ABSTRACT
The notions of innocence and guilt seem most at home in a legal context and, somewhat less comfortably, in a moral context. Legally, a man is innocent if he is not guilty, i.e. if he has not engaged in conduct explicitly prohibited by rules of the criminal law. For if killing an enemy soldier is right, then it would also seem to be right to kill the man who orders him to the frontline. If anything, the case for killing a general seems better, since the soldier is presumably simply acting in some sense as his agent, i.e. the general kills through him. Any “ethical” theory which entailed that there is nothing wrong at all with killing babies would surely deserve to be rejected on the basis of this counterexample alone. Deliberate killing of the innocent is prohibited by the Just War Theory and is a crime in international law.
