Aeon Ideas - Thom Brooks on What is your favorite

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ideas.aeon.co /viewpoints/thom-brooks-on-what-is-your-favorite-philosophical-thought-experiment

Thought experiments. So many to choose from. Brains in vats. Or thinking what it’s like to be a bat?
Ok, I’ll stop with the attempt to be philosophical through poetry.

And this leads me to argue in favour of an under-appreciated philosopher and essayist. (And keen
footballer.) Albert Camus.

Camus will be forever associated with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and French
existentialism. Like any philosophical school of thought, there is no easy definition and there is much
diversity that can be found within it. But core claims are that the individual is responsible for himself,
that we are the source of our freedom, that we are our possibilities. I’ll come back to this in a moment
to say something about its relevance for the thought experiment I’m going to discuss from Camus.

Camus wrote an essay “Neither Victims Nor Executioners” that I picked up in a wonderful used book
store in Scottsdale, Arizona while in grad school. I don’t know of anyone who has read it, but it has
struck me as one of the most insightful comments about just war theory I’ve seen. Ever. No, really.

Camus claims that every war yields civilian fatalities. Non-combatants too often are caught in the
middle and we - you and I - pay the heaviest price whenever wars take place.

The next claim he makes is that any decision to go to war is a decision to execute randomly selected
civilians on the other side. Their deaths might not be individually selected, but we know that some will
die as a result of military action. So Camus does not get into questions about whether a Doctrine of
Double Effect might excuse our decision - this is not about intending x, but getting an unintended y. It
remains firmly in existentialist-friendly territory examining our choices and their consequences.

So here we are: every war brings civilian fatalities and so every decision to go to war is a decision that
some civilians will die. So what’s his point?

His point is simple. As civilians, we can too readily say we support our country’s war effort. But what
does this say about our moral responsibility? We might support military intervention in the safe
knowledge that our opponents lack any genuine prospect of retaliation and so our support comes
without direct (moral) costs for us. Or does it?

For Camus, this is unacceptable and morally short-sighted.

The argument is if we are willing to support military action against others knowing civilians in another
country will be selected randomly and killed as ‘collateral damage’ then our decision to support war is a
decision that they should be killed.

This point is important because they share our standing. We are both civilians.

So Camus’s thought experiment is this: if we are willing to support military action against others
knowing some civilians will be liable to be killed, then we should hold ourselves up as potential civilians
to be killed by our opponents. If we choose to put other innocents at risk of death, then we must have
the integrity to put ourselves at risk, too.

Camus’s point is that we should be neither victims (of military action) nor executioners (supporting
military action). And that we can see this if we thought more seriously about our moral responsibility for
supporting war and the moral equivalency we have with other civilians.
I’ve found this makes me view the topic very differently and shapes my critiques of much work in the
field. If others have read this short essay, what do you think?