In modern war, the Western world typically seeks to avoid killing “innocent civilians.” Likewise, the people of the West decry the deaths of “innocent bystanders” in situations of criminal violence. This stems from a too narrow assessment of responsibility. In war it is most obvious. In war, all adults of a nation are responsible for the actions of their nation, because their government is assumed to act on their behalf. That is what makes it a sovereign government. If their government was not acting on their behalf, then it was their responsibility to change their government, or to die trying, especially if that government was undertaking acts of war against other nations. Every adult, male and female, had a choice, to go along or to resist, so every adult who is still breathing and not in prison consented to the war. And those who are in prison for their resistance are not innocent of the war; they are combatants hostile to the regime in question.

The important thing here is the definition of innocent. Just because the political prisoner did not instigate the act of war, nor was complicit in it, does not make him innocent. To be innocent with respect to an event, he would have to be in no way involved and utterly without agency with respect to the event. As an enemy of his government and an opponent of its actions, he is witting and willing participant in the event. If the event takes his life, he dies not innocent of it, but as a witting and willing participant.

This extends to violent events, crimes, and other evils which occur within a community, and the implications are harsher. If an adult bystander becomes a collateral victim of a gang shootout, or a police shooting, that adult is not innocent, because that adult is a part of that community. His decisions and actions, indeed his entire life, influenced that event and his readiness for it. He may not be culpable, but he has made countless choices which led to that moment, including choices that influenced his community to be more or less violent, more or less likely to produce such an event.

Innocence is unique to those who have never had an opportunity for agency with respect to a situation. In other words, innocence is unique to those who have never made a choice with respect to good and evil, but have lived, heretofore, “innocent” of moral concerns. Adam and Eve were innocent until the moment that they considered the possibility that they could act selfishly rather than selflessly. (It is commonly read that the eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was the moment of the fall, but it was not. The fall happened in the moment each of them, Eve and then Adam, allowed their minds to be turned to the consideration of selfishness and egocentrism as an option. From that moment they were no longer innocent, because from that moment they had made at least one moral choice, and so the weight of the burden of choice was on them. Everything after that, the ramifications of the fruit itself, came as a result of taking on the burden of choice and abandoning innocence.) All adults from Adam and Eve forward make moral choices. They are not innocent. Only children, young children not yet cognizant of such issues, those young enough that they have not yet had a chance even to choose to ignore moral issues or abstain from moral agency, can still be said to be innocent.

This is not to say that society should seek to punish those other than the direct perpetrators of a crime or an act of war. Societal retribution in pursuit of justice is a matter of determining guilt for purposes of maintaining societal order, and nothing more. A human justice system can never determine absolute guilt or innocence. It can only assess that this person or that person is the immediate, proximate perpetrator of the crime, and that the swift and equitable punishment of that person will serve to preserve justice, order, and above all liberty, in society. Indeed, the punishment meted out by society cannot even be said to be punishment in the sense of balancing the scales of justice for the person’s crimes. That cannot be society’s goal, because society cannot measure the true burden of the perpetrator’s guilt, properly accounting for all mitigating and causal circumstances. Any effort to this end is futile and will inevitably result in chaos, as social justice supplants any semblance of real justice. The best a society can do domestically is to implement a system of exactly equal retribution on the proximate agent of the crime and leave it at that. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life, and nothing more. No human being has the wisdom to achieve anything more, because no human being has perfect knowledge of circumstances and how those circumstances should weigh.

In the case of war, because one society has no authority to impose punishments of justice on the other (by definition, since the advent of war implies that the other society has the strength to determine its own behavior, and authority is solely a function of disparity of force), the one society can only attack the other collectively. When two societies go to war, collective responsibility is and must be assumed. One society can only attack the other in its every aspect until all persons in the other society who support that society’s war effort are dead or have capitulated, and the remainder of conscious, decision-capable people have decided to ally with the opposition. Any attempt to divide an enemy nation into its government, its military, and its “innocent civilians” is doomed not just to failure but to atrocity. First and foremost, it encourages the hideous presumption that it is “more okay” to slaughter military people than other classes of people, as if their lives count for less than those of their countrymen because they dared to bear the burden of combat. Second, and perhaps more significantly, it promotes the absolution of the enemy nation’s civilians’ responsibility for the actions of their government. Allowed to be treated as innocent, they will certainly choose to be treated as innocent, but they are not. It is their choices, their culture, which brought about their government’s actions and their military’s actions. Only two versions of the same possibility can result: Either they cynically deceive you, fully aware of their culpability but pretending to the innocence you assign them until they can recover and resume hostilities, or they believe the innocence you assign them and never seek to cleanse themselves of the qualities which produced their government and its actions. In either case, repeating history is inevitable. A nation which allows its government to go to war must pay for that, until they commit to positive action to prevent it ever happening again, or they will allow it to happen again as soon as they are able.

Nor, when I say only the children are innocent, do I mean that children are good. A child who is innocent may be good, evil, or a mix. It is possible that a few children are broken from their formation, born for cruelty and wickedness. It is more likely that they are dynamic but undetermined systems waiting for environmental input, and the bad ones, the ones who show sadism or psychopathic tendencies even in early childhood, are victims of some environmental pressure or abuse which has not yet been recognized by the observer. The good ones, those children who are particularly selfless and kind, are likewise probably products of early, subtle conditioning. In either case (even the case of a child monster), the child is innocent, because the child has had no agency in his condition. He has never made a choice, never considered the possibility that he could be one thing or another.

So, only the children are innocent, because only the children are not causal in their good or evil or mixed natures. All the rest, all of the adults, have made moral choices, if no more than the choice to flee from moral choices, and as such all adults must bear the consequences of their society’s actions, and should not be shielded with a misguided misunderstanding of innocence.