 McMahan (2011a) has sought to avert this troubling implication of his arguments by contending that almost all noncombatants on the unjust side (unjust noncombatants) are less responsible than all unjust combatants. But this involves applying a double standard, talking up the responsibility of combatants, while talking down that of noncombatants, and mistakes a central element in his account of liability to be killed. On his view, a person is liable to be killed in self- or other-defence in virtue of being, of those able to bear an unavoidable and indivisible harm, the one who is most responsible for this situation coming about (McMahan 2002, 2005b). Even if noncombatants are only minimally responsible for their states’ unjust wars—that is, they are not blameworthy, they merely voluntarily acted in a way that foreseeably contributed to this result—on McMahan’s view this is enough to make them liable to be killed, if doing so is necessary to save the lives of wholly innocent combatants and noncombatants on the just side (see especially McMahan 2009: 225).