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Economic sanctions have faced substantial criticism for being blunt coercive instruments that inflict a broad array of harms upon innocent populations. In response to this, the targeted sanctions movement has sought to limit the form, function, and scope of sanctioning efforts to minimize their adverse effects on average citizens who have no direct role in influencing the objectionable policies sanctions' senders senders want changed. We seek to take stock of whether targeted sanctions are truly more ethical coercive policies. We argue that targeted sanctions strategies, as practiced by the international community, tend to make tradeoffs amongst just war theory principles and at the cost of sanctions’ utility. Rather than representing an ethical form of coercion, targeted sanctions often just differ from more comprehensive sanctions in how they violate just war principles. We demonstrate this by showing that although …