CHILD SOLDIERS AND KILLING IN SELF-DEFENCE: CHALLENGING THE 'MORAL VIEW' ON KILLING IN WAR

• Published in: Journal of military ethics Vol. 10; no. 1; pp. 36 - 51
• Main Author: Vaha, Milla Emilia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oslo Taylor & Francis Group 01.03.2011; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Armed forces; Child soldiers; Children & youth; Equality; Ethics; innocence; McMahan; Military service; Morality; self-defence; Self-defense; Violence; War
• ISSN: 1502-7570; 1502-7589
• DOI: 10.1080/15027570.2011.561639

According to the so-called Moral View on justified killing in war, mere status as a soldier is not a sufficient condition for a combatant to lose his immunity against not being killed in war. While the traditional theory of war maintains that all soldiers are morally equally liable to be killed, the 'Moral View' stresses that it is moral culpability, not a mere combatant status, that makes one eligible to be killed and hence one must differentiate between morally innocent and non-innocent combatants - from which only the latter category are justifiably killed in war, even in self-defence. In this paper I will challenge the Moral View and its plausibility to the hard cases and will explore if, according to this view, child soldiers are eligible targets in war. Intuitively, children as morally innocent persons should belong to the category of innocent combatants. And yet, an armed child may be as brutal a soldier as his adult colleague. By using the example of child soldiers this paper aims to show certain difficulties of the Moral View compared to the traditional moral symmetry thesis on combatant equality.