The war must be in proportion

The war must be in proportion

The war must be in proportion

There are two ways of looking at this:

• The goal of the war should be in proportion to the offence. Thus a state should not set itself a goal that is out of scale to the wrong to be righted.
  • So if country A invades part of country B, it is ethical for B to go to war to get the captured territory back, but it would not be ethical for B to go to war to conquer country A and take over all of it.

• The benefits of waging the war must be in proportion to the costs, so:
  • it must prevent more evil than it causes
  • it must prevent more human suffering than it causes

Consequences

But there is another sort of proportionality to consider - whether the benefits of the war outweigh the harm it will do.

The aim here is to make sure that states don't go to war if the harm done by the use of force is more than the good that would be achieved by going to war.

Proportionate means

Not just the aim of the war, but the means used to fight it must be in proportion to the wrong to be righted.

So destroying an enemy city with a nuclear weapon in retaliation for the invasion of an uninhabited island would make that war unethical, even though the cause of the war was just.