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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30069 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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Why is Eisenhower asking a Catholic woman? Eh, weirder things happen in wartime.

There are a few criteria for waging a just war according to Catholic doctrine:

  1. The damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave and certain.
  2. All other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective.
  3. There must be serious prospects of success.
  4. The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.

I think your scenario takes for granted #1 and #2. The historical record bears out #3, but it could be an interesting exercise to determine if this could have been known at the time. Your question is getting to the heart of #4.

Then I look at the doctrine of Double Effect. When an action produces both a negative and a positive effect, it is permitted if:

  • The good effect outweighs the bad effect.
  • The action is undertaken with the intention of producing the good effect, not the bad effect.
  • The bad effect is not the direct cause of the good effect.

Given this, the most simple answer to "How many French civilian deaths are tolerable to ensure the success of Operation Overlord?" is one less than the number of lives saved by the success of Operation Overload, as long as the rules of Double Effect are applied. Of course, we don't live in a counterfactual world where we know for certain how many people would have died had we not acted. We should be careful and allow for our knowledge being imprecise.

There would be some actions that could not be tolerated - we could not attack civilians directly in the hope that it would redirect medical supplies from the military and therefore weaken the military. This would violate the "bad effect is not the direct cause of the good effect" clause. But overall, as long as we are attacking legitimate military targets for the sake of attacking legitimate military targets, and we are reasonably certain that each attack will save more lives than cause civilian deaths, it is morally permissible.

There would be some actions that could not be tolerated - we could not attack civilians directly in the hope that it would redirect medical supplies from the military and therefore weaken the military. This would violate the "bad effect is not the direct cause of the good effect" clause.

While this idea was not pursued with respect to targeting French cities, it was employed in the strategic bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan. Learning from experiences from the Blitz and the early years of strategic bombing, it became to be understood that attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure were in some respects more effective than targeting enemy manufacturing. Mass civilian casualties, and both damaging transport infrastructure and then deluging it with fleeing/wounded civilians, had larger downstream effects on military capabilities than directly targeting military elements themselves. The apogee of this mentality was the firebombing of Dresden, which was deliberately designed to cause maximum chaos in the German rear to limit their ability to co-ordinate a response to concurrent Soviet offensives.

The criteria you mention seem to be re the initiation of war, whereas the OP is asking about the conduct of war. This Catholic source discusses both.

Discrimination and Due Proportion seem like they are applications of Double Effect, which is why I went into the more general Double Effect, but for the curious and lazy:

(1) Discrimination — Armed forces ought to fight armed forces, and should strive not to harm non-combatants purposefully. Moreover, armed forces should not wantonly destroy the enemy's countryside, cities, or economy simply for the sake of punishment, retaliation or vengeance.

(2) Due proportion — Combatants must use only those means necessary to achieve their objectives. For example, no one needs to use nuclear missiles to settle a territorial fishing problem. Due proportion also involves mercy — towards civilians in general, towards combatants when the resistance stops (as in the case of surrender and prisoners of war), and towards all parties when the war is finished.

Sure, but they are much more specific to the issue of civilian casualties, which I think is helpful.

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