What’s your view?
It’s not ‘OK’ ( at least outside of a defensive war ), but people are taught to believe that it is because it benefits the powerful. That’s also why executions are approved of ( since the powerful almost never get executed ), while assassination is considered bad ( because assassination puts the powerful at risk, not the expendable commoners ).
Killing is never morally OK (IMHO) - it is, however, sometimes necessary…
A defensive war being one example.
Grim
Too simplistic. Even in an ideal democratic, perfectly egalitarian society executions might be approved of, while assassination might not be, simply because one may be societally sanctioned while the other almost certainly would not be.
In my wildest dreams I never thought I would agree with you on anything, but on this we agree. Killing is never right, however, killing to preserve your own life or others sometimes may be necessary. In defense killing may be acceptable, but never right. Executions are murder, plain and simple, expecially since one in eight are innocent of the crime.
My greatest surprise was when a spiritual guide said: “if a person is so filled with hate and violence that nothing can be done for him, then the most loving thing may be to send him home.” Meaning to kill him. But only in extreme circumstances.
Depends on what you mean by “OK,” doesn’t it? I’m assuming you mean “not illegal” or “not a crime.” Then, in addition to war or military action, there are other cases where killing is “acceptable” – self-defense comes to mind. (War is arguably just a special/societal case of self-defense.) Another example would be killing by failing to act, such as terminal patients who are not given life-support.
Irrelevant, since I was talking about real societies, not ideals that don’t exist and never will.
And you completely brush aside the question of why one form of killing is sanctioned and the other is not.
Executions are performed by law, after trial, with the consensus of peers.
Assassinations are the illegal act of an individual, or perhaps team of unlawful persons.
I see a big distinction here. And although capital punishment is not legal in Canada I have no problem with it if decided upon in a democracy.
I think this is it: Anyone but extreme pacifists would find it (at least in some circumstances) acceptable to kill in self-defense, or in defense of another innocent person. And killing in war, if it *is okay, is okay because it does fall into this category.
Which of course raises the issue of when it is morally acceptable to engage in war, and what it is morally acceptable to do in a war. See, for example, Just War theory.
While I do not subscribe to this view, I get the impression that, in some cultures, the answer to the OP’s question would be something along the lines of: For the same reason that it’s okay to punch someone in the face during a boxing match but not elsewhere. That is, war has its own rules of what’s acceptable.
The justification in the boxing case is that the participants have consented to being punched, under certain conditions (such as, that the rules of the game be obeyed).
There are in fact two seperate answers to the OP, depending on whether the OP means ‘morally’ or ‘legally’ okay:
First, it is legally okay to kill in war because in just about every society, killing during warfare is, when under legitimately constituted authority, considered not only legal but praiseworthy; the reason being that relations between states are essentially anarchistic, recent attempts to create forms of law between states notwithstanding; thus, in the absence of a real sovereign authority, state-sanctioned violence is the only way to police relations between states. It makes no sense in this system to persecute the individuals participating, as it is the system’s fault (or rather, the lack of a system’s fault). They may well face persecution should they kill not under duly constituted authority, or do so in a manner not accepted by the same.
Second, it is morally okay to kill in war where the conditions of a “just war” are met; that is, where the war itself is just and where it is conducted in a just manner. Naturally, all sorts of people will interptret these conditions differently - the more pacifistic your leaning, the more difficult for any particular war to qualify.
The difference between these positions can be seen in the example of Germans during WW2 - it was clearly “legal” for German soldiers to kill in that war, but clearly “immoral” for them to do so, as the war itself was unjust and conducted unjustly.
There have been various attempts to codify just war theory as a principle of law, but all are doomed to comparative failure by the lack of any true world sovereign, the UNSC notwithstanding.
Here is Curtis LeMay’s view on it.
I think the “Why” of it is that we consider there to be no limit to the scale of acceptable responses to threat, presuming the threat itself it also similarly large, and I think the why of that is because, if someone threatens or attacks you, we sort of feel that, since they’re willing to take extreme actions against others, that they have implicitly given permission for similar actions to be taken against themselves.
At least, this is the ideal case: the ‘moral’ okayness of self defense, including killing in self-defense, defensive war, and even the execution by society of murderous criminals. However there are various other cases where killing is allowed out of proportion to the actions of the killee; those are generally ‘okay’ only in the sense that people think they can get away with it. (And at times, they’re right, especially if they happen to be of the political upper class killing those of ‘lower’ classes.) This would include the typical offensive war.
As said, it depends on the meaning of “OK”.
One might argue that killing is never a good thing, but is sometimes necessary to avoid a worse consequence. (E.g., killing is bad, but letting Hitler conquer the world is worse.)
There are other situations besides war where people find killing permissible in the face of the alternative. E.g., most people wouldn’t object to a police officer shooting a criminal to stop the criminal from shooting an innocent victim.
One could argue however that perhaps the standard for what is an acceptable reason to kill is different in wartime than not, and could ask what the justification for this is.
I think there’s also a difference from the level of justification required for the political leaders initiating the war and for the actual soldiers doing the killing. E.g., you could argue that the threat to this country posed by communist control of Vietnam wasn’t enough to justify going to war and killing many Vietnamese (basically, justifying it on national “self defense” grounds). But this is not necessarily inconsistent with arguing that the particular U.S. soldiers doing the killing may have been reasonably acting in “self defense” in killing enemy soldiers who were bent on killing them.
However, that ignores the question of why one is legal, and the other not. The answer, primarily, is that assassination threatens the upper classes. You’re a hero if you put on a uniform and kill other mostly low-to-middle class people in uniform; you are a bad guy if you snipe the upper class guy who gives those uniformed people the orders to kill.
No, that is not the reason. It’s because of a ‘greater good’ sort of thing. The person in power is a servant of the people. Without the will to protect our politicians from assassination, we cannot have a functioning government. This protects civil servants from some legal responsibility for acts of state that have bad consequences. A government paralyzed in such a way cannot act at all. An Assassin tends to be working on his own for his own or some organization’s purpose, contrary to the purpose of the state that appointed/elected the official. The execution of a murderer is sort of a societal immune response. It removes a pernicious infection. In each case it has to do with representation of the people vs the lack thereof. It’s not quite so simplistic as you lay out.
Of course, before World War II (when aristocrats led their commoner soldiers from the front), the class least likely to die in a war is a middle-class businessman.
The issue is who authorizes the killing. In an ordinary killing, a private individual or group decides to kill somebody. Society has decided that individuals do not have the authority to make this decision.
But society has also decided that there are legitimate reasons for society as a whole to kill people. And if society has authorizes the killing, then the individuals who actually perform the killing are just acting as representatives of their society.
Or back in the Middle-Ages peasants were the least likely to die as it was the noble knights that went to war. I think it was Frederick Barbarossa who said that when he went to war he didn’t even want his peasants to know about it.
That’s pure rhetoric.
Because the members of the ruling elite tend to regard each other as less expendable than the common folk, so they typically don’t send assassins after each other.
Only on the winning side in a battle; plenty of civilians were killed in sacks of cities and sieges and such. And there were still plenty of class differences in war.
And the peasants are the worse off for this because they can ill afford to have what little they have left taken.