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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Military forces are obligated to take all feasible precautions to avoid or minimize incidental civilian casualties and damage to civilian objects during military operations.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Military necessity can legitimately override precautionary obligations when delay or restraint would cause greater total harm to combatants and civilians alike.
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    • 2.Walzer's 'supreme emergency' doctrine acknowledges that existential threats can suspend ordinary proportionality constraints, including feasibility requirements.
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    • 3.An absolute precautionary obligation that ignores strategic context collapses into pacifism, which most just war theorists explicitly reject as a framework.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.The 'feasible precautions' standard is epistemically indeterminate: commanders cannot know in real-time what precautions were genuinely feasible under fog of war.
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    • 2.Holding forces to an obligation defined by post-hoc feasibility assessments imposes retrospective standards that distort prospective military decision-making.
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    • 3.Vitoria and Grotius grounded combatant liability in mens rea and reasonable belief, not in outcome-based standards imposed after the fact.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.Constant care must be taken to spare the civilian population during the conduct of military operations.
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    • 2.All feasible precautions must be taken to avoid incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, and damage to civilian objects.
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    • 3.Where avoidance is not possible, incidental civilian harm must at minimum be minimized.
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