What appears to have been a chemical attack on the city of Douma in eastern Ghouta has drawn widespread international condemnation – and a denial of responsibility by the Syrian government. Similarly, the attempted assassination in Salisbury of the former intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter with the use of a nerve agent rapidly brought denunciation, and retaliatory action including the expulsion of Russian diplomats, from most Western governments.
Yet the war in Syria has been in progress for seven years and the latest estimates suggest that between 350,000 and half a million people have been killed, and millions more displaced. The footage from Douma undoubtedly shows bombing and widespread destruction, even if the latest deaths (at least 70 at the first estimate) were not caused by chlorine gas, as was suspected.
Nor is the murder of Vladimir Putin’s political opponents, including foreign citizens, politicians and journalists, new. Indeed, it is so depressingly common that it is implausible to the point of absurdity to think that such killings are not part of the Russian president’s modus operandi.
Of course both events receive attention, criticism and calls for action (even if none follows), but a particular, and almost universal, condemnation is forthcoming when chemical or biological weapons are employed. Why is their use – in fact, even their existence – thought so much worse than conventional weapons, when the conventional means of maiming, killing and destroying are often comparably horrific?
There are, I think, answers to this question that tell us something about the moral issues which arise when people, and nations, unleash unspeakable carnage and suffering on their fellow human beings.
An absolute pacificist position, such as that adopted by some Quaker conscientious objectors in World War II, naturally means that such questions would not arise. But whatever its merits, it is not widely shared.
Many, probably most, people believe that there are just wars (even when they disagree on what they are). It is also evident that, no matter the catastrophic consequences of taking military action – for example, in Iraq – there are plenty of instances – Rwanda, say, or Kosovo – where not taking action also has horrific consequences.
Nor is there even near-unanimity on such issues as the bombing of civilian targets or the existence of nuclear weapons – even the use of nuclear weapons does not have the same level of prohibition in international law as chemical weapons.
It is quite often argued, for example, that the United States’ bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though appalling human tragedies which we hope will never be repeated, were justifiable as a means of ending the war with Japan.
One need not share that opinion to notice that, nonetheless, chemical weapons are regarded as a different case. One flip justification of why – not quite as silly or as simplistic as the statement of it sounds – is that they are against international law.
The historical evidence for why that has been so since the 1920s might suggest that it is either because they do have uniquely horrible effects – as soldiers from World War I could testify – or that their use on the battlefield was so unpredictable as to be counter-productive. The corollary of that pragmatic if not particularly creditable justification is that chemical weapons are intrinsically terroristic (their use by Saddam, Assad and the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo can easily be so characterised).
But it cannot tell us the whole story. In the 1950s, the analytic philosopher
Elizabeth Anscombe, whose work was greatly influenced by Catholic moral theology, provided a distinction that helps to make some sense of what else lies beneath the prohibition on chemical weapons.
As it happens, she did so while objecting to the use of nuclear weapons and the indiscriminate bombing of civilians (in a pamphlet objecting to Oxford granting an honorary degree to President Truman). But she drew a distinction between utilitarian principles, which she called consequentialist, and absolutist ones.
Some believe there are circumstances in which, for example, the foreseeable deaths of civilians are allowable, if the stakes are high enough – on this view, Douma’s citizens are the collateral damage of destroying ISIS terrorists.
One need not delve into the casuistry of the doctrine of the double effect to see that this is unsatisfactory – not least because it lets terrible things be done on some occasions, but not on others, but also because it is the unknowable end which justifies the means. If the end is not achieved, the means is indefensible. Many people (including Anscombe) argue that it is indefensible in any case.
But it differs from an absolutist position. One obvious example is the judgment that torture is never morally acceptable. If that is so, then the ethical dilemma of whether to torture one person to save thousands of others does not come up, because it would never be acceptable to do so. If, for whatever reason, that is the judgment on chemical weapons, it explains why their use is so uniformly condemned, even while the evils of other forms of destruction continue around them.
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