Russia launched a large-scale drone and missile attack on civilian areas of Ukraine, killing at least 16 people and wounding more than 100.
The principle operating here, stated plainly, is: “A sovereign may employ indiscriminate violence against non-combatant populations to achieve a strategic or political end.” Let us ask whether this principle, when universalised, produces coherence or contradiction.
To evaluate the recent bombardment of Ukrainian civilian areas, we must move past the immediate, visceral horror of the casualties - though that horror is a profound empirical fact - and instead isolate the underlying maxim of the actor. The actor in this instance does not claim to be acting on a principle of justice, nor even a principle of lawful warfare; rather, the actor is operating on a maxim of instrumentalised destruction. They are asserting that the lives of the innocent are merely variables in a calculation of geopolitical pressure.
If we take this maxim - that the lives of non-combatants may be targeted to exert pressure on a state - and attempt to universalise it, we encounter a total collapse of the possibility of a rational international order. If every sovereign power adopted the maxim that any civilian population is a legitimate target for the purpose of achieving a political objective, the very concept of a “state” or a “territory” would dissolve into a state of permanent, uncoordinated chaos. A world in which the distinction between combatant and non-combatant is erased by the whim of strategic necessity is a world in which no contract, no treaty, and no law can exist. Law requires a predictable boundary; the maxim in question seeks to dissolve that boundary. Therefore, the maxim is self-defeating. It destroys the very stability that a sovereign requires to exercise power. To will such a law is to will the destruction of the possibility of law itself.
we must apply the second formulation of the Categorical Imperative: the Humanity Formula. This dictates that we must act so that we treat humanity, in our own person and in that of another, always as an end and never merely as a means. The recent attacks on Ukraine, and specifically the reported targeting of those providing emergency services, represent the most egregious violation of this principle.
When a missile is directed at a civilian apartment block, or when the movement of rescue workers is met with such peril that they must operate under armored protection, the victims are being stripped of their status as rational agents. They are being reduced to mere obstacles, or worse, to mere instruments of psychological terror. To use a human being as a tool to frighten their government into submission is to deny that human being their inherent dignity. They are being used as a “means” to a political “end.” In the architecture of morality, there is no higher crime than the reduction of a person to a mere object of utility. The emergency responder, attempting to preserve life, is being treated by the attacker as a mere component in a theatre of terror.
One might hear the argument of “necessity” or “strategic imperative” raised in defense of such actions. This is the classic error of the consequentialist, who believes that a “good” outcome - such as a territorial gain or a political concession - can retroactively justify a “bad” principle. But morality is not a ledger of gains and losses. A victory achieved through the violation of the categorical imperative is not a victory; it is a moral bankruptcy. Even if the destruction of these civilian areas were to result in the total surrender of the opposing force, the principle used to achieve it remains fundamentally immoral because it cannot be willed as a universal law.
The distinction between legality and morality is crucial here. A state may find a way to frame such actions within the technical, albeit hollow, definitions of its own internal logic or its own distorted view of “security.” But legality is merely the outward adherence to a rule; morality is the inward adherence to the law of reason. The destruction of the civilian infrastructure and the targeting of those who tend to the wounded is a rejection of the shared rational framework that allows human beings to coexist.
The duty that follows from this analysis is clear. We have a duty to uphold the dignity of the person against the encroachments of strategic utility. We have a duty to reject any political framework that treats human life as a negotiable commodity. The international community must not merely seek to “mitigate” the consequences of these attacks - for mitigation is a concern of the utilitarian - but must instead reassert the absolute prohibition against the instrumentalisation of the innocent. The duty is to demand a return to a principle that can be universalised: a principle where the non-combatant is recognized as an end in themselves, inviolable by the ambitions of any state.