Anyway, I agree that these sort of emotionally salient boundaries can be quite useful and important. Even if chemical weapons do lie on a continuum with conventional weapons creating the psychological barrier to the use of chemical weapons can be very important. By adopting an agreement to consider the use of chemical weapons to be beyond the pale we considerably reduce the harms of war even if there are some individual circumstances where chemical weapons could have been used to end that particular war with a net lower amount of suffering, i.e., the precedential value can overwhelm the current beneit.

Indeed, it is the importance of these sorts of psychologically salient barriers which is the reason I am worried by the campaign against cluster bombs. By allowing this boundary to creep to a place that doesn’t coincide with an emotional distinction risks losing the gains we have made against nukes, chemical weapons and land mines.

However, I don’t think this argument flies for terrorism. For starters, unlike our repugnance for chemical weapons, rejecting suicide bombing out of hand as never justified brings us little benefit. Only terrorists our countries so far outside of the reach of these sorts of norms are ever likely to use it so the gain is minimal. However, the real problem is that this sort of verbal slight of hand discourages people from addressing the real issues of unnecessary and stupid violence. By focusing on civilian targets and suicide bombings we both risk criminalizing future justified resistance efforts and worse letting non-suicide bombings against military targets by terrorists slip through as un-condemned.

By this I mean campaigns like the anti land mine campaign or the anti chemical weapons campaign. And I guess (although I don’t know) that these things have had positive effects.