Postscript

Military ethicists have largely abandoned the claim that whether a person is liable to harm in war depends on whether he or she belongs to a category, such as soldiers or civilians. This is especially because these categories can be independent of what a person actually does. This may be a result of attributing to each member of a group some feature that is characteristic of the group as a whole, which is a crucial mistake in moral theory. This doctrine of liability by association is of the same kind favored by terrorists. Instead, what is most important in these cases is what an individual does, for example, whether he or she is morally responsible for a threat of unjust harm. While traditional just war theory has failed to offer an adequate defense of the criterion of liability to harm, constructing a new one is a formidable task.