On Adopting a Posture of Moral Neutrality

Abstract

For at least a millennium, human beings in the Western tradition have been objecting on moral grounds to new technologies of warfare. Pope Innocent II condemned the crossbow and the longbow alike in the Second Lateran Council of 1139. Centuries later, some objected that rifled weapons— which were vastly more accurate over far longer distances than their smoothbore predecessors— should be prohibited lest warfare become more like assassination from afar than like chivalrous combat. So- called dum- dum bullets— projectiles designed to explode on impact— drew the criticism of humanitarians in the middle of the nineteenth century. By World War I, attention had turned to chemical weapons. In the wake of the Second World War, nuclear weapons and biological warfare were added to the list of hotly controversial new technologies of combat. Closer to our own time, we see protests against antipersonnel landmines, munitions with undetectable fragments, incendiaries, and blinding laser weapons.