ABSTRACT

This chapter attempts to reframe the debate about the moral equality of combatants in order to move it away from non-empirical arguments. It focuses on service members' epistemic limitations, shared political servitude, between the individual and the political community. The chapter argues that, as long as combatants cannot claim a right to selective conscientious objection, all lawful combatants fighting on behalf of a state are morally equal. Framing the concept of combatant moral equality as dependent on an empirical question is a different approach than employed by nearly all the theorists who have addressed the topic of late. The consensus for roughly the last 400 years in the Western Just War Tradition has been that all combatants obeying the laws and customs of war are moral equals. Instead, they use the same individual-centered terms of moral analysis used in the analytic literature on self-defense to address questions of combatant culpability.