 I'm Gareth Evans, the Chancellor of the ANU, and I'm talking to Seth Lazar, who's Senior Research Fellow in the School of Philosophy here, someone who's published very widely in the major journals on the Ethics of War and Peace. And in fact, back in 2011, received the Frank Chapman Sharp Prize from the American Philosophical Association for what was then the best unpublished monograph of that year. And we're talking about Seth's book, which was being published on December the 8th, Spearing Civilians. And let me begin by asking you, Seth, starting from the back of when I studied philosophy at Melbourne University and Oxford 50 years ago. Now, I think the best single definition I heard of what philosophy was was scrutinizing the obvious. Now, what you're doing in this book is scrutinizing what to most people will seem a very obvious proposition indeed, namely that killing civilians is worse than killing soldiers. What is it about that proposition that makes you think it needs a full-length book defence? Is it becoming contestable, contested out there in the real world such that a new defence is necessary? So I think that there are two challenges to this principle, what I call moral distinction. And they're philosophical and they're political. So the philosophical challenges have come from recent work in the ethics of war, which has placed the emphasis for determining who should be a permissible target in war on one's responsibility for contributing to wrongful threats. And the problem with justifying this principle on those grounds is that it doesn't help on two sides. It doesn't help in distinguishing between combatants and non-combatants who are fighting a justified war. So none of them are responsible for contributing to wrongful threats. So it doesn't help on that count. And it also poses problems on the other side for people who are part of a side that's fighting an unjust war. Because if we focus on responsibility rather than, for example, causing a threat oneself, then certainly in the modern state and in certain kinds of modern conflicts, there are arguments for thinking that non-combatants are often, at least as responsible, sometimes more responsible, than combatants are for contributing to their state's capacity to wage wars. That's just on the philosophical side. And on the political side, we see ramifications of these kinds of debates, especially not so much with the issue of when it's permissible to target civilians. I think that that norm remains pretty robust internationally. But in terms of the attitude we should have towards the deaths of civilians as collateral harm, these kinds of arguments resurface in those cases. So if you think about the recent Operation Protective Edge in Israel last year, a lot of arguments that were coming out about the use, about the protection of civilians in Gaza had to do with the responsibility they purportedly had for the position of Hamas being in control there. And that giving Israel some reason to be able to discount the significance of their lives, essentially, when working out whether a particular attack was proportionate. A further extension of that is in the attacks on the US, on recently Paris. This is part of basically the terrorist logic, that the people they're targeting, we think of them as innocent civilians, but because they're the citizens of democratic countries that are voting in the governments that are carrying out the policies of the West and the Middle East, they're responsible for those policies and so they become legitimate targets. So there seem to be two kinds of complications in which so far you've concentrated just on one. That is the fact that a number of civilians or prima facie noncombatants may in fact share some moral responsibility or be perceived as sharing some moral responsibility and therefore become legitimate targets. You've given some good examples, I think, of that, the most extreme examples of their voters and potentially in that sense there's a chain of responsibility from them all the way up to the political leadership to go to indefensible wars. But you might want to say a little bit more about that side, but the other side you haven't really addressed at all, which will be in a lot of people's minds, is to be assumed that simply because you're a soldier, simply because you're notionally a combatant, you're defensibly attackable in all circumstances. Are there moral gradations here or political gradations as well as philosophical ones between different classes of soldiers? I mean, what about conscripts as distinct from professional soldiers? Are they just as defensibly attackable? What about those who are sitting in prisoner of war camps? Are they just as defensibly attackable? Are there any other relevant distinctions here? Yeah, so I think this is the other philosophical... the other way in which philosophy has basically led to some of these distinctions being undermined. So there was this doctrine, and there's still this doctrine which philosophers tend to call the legal equality of combatants. You find it in the first additional protocol to the Geneva Convention. It defines what makes you count as a combatant, the various criteria you have to satisfy. And then it says that combatants have the right to participate in hostilities. That all combatants have the right to participate in hostilities. And the flip side of this is that all combatants are attackable. So there's a sort of trade-off that gets made. Combatants gain the right to participate, they gain certain rights such as benevolent quarantine, so prisoner of war status, and at the same time they become legitimate targets. And one of the major moves in the philosophy of the ethics of war in the last 15 years has been to cast doubt on the moral foundation of this idea of combatant equality. And the main move has been to say that if you're fighting for a just war, then there's no reason to think that you should forfeit your right not to be harmed. And that's really the thing that I think most people who think about this morally would agree on now that if you're fighting justifiably, if you're the Kurdish Peshmerga now fighting against the Islamic State, then you don't do anything in virtue of wearing military uniform or whatever to forfeit your right not to be killed by soldiers of the Islamic State. So that's the first kind of important disruption to that traditional idea that all soldiers are attackable. But then I think also, you know, if we look at most research on the participation of soldiers in war suggests that very few of them are actually individually responsible for lethal threats. So there's this very widely cited research by Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall about the rates of fire during the Second World War and not during the Civil War as well. We suggested that only 15 to 25% of soldiers who had an opportunity to fire their weapons were actually firing them. Now I think that levels of training in Western militaries these days have advanced to the point that the natural revulsion to killing has been largely overcome in Western militaries, in advanced Western militaries. But certainly when we're talking about the sort of the conscripted armies in Iraq during 2003 and 1991 and other armies in no sort of situations I think that actual rates of fire are very low. So if what makes you responsible for, makes you a permissible target is that you're responsible for contributing to a wrongful threat. Lots of soldiers don't actually contribute to those threats. Given these multiple complex qualifications on both sides, civilian, soldier, combatant, non-combat, what's left of the core principle that you want to defend that killing soldiers is worse than killing civilians? I mean, is there anything that you can use arguments about in defense of that core general principle or is it just a maze of qualifications that one is inexorably drawn into? And if so, what are the key arguments that you do advance? Right, so that's really the backdrop for the starting point for the book and the idea is then given this, given that we can't distinguish between them on the grounds of responsibility, what other arguments can we offer? And so my view is that the principle of distinction has multiple overlapping foundations. It's a bit of a maze, but that these overlapping foundations, although they're a counter-examples to each of them taken in isolation, when you take them together they present quite a robust foundation for the principle of distinction. So the first one that I talk about in the book is the principle of necessity. Now this is something that has also often been leaned on to protect civilians in war and it's also somewhat under pressure. This is simply the idea that harming civilians is just not militarily effective whereas harming soldiers is. That's why you can't harm civilians because it's just pointless. Now I think that often it's true that what makes killing civilians wrong is that it's pointless, it's wanton. This is one of the things that is so deeply objectionable about what ISIS have been doing in their terrorist attacks, but that it's not always true and sometimes these things can be effective. So for me the core arguments really have to do with the vulnerability and defenselessness of civilians on the one hand, the risks that we run in attacking civilians on the other and in the particular character of the agency that is used when harming civilians. So if you want me to, I can explain each of those in a little more detail. A tiny bit more detail because we're running out of time but just a sentence or two in each so we just get the flavour. Well and the vulnerability and defenselessness this really I think is almost as basic as the idea that harming the innocent is especially wrongful. I think that if you even just do a sort of a crude Google search for the phrase defenseless civilians it's the trope that we reach to most immediately and I think it has to do with the way in which harming defenseless people disempowers them as well as wronging them. The risk argument has to do with the risks you're taking with people's rights. Again I think that harming someone recklessly is worse than harming them less recklessly and I think that even if civilians and soldiers there is some degree of overlap between them. You still take a greater risk when you harm civilians than when you harm soldiers. And the agency argument has to do with the character of the agency that's involved in harming people. If you're harming somebody who just poses a threat to you if you're trying to solve a problem that that person poses then that's somewhat less objectionable than using that person as a means to convey a particular message. So just a little anecdote to finish with to illustrate this idea. So when I was in, I was doing a lot of travelling I was in Raul Pindi in 2006 and I sat next to a guy in a silk shop and he pulled out his phone and was showing me a picture of the phone and I thought it was going to be something funny we were kind of chatting his banter generally. So this picture of me was a video of the murder of Daniel Pearl and this it was intended to shock me and you know it turned out they're beheading. Yeah they're beheading. And I think this is just a paradigm case of using somebody as a prop in your horror show to terrorize, to so sort of discord among your adversary. And that's the way that civilians are harmed tend to be in that way like in Paris just recently they're used as a means to convey a message and that's different from the way in which soldiers are harmed. So the cumulative result of all these very well-made arguments is that we should be prepared to continue to assert confidently the primacy of that general principle which you refer to as the moral distinction. Absolutely. That's killing soldiers as well. Does that still leave killing civilians as worse than killing soldiers? Does that still leave any room philosophically for distinguishing different kinds of responsibility or levels of responsibility between different classes of combatants and non-combatants or is that just noises off now? So in my view there is not a lot of room as far as non-combatants go so I think that the sort of responsibility you need to have to be liable to be killed is just not the kind of responsibility most non-combatants have. I think it does leave some room for thinking about the position of combatants in international law. There's no actual necessity constrained in international law and the harming of combatants. There are constraints on particular kinds of weapons that you can't use but as far as combatants go it's basically a free-for-all regardless of how responsible they are. And I think that's something that is morally objectionable. I think that you still do have to use the least harmful means available regardless and I think that we are in a stage now where we are able to distinguish between different roles within the military to a greater degree than has been the case in the past. The military has in large parts certainly in the West been civilianised and I think that it doesn't make sense to have a pure membership-based criterion of liability to attack except perhaps on pragmatic grounds that it's just too difficult to distinguish but certainly morally speaking there are grounds for distinguishing between some combatants and others. Let me conclude by asking what are the implications of any of all of this for the particular moral, stroke, political issue that I've been consumed with the last decade or more and that's the issue of the responsibility to protect civilians essentially from genocide, major war crimes, other crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and so on and trying to energise the global community to recognise that when these atrocity crimes are perpetrated behind sovereign state borders that should not be a matter of indifference, that sovereignty is not a licence to kill. There really is a universal moral obligation to do what's necessary to halt or revert that harm including ultimately in appropriate cases military force, complicated argument but big current and continuing issue. You're really about the comparative judgments concerning civilians versus soldiers, combatants versus non-combatants. I'm slightly off to one side focusing on just this larger issue in the sense of not a larger issue but a consuming issue of when if at all, what should be the responsibility of the global community to react and if so how in these cases. Any points of connection? Yeah for sure, I mean so the difference is that I'm really focusing on what's usually called the use in bellows so the ethics of just conducting war and responsibility to protect is primarily an issue of usad bellum so the ethics of resorting to war but there are clear connections so everything that I say about the special wrongfulness of harming civilians is relevant to the case in favor of the responsibility to protect and as much as we need to be able to characterize exactly what's going wrong, why it's so morally serious that it warrants the response. Another area where it comes in that is particularly kind of philosophically interesting and also extremely important right now as the bombing of Syria is being debated is when you're thinking about these kinds of interventions we have to think about the level of cost that we're prepared to bear to our soldiers, the level of risk we're prepared to put ourselves to in order to save the civilians who are on the ground. What we're doing at the moment, what we've seen at the moment in the last several years is this sort of move towards what people call risk transfer warfare where we're prepared to carry out these sort of interventions but only if we do so from 30,000 feet essentially and where we're beyond the capacity of people to harm us and this inevitably then means that the harms to civilians on the ground are significantly greater so we need to then work out the relative significance of harms to civilians compared to the risks we put our soldiers and our pilots to and I think that the case that I'm making in favor of the protection of civilians suggests that we should be prepared to accept much greater risks than we currently are in order to save them. Well thank you Seth, that's an intriguing set of defences, arguments, explanations, this is potentially a very long conversation indeed but it's one that we're all going to be stimulated to have with the publication of your book by Oxford University Press, December the 8th, 2015, there it is, Spearing Civilians and I've been talking to Seth Lazar, Senior Research Fellow at the Australian National University School of Philosophy. Thanks Seth. Thanks very much.