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The international law of war limits the use of violence, largely through protections afforded to civilians. However, the law provides no principled limit on the taking of combatant life — soldiers may be killed even if to do so would contribute absolutely no military advantage. This permissive approach to unnecessary killing has deep historical roots in the philosophy of the law of war. Three justifications for unnecessary killing have been advanced: a robust notion of sovereignty that views the soldier as a disposable molecule of a greater being; the idea that soldiers are ‘guilty’ and deserve what befalls them in war; and a pragmatic approach holding that limits on gratuitous violence are both impossible to implement in practice as well as harmful. None of these arguments are persuasive in light of the contemporary consensus that there is a human right to life that ought to be respected at all times, even in war. A rule of “combatant proportionality” should therefore be formally incorporated into the law of war.
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