DOUBLE EFFECT AND DOUBLE INTENTION: A COLLECTIVIST PERSPECTIVE Noam J. Zohar' I. Introduction I find myself in agreement with much of Jeff McMahan's analysis. Yet I have argued in the past (initially against Judith Jarvis Thomson, but also against McMahan 1 ) that it is insufficient, and misleading, to think about warfare and its moral assessment in merely individualistic terms. My disagreements with McMahan's discussion here are mostly linked to the same fundamental reservation. McMahan describes a clear-cut dichotomy between the individualist perspective— which he endorses—and collectivist approaches. These he characterizes as recognizing (in warfare) only collective moral agency, precluding individual responsibility. But in my view, we should reject this very dichotomy and adopt instead a dual moral perspective. Our focus should not be exclusively on individual choice, action, and responsibility: This should be combined with a collective perspective. In my comments here I will illustrate this by examining McMahan's discussion of terrorism and intention. I hope thereby to show that the description of warfare as a set of individual acts must be supplemented by its description as a conflict between collectives—between nations acting through their respective armies. A crucial challenge for my position lies in the question of how these two disparate perspectives can be combined; but I cannot take up that challenge here. Rather, I shall merely try to show what can be gained by adding a collectivist perspective. Moreover, since this perspective is complex, and its differences from the individualistic perspective comprise several aspects, this discussion will focus on only one of these Department of Philosophy, Bar Ilan University. See Noam Zohar, Collective War and Individualistic Ethics: Against the Conscription of "Self- Defense" 21 POL. THEORY, 606-622 (1993); Noam Zohar, Innocence and Complex Threats: Upholding the War Ethic and the Condemnation of Terrorism, 114 ETHICS 734-751 (2004). , available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021223700013534 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.70.40.11, on 05 Sep 2019 at 01:03:29, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use