 But one could also consider the following: Even if ISIL is primarily at fault for using civilians as cover, why should this mean that those civilians enjoy weaker protections against being harmed? We typically think that one should only lose or forfeit one’s rights through one’s own actions. But on this argument, civilians enjoy weaker protections against being killed through no fault or choice of their own. Some might think that more permissive standards apply for involuntary human shields because of the additional value of deterring people from taking advantage of morality in this kind of way (Smilansky 2010; Keinon 2014). But that argument seems oddly circular: we punish people for taking advantage of our moral restraint by not showing moral restraint. What’s more, this changes the act from one that foreseeably kills civilians as an unavoidable side-effect of countering the military threat to one that kills those civilians as a means to deter future abuses. This instrumentalizes them in a way that makes harming them still harder to justify.