Should I Beat My Wife If She Annoys Me?
People who say Israelis should be killed because of X or Palestinians should be killed because of Y are often morally bankrupt. There is almost always some list of excuses for their moral bankruptcy, for why killing other people is more ethically acceptable than killing their people. In the worst cases, killing anyone is okay if the grievance is terrible enough.
Here is one form. Palestinians are in jail, and Gaza is occupied, so killing a hundreds of Israelis is justifiable. Another form is Hamas is attacking Israel, so any number of Palestinian deaths is justifiable.
The way I understand morality is simple. If my wife or girlfriend annoys me, should I beat her? The answer, in the place we have arrived at, is no. We understand today that violence is not justified by what other people do — violence is a reflection of who we are.
Killing other humans is morally wrong. It is ethically wrong for us to do it in our personal lives, it is morally wrong for a government to do it as part of the criminal system, and there are other areas where we might assert immorality.
What about self-defense? Well maybe. But is killing people at a music festival self-defense? Are the thousands of people dying…
