Hananeh Khansari

This paper offers a critical re-examination of the principle of proportionality within contemporary just war theory, arguing that its dominant interpretations rely on an unduly narrow conception of harm and an ethically problematic form of moral calculation. While proportionality is conventionally understood as a comparative assessment of anticipated military benefits against foreseeable civilian harm, the article contends that such assessments systematically obscure deeper, structural forms of violence produced by war. Drawing on philosophical debates in just war theory (including Walzer, McMahan, and May) and grounding the analysis in concrete historical examples, the paper shows how proportionality has increasingly functioned as a technocratic and rhetorical device for legitimizing violence rather than as a genuinely critical moral constraint. The central contribution of the article is the introduction of the concept of collective viability—the ensemble of material, institutional, symbolic, and affective conditions that make shared social life, cultural continuity, and post-war reconstruction possible. Harms to collective viability, such as the erosion of social trust, destruction of cultural memory, collapse of institutions, and intergenerational trauma, are neither adequately captured by casualty counts nor reducible to economic loss, yet they fundamentally undermine the prospects of a just and lasting peace. The paper argues that ignoring these forms of harm not only distorts proportionality judgments but also risks reducing human beings to mere biological units within cost–benefit calculations. The article concludes that if proportionality is to retain ethical relevance, it must be reconceptualized to include long-term, collective, and structural harms, thereby reconnecting moral judgment in war to questions of dignity, responsibility, and the conditions of meaningful social life.