A history of military morals: killing the innocent

This historiography demonstrates how theorists have rationalized killing the innocent in war. It shows how moral arguments about killing the innocent respond to material conditions, and it explains how we have arrived at the post-World War II convention.

Killing the innocent : three discursive traditions from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries -- The origins of the double effect : the scholastic tradition -- Martialists : soldiers and tacticians -- Humanists and republicans -- The nineteenth century -- Killing noncombatants in the nineteenth century -- Deliberately targeting noncombatants -- The twentieth century : aerial bombing and a shift in norms -- New possibilities : aeronauts, inventors, and future-war fiction on aerial bombing -- Interwar approaches to bombing : two discursive traditions -- The return to intention : post World War I -- Postscript : intention in the twenty-first century.