ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the double effect in terms of direct military actions. Walzer argues that damage to civilians and civilian property, commonly referred by the term collateral damage, is an unavoidable reality of warfare. To reconcile this inevitability he attempts to justify collateral damage through the traditional just war doctrine of double effect: soldiers could probably not fight at all, except in the desert and at sea, without endangering nearby civilians. The double effect is a way of reconciling the absolute prohibition against attacking non-combatants with the legitimate conduct of military activity. Militaries must refrain from attacking civilians producing the goods that a civilian population needs to survive, but they have no parallel duty to avoid targeting civilian infrastructure. This idea of responsibility was echoed by US military actions during the Gulf War. The targeting of infrastructure during the Gulf War is just one example of the importance of looking at the temporally unconstrained effects of warfare.
