Answer all of the questions provided. Clearly indicate in your paper which part of the prompt you are answering. Your paper should be 1500 words or less. Longer papers will be penalized. All you need to answer these questions are the readings and your notes. I strongly discourage you from using any outside sources. But if you do, make sure to cite them. If you use direct quotes from the reading, cite those as well.
A major theme in this course has been that it is difficult to square the morality of individual liability with the morality of war. Your task here will be to show how accounts of individual self-defense challenge the principle of non-combatant immunity (which states that non-combatants are not morally or legally liable to be attacked). This challenge has, in turn, implications for the permissibility of terrorism and the viability of contingent pacifism.
a) Explain, in detail, how the responsibility-based accounts of the morality of self-defense, applied to the morality of war, make it difficult to defend the principle of non-combatant immunity.
b) Suppose that the principle of non-combatant immunity is mistaken at the level of morality, and as a result some civilians are morally liable to be killed. Would killing such civilians count as terrorism on Samuel Scheffler’s account of terrorism? Why or why not?
c) According to one argument in favor of contingent pacifism, rejecting the doctrine of double effect (DDE) yields the conclusion that the vast majority of wars will be unjust, since rejecting DDE collapses the distinction between terrorism and war. Explain how this argument is supposed to work, and explain why Jeff McMahan thinks that it does not necessarily entail contingent pacifism. Is his argument convincing?
