Modern jus in bello rests on combatants’ equal right to kill, not on punishment

Evidence

What he suggests here is not so much a right to equal combat, which would involve insisting on a struggle with equal weapons, but rather an equal right to fight. The fact that the law should not, by the norms that it imposes, make it “impossible from the start for one side to hope for victory” implies, not turning the war into a tournament—with pistol against pistol or sword against sword but, on the contrary, taking into consideration the disparity of the forces confronting each other and taking care not to increase it by imposing short-sighted laws that would confer to one side greater advantages while depriving the other side of even the possibility of fighting. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 1038 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Law should equalize the right to fight, not the weapons themselves. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 1038; Laws of war should grant equal right to fight, not equal arms; War’s immunity from murder prosecutions rests on mutual reciprocity

Related

• Laws of war should grant equal right to fight, not equal arms (similarity 0.90)
• Law should equalize the right to fight, not the weapons themselves. (similarity 0.89)
• Legal immunity for wartime killing presupposes that the right to kill is mutual. (similarity 0.84)
• War’s immunity from murder prosecutions rests on mutual reciprocity (similarity 0.81)
• Humanitarian law must leave both sides equal chances to fight. (similarity 0.81)
• Outlawed combatants lose all incentive to obey war’s rules (similarity 0.80)
• Right to kill depends on readiness to expose own soldiers (similarity 0.80)
• Just-cause theorists grant only the just warrior the right to kill (similarity 0.79)
• Unilateral drone killing makes the legal right to kill merely formal. (similarity 0.79)
• Moral limits on weapons apply only where adversaries are equals (similarity 0.79)
• Humanitarian law must grant asymmetrical parties equal chances to fight. (similarity 0.79)
• Drone warfare leaves the mutual right to kill formally intact but substantively empty. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• War’s immunity from murder prosecutions rests on mutual reciprocity #corroborates (0.80)
• Laws of war should grant equal right to fight, not equal arms #corroborates (0.75)
• Law should equalize the right to fight, not the weapons themselves. #expands (0.70) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 1038