Although I discount the Libyan government’s assertions that many civilians have already been killed as a result of Operation Odyssey Dawn, it is inevitable that Libyan civilians will be killed by bombs dropped by Western planes or missiles launched from Western ships. Are such deaths excusable in an action the goal of which is to protect civilians, or do they render the action perverse?
A year or two ago, I attended a lecture given by a professor of philosophy from Rutgers University. He contended that civilian deaths, such as those caused by the NATO intervention in Kosovo, do not harm the moral worth of humanitarian interventions because the population that is being saved or protected should bear some of the costs. He used the metaphor of a person caught in a quick moving river about to fall over a waterfall. I can climb out on a tree branch and grab this person by the arm, thereby saving him or her from a watery grave. But, because of the force of the river’s current, doing so will probably break that person’s arm. He or she is saved, but at the cost of a broken arm.
At the time, I disagreed with the speaker because he went so far as to say that, even if ground troops could lessen the number of civilian casualties in an intervention, intervening countries could still act perfectly morally by using bombings and so causing more civilian deaths — because the population being saved should share the costs of intervention. In my mind, the country that decides to intervene has no right to push costs on the population being saved without their consent. The Kosovars, to my knowledge, never told NATO, “Please, don’t put your troops in harm’s way, use a bombing campaign to save us, we accept that you will also kill some of us.”
In the case of Libya, however, the rebels asked specifically for a no-fly zone and the West has given it to them. They even specifically stated that they do not want foreign ground troops to assist them. Of course, whether or not the rebels truly speak for the Libyan population — some of whom may be killed by Western bombs — is not for certain known. But if we accept that they are the closest thing we have to formal representatives of the Libyan people, and that the intervening powers are taking every precaution to minimize collateral damage, I think we can say that accidental civilian deaths will not undermine the moral legitimacy of the West’s intervention in Libya.
Civil Minded 