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Comment by titraprutr | Hacker News Reader

"Ethics of War" sounds like an oxymoron.

And yet it is internationally recognized to exist. Here's a video that goes into how war has more formalized ethics than, say romance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oThh3_Srxtc

It's useful to recognize it, while simply abiding by only the parts of it which suit you. After all, if you need to, you can always ignore it and deny it.

That's the reality of war.

True, but this fatalistic view alone isn't an argument to stop trying to maintain ethical behavior even when when waging war.

Absolutely, and I didn't mean my post to come across that way. This topic makes me a bit glum, and I think that comes across as defeatist, but I'd rather take on the correct, losing fight, than not fight at all.

On the other hand, the Thirty Years War caused such destruction that the institutional memory in European nobility lasted 250 years. Total warfare on such scale was only seen again during the Peninsular War.

And yet Curtis LeMay died a free man.

In times of peace, sure. In times of war, it's usually forgotten within 1-2 years of the outbreak of hostilities.

Without ethics of war you'd have no war crimes, everything would be okay the moment a war starts - not really a good idea.

Sure, in a perfect world there wouldn't be any war, but that won't happen as long as there are humans.

Which is they Geneva Conventions and other treaties of the like make it clear that the protections only apply to groups that have signed and follow them.

The proto-ISIS militia groups in Iraq did not, and would deliberately target civilians, refused to wear uniforms, and hid among civilian population. Because of that they did not have POW rights that afforded to legitimate militias.

Refusing POW rights is as much a reflection on those they fight as it is on ISIS. If you're making categories like this you have crossed the moral line, if not the legal one.

POW rights are earned by wearing uniforms. Not wearing uniforms means you've passed a moral line that encourages the murder, if not slaughter, of civilians.

That may be legally correct but is that morally ok? How do you apply this to groups history looks upon sympathetically? French partisans come to mind, but there are dozens of other groups that had similar situations. Selectively deciding abuse of humans is ok is a slippery slope. Not wearing a uniform may relate more to total oppression or occupation rather than be an indicator of disregard for civilians.

Yes, it is absolutely morally OK, because it puts pressure on all combatants to follow conventions designed to protect civilians.

From the article:

> Of course, the Just War Ethic suffers from a problem: The normative ideal in this case is the absence of war, yet the reality of war precludes that ideal. Therefore, any applied ethics of war are by definition morally flawed. The question for the ethicist then is this: Is it more ethical to make continued (and often ignored) normative pronouncements against the existence of war, or to engage with the temporal reality of war with ethics that seek to limit the cases in which war is undertaken, to moderate its effects, and to guide it toward the normative goal, with the understanding that this goal is not immediately or fully achievable? Obviously, advocates of the Just War Ethic, myself included, come to the latter conclusion.

The author's argument is a good one, but note that, in the (perhaps rare) case of just wars, he doesn't even have to concede this point:

> The normative ideal in this case is the absence of war, yet the reality of war precludes that ideal. Therefore, any applied ethics of war are by definition morally flawed.

With the exception of true pacifism, which is exceptionally rare, essentially everyone agrees that there are just uses of violence. When within a nation with a functioning government, this is the police's uses of force. When it's between nations, it's war. No one would think that rules governing the police's use of violence are inconsistent with the fact that we'd all prefer violence be unnecessary. Likewise, there are at least some just wars (by at least one of the participants), and in these cases the just participant need not be morally flawed at all.

As a defender one is a partaker in a war. As partaker in a war one can choose to either take or not take prisoners and one can choose to torture said prisoners or not. These choices represent different levels of ethicality.

It's also not always necessarily attacker vs defender. You can have wars between two sides that both want to go to war.

Also, there was a whole period of war (the so-called Cabinet Wars, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabinettskriege) which was for the most part just princes with smaller armies in a very constrained manner fighting each other. So it's not always the same there.

Not a vet, eh?

Careful not to cut yourself on that edge, sparky. :|

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