The problem with the implication of the answer you are seeking for that question is that it incentivizes immoral behavior because it gives a tremendous advantage for achieving a goal for those who are willing to act in a way that provides an impossible moral choice for their adversaries. At some point, utilitarian calculations are justifiable in order to maximize what one considers moral.
Hamas totally agrees.
Stalin totally agreed.
Mao, and Hitler, and Pol Pot, and Pinochet totally agreed.
History is lousy with tyrants who justified their atrocities with utilitarian calculations designed to maximize what they considered moral.
The whole point of human rights–and of concepts like “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity”–is that these utilitarian calculations are sometimes off the table. You don’t get to weigh your atrocities against the possible outcomes, and stay in the community of civilized nations.
This is a wee bit hypocritical, coming from an American. I’d let this kind of preachiness slide from say a Norwegian or similar, but Americans have no leg to stand on when it comes to committing atrocities and other war crimes and justifying themselves, in very recent memory.
And so has every US president and every other leader of a nation at war. I am continually surprised that people suggest that a nation is obligated to cower impotently after being subjected to an attack that included rape, torture, and the deliberate killing of infants and toddlers because the immoral actions and tactics of the perpetrators will lead to more suffering. Hamas could surrender. But they won’t need to because of Western apologists.
You don’t even understand what I am saying and you grossly misrepresent it.
A lot of Americans take it as a given that our government murders civilians. I don’t think it’s really hypocritical to oppose your own government as well as other governments for doing the same thing.
It’s the “community of civilized nations” patronizing bullshit that’s hypocritical and preachy. There ain’t no such thing.
OK, fair.
Either you think we all think the same, or you use “hypocritical” in a different sense than I do. I’ve lodged similar complaints against the US government, and I’ve never ever felt it represents me.
It’s, like anarchism, aspirational.
You’re fuckin funny, dude. Do you even read what you write before you post it?
If you don’t feel America is one of the “community of civilized nations”, then I apologize. Otherwise, it stands.
I don’t wield anarchism as a ruler to slap the knuckles of archists while I tut-tut at them…
You still haven’t demonstrated understanding only so-called concern.
At the point where you claim that my calls for not committing crimes against humanity are declaring that “a nation is obligated to cower impotently,” this criticism of yours is wholly toothless.
I definitely do not feel that way. There may be a few countries, like Costa Rica, that might qualify, but I’d not put a nation that spent a couple decades bombing Afghani weddings in that category.
If “the community of civilized nations” is restricted to Costa Rica and, I dunno, Andorra and Bhutan? Maybe it’s not a useful thing to wave about while weighing up possible Israeli actions.
I mean, I get it, it’s ol’ Putzy, and I certainly don’t take his side in this. I’m not saying your larger point doesn’t have some merit. But the way you laid it out is pretty damn preachy, and certainly reads like you saying only the worst monsters of history favour utilitarian approaches. If you’d thrown in a Bush or a Johnson along with the Stalins and Pinochets, I wouldn’t have said anything.
Rhetorically, I figured that throwing out names @octopus wouldn’t want to identify with would be more effective than throwing out someone he thought was hunky dory. Hell, I even thought about not including Pinochet for that reason. But I take your point, and absolutely we have our Bushes, our Reagans, our Johnsons, our Clintons who demonstrate what eggs people will break in order to make their favorite omelet.
That’s hilarious. Stalin!!! 
I almost did an emoji at each name just to acknowledge the perception but you folks are far too ‘serious’ for that sort of self-aware levity.
Look, you don’t understand what I am saying. You just don’t. My response was to Miller who can read.
But to simplify it here goes: Israel and Hamas each have different fundamental sets of morality. As far as states and organizations can be anthropomorphized. When dealing with a group like Hamas who has the explicit goal of Israel’s genocide/elimination AND has demonstrated the ability to act in that direction with terroristic acts one has every right to take actions to ensure one’s own survival by eliminating said threat.
Now we all know that the elimination of an idea is impossible. We all know that innocent people are going to die and suffer horribly. But if you fail to act then there will be even more dying and suffering because Hamas will be encouraged to continue what they will perceive as a successful strategy. Nowhere in any of my posts did I say Israel ought to nuke Gaza and kill everyone in it. But they are fighting an incompatible group who is not bound by any so-called “international” norms and they are not omnipotent and they are not omniscient and urban warfare is horrid. Especially urban warfare against a non-uniformed group that exploits civilians and kidnapped babies. So, to suggest that Israel is obligated to lose thousands of more civilians and soldiers to placate your naive sensibilities is, to use one of your favorite words, gross.
You fixated on one word, utilitarian, and misunderstood it. I’d say deliberately but you consistently fail to demonstrate the ability to read what you respond to.
That’s a whole lotta prevaricatin to get around a simple question: do you think Israel is obligated to “placate my naive sensibilities” by following international law?
My “naive sensibilities” are the same “naive sensibilities” as the United Nations. As the World Health Organization. As Doctors Without Borders, and the International Red Cross, and just about every other humanitarian group out there. You’re not raising objections, you’re just throwing out insults.
I notice you didn’t mention Obama, who certainly wasn’t afraid to break eggs either. I don’t think it’s really a right vs left thing so much as a basic requirement of the modern system of nation-states.
I’ll note that your example of Costa Rica squeaks by without having to break any eggs mostly because it’s happy to eat America’s leftovers. In this increasingly strained analogy - Costa Rica doesn’t have to fight because American policy labels the whole hemisphere that Costa Rica is in off limits.
Look, aspirationally, I think the whole concept of nation-states is archaic and damaging. Think about what nationalism does. It seems like a hacked together way to turn our tribal instincts towards a common purpose, by giving us a constructed ingroup at a national level. And this has its benefits. For example, in the United States, the sense that we are all Americans with equal rights was used to fight for civil rights. But it can also be weaponized. Are those people real Americans? If you convince enough people that Black people aren’t Americans you can turn nationalism into a weapon (which it was originally, in the case of Black Americans). Or it can be turned against migrants at the southern border, which it could never protect because they are outside the “nation” (which highlights the big limitation of nationalism).
Here’s the thing, though. Nationalism didn’t pop out of the ether fully formed. Nationalism took root and spread so much because it works. Modern nation-states command orders of magnitude more people and resources than even the most powerful empires of old, and they do it with much less coercion than feudal kings or Roman emperors. Because the shared story of the nation-state is a powerful thing.
So how do we get rid of the ugly parts of nationalism like xenophobia without also torpedoing our ability to work together towards a shared goal? I won’t pretend to have the answer. Obviously, that’s not something Humanity has ever done before.
But what I can do is look around and see who is on the right path. And that’s where I look to the European Union.
That’s not to say that the EU doesn’t have its issues. But on the whole, it seems like a perfect transition. Imagine a world where there are lots and lots of nation-states. Palestinians get to self-govern. Kurds get to self-govern. If someone starts persecuting Palestinians or Kurds, Palestine or Kurdistan speaks up.
But at the same time all of these nations work together. Their economies are completely interlinked. People can freely travel between nations, live and work whereever they please.
But again, that’s all aspirational. We don’t live in that world. Some states or non-state groups are violent actors who are completely disinterested in coexistence.
In Israel, those groups are represented by people like Ben Gvir, and - since Israel is a democracy where Ben Gvir’s ilk make up a small proportion of the electorate, the solution is to oppose them at every turn, point out how their policies have contributed to the current crisis, and toss them out of office.
In Gaza, those people are represented by Hamas, which controls Gaza with an iron fist. They cannot be dislodged by internal opposition, they do not hold elections. And they have full control of a force of militants, again unlike Ben Gvir.
I mean it’s also a sign that Obama’s “breaking eggs” were also war crimes. Including IMO the worst, aiding Saudi Arabia’s efforts to starve out Yemeni civillians in an effort to fight the Houthis who (while also horrible people) posed virtually no threat to American civillians and were actually fighting against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, who were also Saudi allies.
And like many insurgent/terrorist/extremist groups, in spite of the massive collateral damage incurred in an attempt to root them out, they’re still there.
At some point the list was getting too long–but absolutely Obama’s administration enabled war crimes. His were much smaller than, say, Bush’s, but you don’t get to commit just a few itty bitty little war crimes. You get to commit none.
I think I agree with the rest of your post, and it’s probably a poor turn of phrase for me to use. Its rhetorical value is outweighed by the false system it implicitly supports.
Well, we can all celebrate. The “collateral damage” talk killed a 6 year old boy in Indiana Illinois. Human animals indeed.