Chapter 1 The Origins of Double Effect: The Scholastic Tradition
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Nineteenth-century pacifists sought to rehabilitate the primitive Christian tradition which expressly forbade the private right to self-defense. This rehabilitation of early Christian thought does a great deal to illuminate the moral climate in which Thomas Aquinas formulated his well-known doctrine of double effect – the belief that an action that produces a harm would be morally permitted if the primary intention were good, and the negative side effect were unintended. Even though military ethicists in the twentieth and twenty-first century routinely appeal to Aquinas’s ethical formula, it is by no means clear that it was originally developed to justify killing the innocent in war. Double effect was not used to justify such killing until the sixteenth century, when transformations in siege warfare made civilian casualties much more likely. This chapter shows that intention-based arguments for killing the innocent persisted right up to the end of the eighteenth century.