Ida Vind Petersen

According to the principle of discrimination in the ethics of war, combatants must not intentionally target civilians for attack. However, they are morally permitted to intentionally attack adversary combatants and to cause unintentional yet foreseen collateral harm to civilians. This dissertation tackles two of the most debated issues related to this principle in contemporary just war literature. First, there is the question of how to morally justify a categorical prohibition on intentionally attacking civilians and a categorical permission to intentionally attack combatants. Second is the question of whether combatants share a symmetrical permission to harm each other regardless of whether they are fighting for a just or an unjust cause, commonly referred to as Combatant Equality. In four articles divided into two parts, the dissertation investigates these questions through perspectives from theories of liability to defensive harm, collective responsibility and the evidence-relative view of the ethics of self-defense. The first part argues that theories of collective responsibility ultimately do not provide better support for the moral distinction between unjust combatants and civilians in war in terms of liability to harm than theories of individual moral responsibility are able to provide. The second part argues that the evidence-relative view only gives limited support to Combatant Equality, as it argues that there may be a symmetrical permission for harming strictly between just combatants and evidentially justified, yet factually unjust combatants, but this permission does not extend to permissibly causing evidentially justified, yet factually unjust collateral damage to civilians.

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