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Comment by mancerayder | Hacker News Reader

There's hubris in the belief that one 'knows' always and every time what good and evil are. There were always multiple sides, each on the side of Good, killing each other, since antiquity. The more modern enlightened moralist should strive to question one's information and assumptions, at all times. Oftentimes, looking back in history we see moral ambiguities.

Certainly in the field of international relations the concepts of good and evil are in the realm of media commentary and politicians. Foreign policy crafters, and the literature around them, have a completely other way of talking.

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> There's hubris in the belief that one 'knows' always and every time what good and evil are.

Oh, come on. You don't need to invoke existential certainty to know that unilateral military invasion of peaceful nations is "evil" inasmuch as that word has any meaning at all.

> unilateral military invasion of peaceful nations is "evil"

America invaded Iraq and Afghanistan on flimsy pretexts and then continued to occupy the latter for what, 20 years?

Why wasn’t there similar international pushback against that?

Maybe that was evil too? I mean, there's complication. But "because America did it" is not a moral argument, and the contention was something about "evil".

> peaceful nations

Afghanistan was harboring al Qaeda and Iraq was threatening use of WMDs. They weren't peaceful nations.

The latter turned out to be bluster, supported by terrible intelligence and a U.S. administration that didn't have the wherewithal to counteract its own confirmation biases, and that deserves its own appropriate condemnation, but it's nowhere near the same thing.

Does anyone else notice that the above comment is greyed out but still showing up above two other comments ungreyed out? Maybe it’s just a glitch, first time I’ve seen it occur.

What's the flimsy pretext for the US going into Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks?

If the US were serious about going after the parties responsible, it would have invaded Saudi Arabia. Instead it made a token stab at Afghanistan then ginned up a war in Iraq they were intent on waging anyway.

I will first say I don’t agree the USA should have invaded anyone.

1) America has Europe by the balls because we provide most of the major military security guarantees.

2) Iraq wasn’t exactly a peaceful nation (see: Kuwait)

3) Both Iraq and Afghanistan were governed by non democratic governments; a dictator in one and by religious zealots in the other

4) No one other than the local middle eastern Arabic countries were threatened by this action by the USA, and they didn’t have enough power to put pressure on the USA

In Ukraine, Russia invaded a neighbor of NATO countries, Ukraine was actually a peaceful nation and has a democratically elected government, and the countries that don’t like Russia actually have the power to try to stop it and can get by without anything from Russia.

There was a great deal of international pushback against both. There was also international support for both. The United States didn't unilaterally invade either country.

You missed my point about information asymmetry.

Talk to a Russian, then come back and let's talk about what's an invasion of a peaceful nation. They're going to tell you that 14K were killed due to a fascist regime. Now, I don't believe that, but you're proving my point. Maybe it's just the naive perspective of moral certainty speaking, or maybe it's the lack of international perspective -- something one unfortunately commonly finds among Americans.

We come back to the question of evil. Maybe we grew up on too many cartoons and Hollywood movies, but good and evil are symbolic fictions.

Still not following. It's not "hubris" to believe in the truth. It's not "moral relatavism" to believe lies, that's just "being wrong". The fact that people lie to other people isn't a license to throw out the concept of morality! Quite the opposite in fact.

My point is that everyone views themselves as having the moral superiority.

What's less certain is the information, and my point is that you should always have a sliver of doubt in your mind that you're correct.

I own real estate in Moscow and Kyiv, am married to the daughter of a Russian oligarch. My family is being hit hard by the sanctions.

I certainly have the international perspective you accuse others of lacking, and I rather suspect it might in fact be you who lacks that perspective.

Nobody in positions of power believes for a second that Putin has anything but his own legacy in mind at this point.

> Nobody in positions of power believes for a second that Putin has anything but his own legacy in mind at this point.

Perhaps now is their time to fix that situation.

I don't think the parent meant that it's always easy to discern good from evil. The same way I don't think you believe in absolute bothsidesism. But in some extreme cases (such as current invasion of Ukraine or Nazism last century), it would be pretty hard to argue that there's not one better side. Switzerland isn't asked to pick sides in every single conflict. Starting with the clearest cut ones would be moral progress.

I'm obviously absolutely pro-Ukraine, especially as I'm Western European, with Western European values and with a decided belief that Western European ideas are better than what's currently being offered - what Russia for example offers - as an alternative.

And while rooting for the Ukrainian side, I can't even find the Russian perspective within the sphere of information and data, other than what Russians tell me, which sounds so completely different information-wise, that I wonder if we live on the same planets. In fact I got off the phone with a Russian friend a few hours ago, and I asked their perspective but replied nothing in response. It was literally 100% inverted: that the country was fighting fascism and was conned by the U.S. due to weapons treaties in the past.

So the question is NOT about morals, whose are better - it's hard to find a villain in history with an army behind them, where each individual believed in their own evil.

So the question is about information asymmetry, at the very least, a foggy issue we have to get past before we talk about morals. Again, I'm about 90% confident that the Russian side aren't behaving in good faith, but I leave that 10%.

And most importantly I recognize my bias, in the superiority of Western European values, which means that I'm also biased with regards to those nations having the military upper hand. Which implies that even if the situation were much more ambiguous I would likely root for the Ukrainian side.

I hope that does the opposite of clear up the issue!

War is rarely a matter of good and evil purely. It's a muddled world we live in.

Putin taking direct action to invade will result in needless Russian and Ukranian suffering and death. That seems plenty evil; and if he has deluded the majority of the population of Russia into believing that the current war is necessary, that is evil too.

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