Killing when you are not fighting for defensive victory

 Once upon a time, there was a silly party game called "Scruples."  A player would draw a card, posing a moral or ethical dilemma in order to amuse party-goers.  You attempt to weasel around supposedly sticky wickets.  The idea was nothing new, or at least if there was anything new to it, it was the trivializing structure of certain specific and mostly trivial questions.  Yet moral philosophy is only important in the interstices, when one principle or goal conflicts with another.  If you believe that you hold a rule to be absolute, I search for a circumstance, however extreme, in which you would violate it.  The threshold for killing is high, for what should be obvious reasons, yet for most people that does not mean that it is an inviolable rule.  Whether that is the death penalty for the most heinous crimes, killing in self-defense, or even some absurd variation of the trolley problem, unless you are the weirdest of the weird, a Jainist, or something of the sort, I can poke and prod and find a circumstance in which you would accept the morality of killing.  Removed from the cheap diversion of Scruples, it is a serious question, because therein lies the most important boundary of law and policy.

Even the most self-righteous hippy, who bathes not with soap and water, but with an aura of self-satisfaction infused with patchouli, can be pressed on this point.

The question is not what principle you hold to be inviolable, but the boundaries of any principle you hold.

If you say something like, "war is always wrong," you will be trapped by your own rule.  Rather, you will be forced to accept some circumstance unless you accept some truly untenable outcome.  The better questions, then, are these.  Under what circumstances is war acceptable, and how may it be conducted?

The obvious answer to the first question is, in self-defense, or in defense of those incapable of self-defense.  War inevitably kills noncombatants.  That is a compromise.  War, given the constraints created by an attacker, becomes the better option because the alternative is worse.  Noncombatants die either way.  One does not want that to happen, but the goal is to prevent that, long term, by defeating the attacker.

Here, then, is the problem.  If you kill x of my citizens, and I kill x of your civilians (i.e. arithmetic "proportionality," which you may notice is exactly what leftists advocate these days), you are engaged in something else.  You are engaged in revenge.  Revenge is both act and motive, and the motive of revenge is one that I will maintain is intrinsically wrong.  Can you trap me there?  Maybe.  I don't think so, since I am rejecting the motive, but this is vital.

If you respond to killing by killing the same number, are you acting defensively?  No.  Your motive is tit-for-tat.  That is vengeance, and that is morally indefensible.

Strategically, we can get into the game theory of deterrence, Axelrod, the efficacy of tit-for-tat, and all that, but from a moral perspective, it is revenge.  Nope.

Killing, under the potentially defensible aegis of war, has moral legitimacy only if it has the defensive purpose of defeating the enemy in order to prevent further aggression.

Purpose matters.  Motive matters.  Effect matters.  And here is what will seem, at the surface, to be a paradox.  To kill x in response to x is vengeance, which is morally indefensible.  However, to defeat the aggressor may require killing x + z, and since that response is conducted, not for the purposes of vengeance, but to neutralize an enemy and prevent future attack, it is defensive rather than vengeful, and hence even with a higher death toll, it is morally defensible.

The obvious demonstrations of this point are WWII, and tit-for-tat gang warfare.  The United States killed far more Japanese civilians than they did of ours, but they attacked us, to say nothing of the atrocities they committed in China, or the European Theatre.

In contrast, gangs who respond to each others' killings with tit-for-tat are not trying to establish peaceful order or act self-defensively.  They're just enacting vengeance.

And yet consider the differences in scale across those two examples, and within.

When attacked, when engaged in war, the moral path is to fight for victory, to defeat the enemy, not for vengeance, but to protect against future attack.

Our fight in WWII was moral and justified, despite not just a higher death toll than gang warfare, but the fact that we killed more Japanese civilians than they killed of ours.

Imagine, though, that after Pearl Harbor, FDR had ordered some soldiers not to set up those internment camps, which were bad enough, and not defensible, but just to round up some Japanese Americans, say a few hundred, and shoot them in the head.

What, then?

Well, we would not have killed nearly so many Japanese, would we?  Nor Germans.

This is also the plot of so many dystopian alternate histories as to be a cliche, because an Axis victory is the ultimate horror story.

But we wouldn't have killed all those people.

Nobody believes that morality in war is defined by the comparative number of people killed on each side.  Nobody.  If such a person existed, that person would claim that the tit-for-tat murder in gang warfare is more moral than our involvement in WWII.

Find me that person.

Now here is the problem.  It means that half-measures in warfare, where you fight without fighting to win, are immoral.  You kill without the moral justification of fighting to create a lasting defense.  Even if you were the one attacked, if you respond by killing without fighting for victory, then you leave your own people open to further attack, and cannot justify your own killing with self-defense, which is the viable moral justification.

Paradoxical, perhaps, but it means that you do one of two things.  Commit fully, or submit.  To do otherwise is to kill without moral purpose.  I find that odious.

And to go back through writings on the morality of war, the very idea would have seemed absurd.  The idea of being attacked and saying, well, I don't want to commit fully to victory because I might hurt too many people on your side, so I'll only fight a little... you would have been dismissed as a lunatic or fool.

Yet, I see two examples, and I don't like either.  Hamas specifically, and jihadism generally must be defeated.  Hamas is about as evil an organization as exists on Earth today.  Yet Israel is not fighting for victory.  Leftists, anti-Semites, the Islamic world and various fellow travelers have concocted a new blood libel, that Israel is committing "genocide," but that is as disgusting a lie as the original blood libel, noting of course that the UN itself participated in October 7, alongside an organization whose mission statement is the extermination of the Jews.  Instead, Israel is pursuing a strange middle strategy, trying not to kill civilians while Hamas shoves its own population into the line of fire to manipulate you, while still shooting.

The leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, lives because his life was saved from a brain tumor while in an Israeli prison.  By a Jewish surgeon.

That is who the Israelis are.  You didn't know that, did you?

Imagine the reverse.

The IDF is trying to find a way to not kill civilians, while Hamas uses them as human shields, counting on the bad faith and stupidity of outside observers.  Yet because the IDF is going so far, trying to avoid civilian deaths in such a densely populated area, with Hamas using human shields, rather than simply blowing the shit out of every target, Hamas is guaranteed to survive.

And October 7 will happen again and again.

Hamas is saying/lying that they want a permanent ceasefire.  That, of course, is the most transparent lie in the world today.  They want Israel to withdraw, so that they can follow through on their promise to hold more attacks.  They want Israel to cease fire.  They promise to keep firing, and keep raping and burning until every Jew on Earth is dead.  It is literally in their founding document.

The moral justification for killing, from Israel's perspective, is to defeat an enemy committed to the genocide of the Jews, by their own founding documents.  If they aren't fighting to achieve that, then by what justification do they kill?

All or nothing.  Commit or submit.

One side is the purest of evils, but seeking a middle path is compromised in the wrong sense.

And now, our Dear Leader, Joseph R. Biden has promised some sort of response, as a different Iran-backed terrorist organization of fanatical jihadists has killed American soldiers.  Why, it's almost as though Iran is the real problem...

Commit, or submit.  There is one justification for killing.  Victory in defense.  Seek that objective, or your killing has no moral justification.  If, on the other hand, you are too squeamish for that, then don't kill.

Submit.  Give in, do whatever they want, convert to their religion, submit to their demands, let them rape you to death, whatever.  That's it, that's all there is to it.

Here, then, is the problem.  We have the biggest guns and the toughest military in the world.  It counts for nothing if we will not use it.  The same can be said of Israel, or anyone.  If you care more about the other side's civilians than they care about their own, you lose.  A resource that you refuse to use doesn't exist.

Biden will shoot a couple of missiles into the near vicinity of some targets to waggle his finger ineffectually.  Israel will kill, some number of Hamas terrorists and some others, but they will not commit because they are the side that gives Sinwar life-saving surgery while in prison, and then cringes about the human shields that Hamas uses.

Hamas is not mourning those deaths.  They are celebrating those deaths.  To Hamas, anyone killed by a filthy Jew is a martyr.  They go to paradise.  Then, double victory, Hamas gets to turn that into a propaganda victory, manipulating useful idiots around the world who care more about Palestinian civilians than they do, but hate Jews just as much.  They kill a Jew, they celebrate, because that's their purpose.  They die, and they're martyrs.

Commit, or submit.  That's it.  Otherwise, there is death, and there will continue to be death without end.  The justification for killing is the prevention of future killing.  Without that, there is not even justification for a middling death toll.