duties of protection toward some civilians, codes of chivalry did not mandate duties toward common soldiers or to all civilians. And, against non-Christian opponents, chivalric codes imposed no constraints at all. For example, Thomas Wingfield explains how guerre mortelle (war to the death)
was applied almost exclusively by medieval forces against opponents sufficiently alien to deserve no human compassion. There was no distinction between combatants and noncombatants . . . Most often, it was waged by Christian armies against infidels, most commonly during the Crusades.Footnote 18
Thus, ideals of knightly honor may have restrained knights’ behavior toward certain classes of noncombatants (and toward fellow knights) yet simultaneously licensed the mass slaughter of non-Christian combatants and noncombatants.
The exclusion of non-Christians from the moral constraints on warfare that chivalry demanded is a telling example of a repeating pattern in the interdependent relationship between just war theory and military practice. Not only do norms of civilian protection (concerning who is protected and why) reflect belligerents’ political and economic interests and background social, political, and economic hierarchies of status, but the rules of war are also malleable in relation to combatants who are members of groups deemed uncivilized and inherently dangerous. The debates about the treatment of indigenous peoples during the era of colonization illustrate this point.
Colonization and Justifying Atrocity
The extreme brutality of colonial conquests in the “New World” and the flagrant violations of the “civilized” rules of warfare that characterized these conflicts challenged colonizing nations’ belief in their supposed moral and civilizational superiority. Hence, following the Spanish discovery of the New World, the Spanish Crown sponsored a series of debates (known as the “Affair of the Indies”) in which renowned scholars discussed “the relationship between war and justice in an effort to provide guidelines for Spain’s political relationship with the ‘barbarians of the New World, commonly called Indians’.”Footnote 19 At first glance, these debates might seem evidence of a genuine openness on the part of the Spanish crown to critiques of colonization. After all, some participants, notably Bartolomé de las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria, condemned the “evil lives . . . monstrosities . . . savagery . . . and pride” of the Spanish conquistadors,Footnote 20 and defended (to a point) indigenous peoples’ rights to sovereignty.Footnote 21
But this assumption would be a mistake. By including “both sides” of the question of the legitimacy of colonial conquest, these debates treated defenses of colonization and conquest as valid positions held by reputable scholars. Thus, even though some participants defended (limited forms of) indigenous rights, these debates created a theoretical and imaginative space for “good” forms of colonialism, against the excesses of “bad” conquistadors.Footnote 22 In contrast, indigenous peoples were frequently framed as “barbarians”—whose “savage” customs were taken to legitimize permissive conceptions of jus ad bellum and jus in bello that recognized no real distinction between combatants and noncombatants. So, as with the guerre mortelle against non-Christians during the Middle Ages, these debates enabled a framework for reconciling the atrocities committed during colonial conquests with a belief in the moral and civilizational superiority of colonizing forces.
As European colonialism expanded from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, the project of reconciling egregious violations of the laws of war—including torture, slavery, and genocide—with a belief in the moral decency and superiority of colonizing forces continued. Typically, these violations were justified by reference to indigenous peoples’ supposed moral inferiority and savagery. For example, Daniel Brunstetter explains how, after the American Revolutionary War, wars of extermination against Native Americans were justified by the claim that Native Americans “did not abide by (European) rules of war but rather waged merciless warfare that ignored all civilized constraints. . . . And within the norms of European warfare, different standards were justified when dealing with such peoples.”Footnote 23 Colonel C. E. Callwell propagates a similar narrative in his 1896 book Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice, where he explains the British colonial way of war, stating that “[when fighting] savages. . . regular forces are compelled, whether they like it or not, to conform to the savage methods of battle.”Footnote 24 The description of atrocities as necessary tactics for dealing with “savages” frames colonizing forces as reluctant perpetrators forced to commit war crimes only because of the barbaric enemy they face.Footnote 25 Callwell’s description of native peoples as “savages” also reflects the view that, as Kim Wagner explains, indigenous peoples were “not considered political actors and could accordingly not be negotiated with; the only language ‘savages’ understood was violence.”Footnote 26 Achille Mbembe’s account of the image of the “native” in colonial moral, political, and legal frameworks reinforces this point. Unlike the “morally superior” colonizing forces, the “native” was characterized as indolent, governed by emotion, “a great child.”Footnote 27 As Kelly Oliver argues, “Colonization brings with it affective imperialism that divides the world into the civilized—those who have control over emotions—and the barbaric—those who don’t.”Footnote 28 The emotions of colonized peoples were disordered, evidence of their intrinsic inferiority, and even dangerous, whereas the emotions of colonizing forces, and their ability to control those emotions, were evidence of their moral superiority to the “natives.”Footnote 29 A similar dichotomy between the uncivilized “enemy” and the “superior” character of colonizing forces finds perfect expression in nineteenth century texts on colonial warfare written for Dutch colonial officers, which describe the “enemy” (native populations in the East Indies) as “uncivilized, cruel, sly, and deceitful,” who should be met with the Dutch soldiers’ “moral ascendancy.”Footnote 30
The widespread acceptance and repetition of these narratives of European moral and civilizational superiority across the centuries of colonialism meant that, despite a growing acceptance in Europe of a legal and normative framework for the rules of war,Footnote 31 the applicability of those rules reflected social, political, and normative hierarches of moral worth that excluded entire peoples from protection: the belief in the civilizational and “moral ascendancy” of colonizing forces was used to justify the conquest, enslavement, and genocide of indigenous peoples across the globe.
While the era of (direct) colonialism may be over, the history of the moral prioritization of belligerent interests and the assumptions about the moral superiority of Western military forces described above continue to shape contemporary work in military ethics and the ethics of war. This is particularly evident in the development and application of the idea of moral injury,Footnote 33 a concept that has led to a burgeoning body of scholarship in military ethics and military psychology since the 1990s.
The Moral Injury Debate and the Morally Sensitive Soldier
Most accounts of moral injury in the military ethics and military psychology literature define moral injury as combatants’ and veterans’ experiences of moral distress (such as guilt or shame) at perceived or actual transgressions they have committed or witnessed that violate their moral beliefs or ideals.Footnote 33 For example, Jonathan Shay (who coined the term) defines “moral injury” as “a soul wound inflicted by doing something that violates one’s own ethics, ideals, or attachments”;Footnote 34 Brett Litz and coauthors define moral injury as “perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations;Footnote 35 and Nancy Sherman defines moral injury as:
experiences of serious inner conflict arising from what one takes to be grievous moral transgressions that can overwhelm one’s sense of goodness and humanity. . . . In some cases, the moral injury has less to do with specific (real or apparent) transgressive acts than with a generalized sense of falling short of moral and normative standards befitting good persons and good soldiers.Footnote 36
While some of these definitions might seem more or less universalizable, these definitions are both derived from, and then almost exclusively applied to, combatants’ and veterans’ experiences. Additionally, while there are important differences between these definitions of moral injury, most accounts share several problematic assumptions, as Matthew Talbert and I explain in our 2023 book chapter “Moral Injury, Moral Suffering, and Moral Health.”Footnote 37 First, in most accounts it is “primarily moral emotions such as shame, betrayal, guilt, and remorse that are the content of the injury, and thus the goal of healing is to enable veterans to make sense of and mitigate these emotions.”Footnote 38 Yet, moral distress can be a sign of moral health, rather than moral injury.Footnote 39 Second, many accounts do not distinguish between feelings of guilt and shame in response to an actual transgression and feelings of guilt and shame in response to a perceived transgression, treating both as a form of moral injury warranting treatment, despite important differences in these cases (as I explain below). Finally, most accounts implicitly or explicitly assume that there is a universal and objective set of “moral and normative standards befitting good persons and good soldiers,” to quote Sherman, the violation of which causes moral distress. For example, Ned Dobos states that the experience of moral injury (as moral distress) is “evidence that an agent’s moral foundation is still solid and their moral compass is still responsive.”Footnote 40 The possibility that a combatant’s “moral compass” or their conception of a “good soldier” may be distorted by (for example) political and military ideology goes unrecognized in most accounts.Footnote 41 Yet, as section one demonstrates, conceptions of “good soldiers” and ethical warfighting have often reflected and reinforced background hierarchies of moral, political, and social worth that have enabled the commission of atrocities to be reconciled with warrior virtues. In such cases, a combatant’s feelings of guilt or shame (or the absence of those feelings) about their actions may be a very poor guide to an objective moral assessment of those actions.
The combination of these assumptions creates a problematic conception of moral injury that excludes civilians from moral sympathy and concern, including those civilians who are the victims of the transgressions committed by combatants, and implicitly echoes the assumption of Western forces’ moral and emotional superiority that has its origins in colonialism.
Moral Injury and the Exclusion of Noncombatants
Many accounts of moral injury in the military ethics and military psychology literature overlook the possibility that noncombatants could suffer moral injury.Footnote 42 As Rosemary Kellison argues, noncombatants are not recognized as “potentially morally injured subjects . . . where they do show up in these accounts, it is often as victims of the harmdoing that has caused moral injury to American servicemembers.”Footnote 43 There are two serious consequences of this one-sided approach to moral injury.
First, many traumatic experiences in wartime suffered by noncombatants are excluded from the dominant understanding of what moral injury is and how it should be addressed. For example, Roghieh Dehghan argues that combatant-focused models of moral injury fail to capture the moral trauma experienced by refugees from armed conflict connected to (for example) experiences of powerlessness, witnessing transgressions, and feelings of betrayal and injustice, and so cannot adequately address their needs related to healing from these harms. As she explains,
It is epistemically flawed to assume that conceptual models and psychometric scales that were developed to draw attention to the “humanity” of perpetrators of violence work equally well for the victims of violence . . . In fact, a perspective shift from perpetrator to victim testifies to different forms of suffering and draws attention to other moral emotions.Footnote 44
So, healing from moral injury in this context requires different concepts and approaches from those relevant to combatants and veterans: “‘humanity’ in the context of a commissioner of a moral transgression may be linked to notions such as self-forgiveness . . . whereas for the victim, it might encompass moral demands for justice.”Footnote 45
Second, civilians will sometimes be the victims of the transgressions committed by combatants who are then regarded (sympathetically) as morally injured and requiring care and treatment. Yet the military psychology literature on moral injury typically advises therapists to avoid making judgments about the morality of a combatant’s actions.Footnote 46 Thus, treatments for moral injury can reinforce combatants’ subjective assessments of their own behavior rather than addressing the possibility that guilt might be warranted in some cases. But, as Talbert and I argue:
Treating a veteran’s appropriate moral guilt as a form of injury or allowing a veteran to unilaterally determine the subjective meaning of their actions makes it less likely that they will see themselves as the subject of justifiable moral demands on the part of the person or persons they have harmed. And these demands may warrant a response, such as asking for forgiveness, making amends, or at the very least acknowledging the harm that was done. Treatments that result in minimizing moral guilt and prioritizing the veteran’s perspective on their wrongful act thereby inflict a form of claimant injustice on the victim or victims by undermining their legitimate standing to hold the veteran accountable.Footnote 47
Much of the moral injury literature and practice therefore favors combatants’ perspectives and emotional and moral wellbeing above that of noncombatants and effectively directs sympathy, attention, and resources away from noncombatant victims of war toward combatants, including combatants who may have committed war crimes.
This normative imbalance in the definition and treatment of moral injury is further entrenched by the dominant framing of moral injury as an individual-level internal experience that is largely independent of the social and political context of war. As Tine Molendijk notes, “Many studies on moral injury currently focus on how to diagnose and therapeutically treat the condition, leaving contextual factors largely unaddressed.”Footnote 48 Kenneth MacLeish makes a similar point: “[The moral injury discourse’s] concern for soldiers’ suffering frames the routinized, institutional production of war violence as a problem of internal psychic conflict.”Footnote 48 As a result, the relationship between combatants’ moral distress (or lack of moral distress) and the morality of war is left unexplored.
Yet, despite the apparent neutrality of the concept of moral injury with respect to the moral, social, and political dimensions of war, the dominant discourse on moral injury focuses primarily on the experiences and moral welfare of combatants from Western nations. This is particularly evident in the literature on the experiences of U.S. veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, where sympathetic discussions of these veterans’ moral distress implicitly echo political and colonialist narratives of a civilized and humane (white, Western) military force facing a brutal and savage (nonwhite) enemy. For example, MacLeish argues that, within the moral injury literature related to the war on terror, “soldiers are presented as morally vulnerable witnesses and victims, not only to the outright violence of enemy fighters, but to the latter’s perceived status as fanatic, mercenary, or indifferent in their brutality.”Footnote 50 The relative dearth of literature on the possibility of moral injury among Taliban, al-Qaeda, or ISIS fighters speaks to the implicit assumption that only some combatants (from only some nations) are deserving of the sympathetic narrative of moral injury.
The dominant moral injury discourse in military ethics and military psychology thereby continues the tradition within just war theory, described in section one, of prioritizing combatants’ perspectives and experiences. This discourse also implicitly frames (predominantly Western) combatants’ moral wellbeing through a colonialist lens in which morally sensitive Western “civilized” military forces confront “barbaric” nonwhite enemies. This longstanding pattern undermines the claims of just war theory (and the moral injury discourse) to offer an objective moral framework that can minimize the harms of war and protect the rights of the vulnerable. And it has contributed, indirectly and directly, to the infliction of devasting harms on civilians.
The Cost of the Moral Prioritization of Combatants
The impact of war on civilians is best understood through the words of civilians themselves, whose experiences testify to the devastating harms inflicted by armed conflict:
With the drone coming . . . we visit each other less, and in the night—if something happens to a family—we cannot go to visit them. It has taken away our comfort from us. . . . we cannot do proper empathy sharing our sadness—because we cannot stay. . . . We are afraid of this “bnngina” [military drone]. (Abdul, 45-year-old refugee from Wardak, Afghanistan, whose brother was killed in a drone strike in 2014).Footnote 51
We were ashamed that those airplanes could come and record our private moments, but we can’t do anything about it. We would have the curtains and the doors of our house closed . . . but this is useless because still we had to walk outside our houses—and when we did, we didn’t feel relaxed. Every individual action of ours they were recording. (Wahab, 21-year-old refugee from Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, quoted in an article from 2019).Footnote 52
My family is scattered. Everyone is in a different place. . . . I’m haunted by thoughts of the house we lost . . . My life is ruined. . . . Even if we could afford it, my wife couldn’t survive in a tent with no basic conditions and a newborn baby who is underweight. When we left home, we took nothing, only clothes. I knew it was the last time. I said goodbye to our house and our neighborhood. Being displaced feels like my soul has left my body. A home isn’t just walls and furniture. It’s childhood memories, family gatherings, and moments with loved ones. Home is everything. The war is cruel, but losing our home is far worse. For me, it’s harder than hunger and deprivation. It’s the greatest loss of all. We are now displaced, without hope, under bombardment and destruction. There is no safe place or humanitarian zone in the Gaza Strip. Every place is attacked. Death is everywhere. (Ahmad Miqdad, 37-year-old father of three from a-Nazleh neighborhood in Jabalya, northern Gaza, interviewed September 11, 2025).Footnote 53
These quotes, from civilians living in Afghanistan under U.S. drone surveillance and in Gaza during the war with Israel, reveal the multi-faceted and severe harms inflicted by the U.S. drone campaign and the war in Gaza. Ahmad Miqdad of Gaza speaks not only of the fear of death, but of the devastation of displacement; of “domicide”Footnote 54—the loss of one’s home and one’s community. Wahab and Adbul, both refugees from Afghanistan, speak of the destruction of communal life and support, and the loss of privacy and intimacy because of drone surveillance and the ever-present threat of drone attacks. Research into the impact of drone warfare demonstrates further traumatic impacts, including widespread PTSD,Footnote 55 significant curtailment of freedom of movement for civilians in affected areas, and a loss of community trust and cohesion because “culturally important rituals associated with religious observance, marriage, mourning, and the like are curtailed by pervasive surveillance and the threat of missile strikes.”Footnote 56 Testimony and research on the impact of the war in Gaza on the civilian population reveals similarly widespread, long term, and devastating physical and psychological impacts beyond the high rates of civilian deaths and injuries.Footnote 57 For example, in an article for the journal Torture, Hatem Yousef Abu Zaydah (a survivor of Israeli bombings in Gaza) writes about the trauma of witnessing the dead and dying, constant displacement, and the pervasive fear created by the sounds of bombings, low-flying combat aircraft, and reconnaissance drones that create a “continuously terror-laden soundscape that never relents.”Footnote 58
In addition to these experiences of terror, displacement, and loss, civilian survivors of armed conflict may also experience distinctive moral harms.Footnote 59 For example, due to the secrecy of the drone program, those living under drone surveillance may have no idea how targets are selected, and survivors often have no way of discovering who attacked them or why. This means that the victims and their communities are denied access to norms of accountability: “For victims in particular, there is no one to recognize, apologize for, or explain their sorrow; for communities living under the constant watch of surveillance drones, there is no one to hold accountable for their fear.”Footnote 60 And, as noted in section two, Roghieh Dehghan describes the forms of moral injury suffered by refugees from armed conflict, whose experiences of witnessing and committing transgressions can result in feelings of injustice and betrayal. Yet, as we have seen, such forms of moral harm are largely ignored in the dominant moral injury discourse in military ethics and military psychology.
Given this brief overview of the scale of harms suffered by civilians in armed conflict, illustrated by the experiences of survivors of drone warfare and the war in Gaza, what would it mean to prioritize these experiences in the ethical analysis of war? Below, I sketch the radical implications of a civilian-focused approach for the ethics of war through the case study of in bello collateral damage estimates.
A Civilian-Focused Ethics of War
In bello collateral damage estimates used by military planners typically only include estimates of the number of civilians killed or wounded and of civilian structures destroyed,Footnote 61 an approach that is consistent with international law.Footnote 62 The moral, physical, communal, and psychological harms described in the previous section, as well as other long- and short-term harms resulting from destruction of infrastructure and the environment, are rarely, if ever, included.Footnote 63
Yet, given the direct causal relationship between military attacks and the range of resulting harms, which are both foreseeable and well-documented,Footnote 64 I argue that there is no morally defensible reason for excluding these harms from in bello , or even ad bellum , proportionality calculations. Indeed, several scholars have argued for the inclusion of psychological harm in collateral damage estimates.Footnote 65 For example, Emanuela-Chiara Gillard argues that “in view . . . of the developments in the medical understanding of mental harm since 1977, and its increasing recognition in human rights law and IHL [international humanitarian law], there is no reason in principle to exclude mental harm from the scope of proportionality assessments.”Footnote 66 Sarah Knuckey and coauthors defend a similar conclusion, arguing that, given the existence of well-developed measures for evaluating and predicting PTSD in victims of different kinds of trauma,Footnote 67 “the humanitarian and military interests in reducing civilian suffering and the extensive scientific research into the serious nature of conditions like PTSD, are compelling reasons of principle and policy to include mental harms in a proportionality analysis.”Footnote 68 Concerns that including mental harm in collateral damage estimates would be unworkable because such forms of harm are not measurable are thus overstated. Further, it should be remembered that standard collateral harm calculations are already based on probability assessments that are often inexact.Footnote 69
In additional to psychological harm, other harms, such as those connected to displacementFootnote 70 are also readily identifiable and measurable. For example, Jovana Davidovic argues for the inclusion of the impact of collateral displacement in in bello proportionality calculations, because displacement is causally (and measurably) connected to increased rates of civilian illness, injury, and death.Footnote 71 In addition to these harms, displacement arguably also constitutes a moral harm in and of itself. For example, research on the impact of displacement due to armed conflict highlights the traumatic effects of displacement on the mental and moral health of displaced persons, including from the loss of cultural and community identity, chronic instability, fear, and experiences of witnessing moral transgressions.Footnote 72
As with the case of mental harm, the fact that both the scale and many of the predictable impacts of displacement from military attacks are foreseeable and measurable speaks against concerns that including displacement in collateral damage estimates would be unworkable.
It is beyond the scope of this article to offer a developed theory of in bello and ad bellum proportionality,Footnote 73 but at the very least expanding the range of harms to be included in proportionality calculations means raising the bar for legitimate military action to such an extent that it is probable that many, if not most, military attacks will fail to meet the threshold of in bello proportionality and that many wars will fail to meet ad bellum proportionality criteria.
This will likely be true even if only mental harm was to be included, excluding the other harms discussed here. Effectively then, a true reckoning with the nature and scale of harms suffered by civilians in war lends compelling support to (at least) contingent pacifism: The view that even if it is theoretically possible that a war could satisfy inclusive ad bellum and in bello proportionality criteria, most, if not all, wars in the actual world will predictably fail to do so.Footnote 74
However, this conclusion does not change the fact that (unjust) wars and military attacks will continue. What, then, can a civilian-focused ethics of war say in relation to the ongoing reality of armed conflict that inflicts devastating harms on hundreds of thousands of civilians? First, a civilian-focused ethics of war has implications for the international laws of armed conflict and the rules of engagement adopted by military forces. As noted above, at a bare minimum, mental harm should be included in collateral damage estimates, given the already-substantive body of international law that recognizes psychological suffering as a severe harm.Footnote 75 There are also good reasons for recognizing severe harms such as domicide as war crimes under international law.Footnote 76 Given that one of the primary functions of IHL is to minimize the suffering caused by war, expanding the range of war crimes and the range of harms to be included in proportionality calculations would be an important step toward achieving this goal. To the concern that doing so might, paradoxically, disincentivize belligerents from complying with the laws of war by increasing the burden of restraint, it should be noted that both the existing categories of war crimes and existing “formulas” for collateral damage estimates, which focus on deaths and injuries, have manifestly failed to prevent extraordinary numbers of civilian deaths, as the war in Gaza illustrates. But, more importantly, the argument for an inclusive understanding of collateral damage, and for expanding the category of war crimes, is not defeated because some belligerents might fail to change their behavior: the argument is a moral argument based on the moral significance of the scale and scope of civilian suffering in war. Far from being a reason to exclude the true scope of this suffering from the moral (and legal) evaluation of war, the fact that some (perhaps many) belligerents will nonetheless continue to inflict such suffering speaks to the pressing importance of the moral and legal recognition of these forms of harm, and the importance of mechanisms of accountability for inflicting such harm.
In addition to developing inclusive understandings of collateral harm and war crimes in law and practice, a civilian-focused ethics of war has implications for military education and military ethics. Military ethics education should prioritize civilian perspectives in case studies and other teaching materials and practices. The testimony of civilian survivors of war, including refugees and victims of war crimes, provides invaluable insights into the impact of military conflict that can and should inform combatants’ understanding of the nature of war. Foregrounding and normatively prioritizing civilians’ perspectives is also crucial to counteract the strong psychological and political incentives that users of military force have to minimize the harms they will cause during military operations.
Civilian testimony should also inform and transform the moral injury literature—the exclusion of the moral harms suffered by civilians in war from the dominant accounts of moral injury has reinforced the moral and emotional prioritization of combatants’ experiences. As Kellison argues in her discussion of the moral injury debate,
the implementation of practices that enable civilians to testify to the physical and moral injuries they have suffered, and that enable combatants and the larger publics they represent to listen to those stories, would constitute powerful practices of recognition while also allowing for the possibility of learning from noncombatants’ embodied knowledge of the harmfulness of particular practices of war.Footnote 77
Finally, the scale and scope of civilian suffering in war calls for proper recognition in the practices and institutions of military memorialization. Monuments, war memorials, and other forms of social and cultural memorialization should include and acknowledge the costs of war on the most vulnerable, even when doing so involves acknowledging the harms inflicted by a society’s own military forces. How this could and should be done is a topic worthy of further exploration.
Conclusion
In this article, I have argued that just war theory and the military ethics literature more broadly (exemplified in the moral injury debate) have long prioritized, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly, the emotional and moral wellbeing of combatants above that of noncombatants. From the attempts of early Christian just war theorists to reconcile fighting in war with Christian values and chivalric codes that permitted total war against non-Christians, through colonial-era attempts to reconcile atrocity with moral decency and civilizational superiority, to today’s moral injury discourse in military ethics and military psychology, civilian lives and welfare have been hostage to, and dependent on, belligerents’ perspectives and interests. This normative imbalance has, I have argued, enabled the commission of atrocities and created impoverished understandings of forms of collateral harm, which has contributed to the ongoing infliction of extraordinary suffering on hundreds of thousands of civilians. There is, therefore, an urgent need to create a civilian-focused ethics of war that prioritizes the experiences of noncombatant victims of war in ethical assessments of war, weapons, and tactics, and in discussions of the physical, psychological, and moral harms inflicted by war. While I have only sketched the outline of such an ethics of war here, it is clear even from this preliminary discussion that such an ethics requires a radical revisioning of the moral and legal principles that govern the conduct and assessment of war.
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