Don’t let justified terror or rage cause you to do immoral things

When extremely angry, or extremely wronged, or when one has undergone incredible suffering, or when filled with belief in one’s righteous mission, it becomes very tempting for many people to ignore very strong moral norms.

But that’s also how so many others in the past made grave moral errors.

Right now, it seems important to make an assertion that is so obvious that one shouldn’t have to say it: Even in a war, all militaries/armed groups should be very careful to avoid unnecessarily killing ordinary people who are just going about their lives.

Of course, there’s no one value that’s infinitely valuable, so in wild situations, there can hypothetically be times when killing is justified. But the vast majority of the time, when groups have claimed that not being careful to avoid killing innocent civilians is justified, they were wrong.

Sadly, being very careful not to kill innocent civilians is not the same as killing zero civilians. The horrible reality is that war in areas with lots of civilians nearby will almost always lead to dead civilians even when a lot of care is taken not to kill them. But taking great care should lead to many fewer civilians dead than would have occurred otherwise.

When groups PURPOSELY kill innocent people to achieve their ends, I believe that more than 99.9% of the time they were morally in the wrong taking that action.  And if you find yourself advocating for PURPOSELY killing innocent people, it is a very strong red flag that you’re advocating that other people do something very immoral. There are incredibly strong moral priors that say you should take great precautions to avoid murdering innocent people.

In my view, one of the only potentially-valid justifications for killing innocent civilians is to save a much larger number of other innocent civilians. But, also, that calculus should be used with great care – I believe that most of the time, when it ends up getting used in real life, it is actually misused, and ends up (accidentally) becoming a justification for immoral behavior.

This piece was first written on October 17, 2023, and first appeared on this site on October 26, 2023.