Sui limiti morali della guerra : Ancora in difesa del principio di proporzionalità : Risposta a Giuliano Pontara

This article directly challenges Giuliano Pontara’s objections to my earlier defense of the principle of proportionality in war. Against his claim that proportionality has normative force only as a legal constraint and lacks moral significance, I argue that ordinary moral reasoning unavoidably involves comparisons between goods of very different kinds and between alternative courses of action. We commonly agree that, where choice is unavoidable, it is morally right to choose the action that produces the lesser evil or the greater good, and that an action producing a certain harm can be morally preferable only if that harm is proportionate to a sufficiently weighty advantage. Decisions in war that require weighing civilian harm against military advantage are no exception. The central claim of the article is that rejecting proportionality undermines the very possibility of imposing moral limits on violence against civilians in war.