The Ethics Of War and Killing

There was a time, in junior high school, when I was a hard core pacifist, at all levels of the personal to the international level. I no longer hold that view.

War And The Use Of Force Is Sometimes The Answer

At the international level and in the context of civil wars, at least one party in any military conflict usually has no choice in the matter. Someone rebelled against them and attacked them. A pacifist stance that one should just give in to violence and threats of violence, while opposing them with non-violent resistance, simply isn't a workable real world approach.

Similarly, defense of self and defense of others defense to assault and homicide offenses isn't at all problematic. 

Indeed, legally justified war is to a great extent a recognition of this principle in a context where military force is necessary because the state using military force is not strong enough to deal with the threat through the more cumbersome and resource intensive due process and methods of its criminal justice system.

And, there is an aspect to those defenses which is non-obvious, but should be noted. Defending yourself or another against serious crimes, unlike a defense of property justification, requires reasonable necessity, but it does not require proportionality.

Killing thirty hostage takers in order to free one person who has been kidnapped is still legally and morally justified.

What Is Right The Gaza Conflict?

In connection with this idea, one of the factors that weighs heavily against Hamas in Gaza, and against Israel, is that Hamas still has about a hundred Israel hostages taken in the October 7 attack that it launched on Israel (which 57% of adult Gazans surveyed still think was the right decision to conduct, after the fact).

The Israeli-Gaza conflict is complex and multi-factored from a moral and ethical perspective. Israel has a long history of mistreating the Palestinians, and it retaliatory military actions in Gaza have inflicted immense suffering, loss, and hardship that is ongoing on lots of people in Gaza who aren't particularly blameworthy. But the Palestinians insistence on hard line positions that Israel shouldn't exist, that they should get their pre-1948 lands back, that they are justified in killing Israelis more or less at random today, and that several generations later that they are still refugees is extremely dubious. Basically, they lost control of their land to conquest and the time has long since passed for them to suck it up, accept it as a fait accompli, and find a way to move on from that defeat. And, Israel excesses, even if they are not fully justified, are at least understandable, when large majorities of the Palestinian adult population wants them dead and sees no moral problem with killing them at random. I don't think that Israel is responding to the October 7 attack in most ethically justifiable manner. 

But the fact that Hamas deliberately provoked this attack knowing that there would be overwhelming retaliation for it, that fact that the people who elected Hamas still feel that the attack was justified even after knowing the consequences, the fact that Hamas has not released the remaining 100 or so Israeli hostages it holds, the fact that Hamas has an official policy with has wide Palestinian support of favoring the annihilation of Israel, and the fact that Hamas is to some extent best understood as an Iranian proxy force, all greatly mitigate Israeli culpability for retaliating for the October 7 attack and changing the way that Gaza will operate going forward, in a way that has inflicted too much collateral damage on less culpable Gazans.

Israel certainly has no obligation to limit the number of people it kills in its responsive military action in Gaza to be somehow proportional to the 1400 or so people that Hamas killed on October 7-8 or so. At a minimum, it is justified in killing every single member of the Hamas military and those civilians somehow connected to ratifying or implementing the attack on it, to destroying everything that facilitates Hamas's military capabilities, to kill everyone it needs to in order to free those 100 hostages, and to inflict whatever collateral damages on Hamas controlled Gaza is necessary to achieve those ends. The only real ethical question is whether there has been far more collateral damage to Hamas controlled Gaza than is necessary, and on that point, there is a fair argument that there has been and that there is a great risk that the unnecessary part of that collateral damage will be great going forward.

I personally wouldn't find it morally offensive for Israel to deport the entire population of Gaza to someplace new, if a place could be found that would receive them. But Egypt doesn't want the Gazans, and neither does anyone else. 

But, for example, given that Hamas, the government that the Gazans chose in reasonably fair elections to rule them, was armed, provided with intelligence by, and incited to bring the October 7 attack by Iran, Iran has a moral duty to accept a relocation of all of the people of Gaza to its territory and it probably wouldn't be wrong for Israel to involuntarily deport them there and turn Gaza into additional territory for Israelis. Similarly, if predominantly Muslim countries really want to advocate for the well-being of Gazans, they should put their words into action and accept Gazans into their territories as new citizens of their countries.

The Death Penalty

I am also not ethically opposed to the death penalty, per se. There are definitely crimes for which the death penalty is not an excessive or disproportionate punishment. Likewise, an execution or corporal punishment that is excruciatingly painful isn't excessive for a crime that was itself heinous, although it may be undesirable for the government to cater to those who take delight in inflicting pain on others.

In theory, the death penalty could be cost effective relative to the cost of incarcerating someone in a maximum security prison for the rest of their life.

My problem with the death penalty is that, as applied, our criminal justice system is rarely accurate enough to justify the executions of wrongfully or immorally convicted innocent people which frequently occurs, and that our death penalty system as it is currently designed does not save money relative to life imprisonment.

Furthermore, many countries that have not abolished the death penalty, including China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia (and to a lesser extent, death penalty states in the U.S.), routinely use the death penalty for offenses for which it is not justified in circumstances in which the accuracy of their systems in imposing it upon people who are executed is doubtful.