I’m not talking about personal morality, or even making a moral claim. I’m speaking strictly about how international law treats war crimes. You can believe that those rules are morally wrong, evil, or what have you. That’s not what I’m talking about.
The counter-argument, if you care, is that if you refuse to do military action because your opponent has endangered a child, that tells your opponent that the only thing they have to do in order to win is to point guns at children’s heads, thus only further incentivizing the risk to them. The problem, the argument goes, is that if you refuse to act because a child may be at risk, your position is essentially that someone can do literally any atrocity at all, and as long as they also ensure that a child will be harmed in the response, you won’t do anything about it. This allows the behavior to continue unimpeded and will result in net more harm.
Under your framework that killing children must always be verboten, you’re saying that the Allies should not have conducted any operations that put children at risk, and that so long as the Nazis ensured that any retaliatory attacks would harm children, they should have been allowed to continue their reign of horror forever.
they are saying when they do that is that they don’t mind killing children to get what they want.
Yes, that is what it’s saying. It’s morbid and terrible to ever have to make the decision, but I think most people would generally agree that there does exist a level of consequence that would justify putting children at harm’s risk, but also, that the blame lies with the people that have made the choice necessary to begin with. Just to take the most exaggerated ridiculous example possible, if a rouge terrorist somehow acquires a nuclear bomb, plants it in the middle of New York City, threatens to detonate it and you have the power to stop it by sending a missile to his house which will kill him and the group of kidnapped children he’s taken hostage, most people (and I’m not speculating; this has been studied) will say that you would be morally justified in sending the missile, and yes, killing the children. They would say that the blame lies with the terrorist that made the choice necessary in the first place.
I don’t want to get into the details of this current conflict because it’s just about the biggest geopolitical clusterfuck the world has ever known, but I hope you can at least understand the perspective behind the legal framework here, even if you still disagree with it.
I’m not talking about personal morality, or even making a moral claim. I’m speaking strictly about how international law treats war crimes. You can believe that those rules are morally wrong, evil, or what have you. That’s not what I’m talking about.
The counter-argument, if you care, is that if you refuse to do military action because your opponent has endangered a child, that tells your opponent that the only thing they have to do in order to win is to point guns at children’s heads, thus only further incentivizing the risk to them. The problem, the argument goes, is that if you refuse to act because a child may be at risk, your position is essentially that someone can do literally any atrocity at all, and as long as they also ensure that a child will be harmed in the response, you won’t do anything about it. This allows the behavior to continue unimpeded and will result in net more harm.
Under your framework that killing children must always be verboten, you’re saying that the Allies should not have conducted any operations that put children at risk, and that so long as the Nazis ensured that any retaliatory attacks would harm children, they should have been allowed to continue their reign of horror forever.
Yes, that is what it’s saying. It’s morbid and terrible to ever have to make the decision, but I think most people would generally agree that there does exist a level of consequence that would justify putting children at harm’s risk, but also, that the blame lies with the people that have made the choice necessary to begin with. Just to take the most exaggerated ridiculous example possible, if a rouge terrorist somehow acquires a nuclear bomb, plants it in the middle of New York City, threatens to detonate it and you have the power to stop it by sending a missile to his house which will kill him and the group of kidnapped children he’s taken hostage, most people (and I’m not speculating; this has been studied) will say that you would be morally justified in sending the missile, and yes, killing the children. They would say that the blame lies with the terrorist that made the choice necessary in the first place.
I don’t want to get into the details of this current conflict because it’s just about the biggest geopolitical clusterfuck the world has ever known, but I hope you can at least understand the perspective behind the legal framework here, even if you still disagree with it.