Fabre Children and War Uncorrected Proofs.pdf (original) (raw)

Children are the main victims of war. They are deliberately targeted by combatants; they are used as shields; they are killed as collateral damage, for example when a bomb lands on their school; they are routinely raped and physically abused by soldiers; they are often forced to flee their homes, and suffer disproportionately from war-induced hunger, thirst and diseases; war leaves them orphans, resource-less and at the mercy of the economic-cum-sexual predatory practices of adults. At the same time, it is estimated that there are several dozens of thousands of child soldiers worldwide, some of whom commit atrocities. Notwithstanding the crimes which they commit, and as we shall see throughout this paper, those children too are victims, precisely for that reason.The victimisation of children is morally egregious – in some respects more egregious still than the victimisation of adults. My aim in this chapter is twofold: to provide strong philosophical support for this intuition, and to highlight some important ethical issues arising from children’s involvement in and exposure to war. In the second section, I defend the view that killing children, whether intentionally or not, is morally worse, other things equal, than killing adults. In the third section, I tackle the difficult issues raised by children who actively participate in armed conflicts. I defend the standard prohibition on child enlistment. But I also argue that, once children have been enlisted, it is morally permissible to kill them in self- or other-defence if they commit wrongful killings. This paper appears in G. Calder, J. de Wispelaere and A. Ghaus (eds) Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children (Routledge, 2018)