Law, Morality, and Blame: Attitudes toward Civilian Casualties in Mosul

• In Event: Ethics, Law, and Civilian Casualties in Wartime Settings: Experimental Evidence

Abstract

Does the reaction of conflict-affected populations to civilian casualties depend on moral or legal judgments, or both? Scholarship has shown that many forms of violence against civilians are associated with poor strategic outcomes, which has inspired the theory that populations punish combatants for casualties, implying a moral judgement. One way in which the United States and other Western forces try to prevent such backlash is by relying on international law, rather than moral judgments, to determine the conditions under which harming civilians is permissible. The related question of whether civilians’ beliefs about the moral or legal permissibility of attacks on other civilians are shaped more by moral or legal principles is largely unknown. We rely on a conjoint experiment and semi-structured interviews with 1,400 Iraqi civilians in Mosul to show how variation in the moral and legal permissibility of a hypothetical military operation to liberate Mosul, tracks individuals’ attitudes.

Authors

• Janina Dill, University of Oxford

• Mara Revkin, Duke University