Leo Tolstoy got it right

[Wonderer]

Napolean is invading Mother Russia. If the French conquer Russia, they might easily enslave, kill, or otherwise abuse Russian peoples.

You are a soldier in the Russian army. You consider the possibility that your wife and daughter might be raped and killed unless the French are stopped. What do you do? Step aside and let it take place?

It's very easy to insist that the lives of the enemy soldiers are worth just as much as the lives of your countrymen. That's not quite a justification for laying down your arms, however. It may be regrettable to kill in self-defense or the defense of others, but you aren't exactly given preferable alternatives.


eudaimonia,

Mark

This is a tough cookie...Consider the following: If you are fighting or killing someone in self- and other defense, then it must be justified, right? As long as you are not the aggressor, you cannot be at fault in a moral way whatsoever, now can you? For how can it not be noble to save the life of your innocent loved ones while they are attacked by an aggressor? Well, how about the aggressor are justifying their attack on you and your loved ones by virtue of the fact that they feel you and yours are taking the food out of their mouths, or that you and your people are a threat to their own survival in terms of resources? Who is guilty and who is innocent here? Both the aggressor and the defendants justify their attack and defense respectively...
We have to consider in this scenario the possibility of collective guilt or karma, if you will. In other words, both the aggressor and the defender are guilty in the bigger scheme of things....universally we may all share blame for the way things are and for the conditions leading to wars and fights in general.
In this way, no killing whether in attack or defense can ever be justified, because everyone is responsible for conditions in the world in one way or another. Or on the flip side, everyone is equally innocent. Universally everyone is as innocent and as guilty as the next person.

 

[beefy]

This is a tough cookie...Consider the following: If you are fighting or killing someone in self- and other defense, then it must be justified, right? As long as you are not the aggressor, you cannot be at fault in a moral way whatsoever, now can you? For how can it not be noble to save the life of your innocent loved ones while they are attacked by an aggressor? Well, how about the aggressor are justifying their attack on you and your loved ones by virtue of the fact that they feel you and yours are taking the food out of their mouths, or that you and your people are a threat to their own survival in terms of resources? Who is guilty and who is innocent here? Both the aggressor and the defendants justify their attack and defense respectively...
We have to consider in this scenario the possibility of collective guilt or karma, if you will. In other words, both the aggressor and the defender are guilty in the bigger scheme of things....universally we may all share blame for the way things are and for the conditions leading to wars and fights in general.
In this way, no killing whether in attack or defense can ever be justified, because everyone is responsible for conditions in the world in one way or another. Or on the flip side, everyone is equally innocent. Universally everyone is as innocent and as guilty as the next person.

I agree. And in the BIble it says to defend the cause of the wido wnad the fatherless. In what way is killing people a way of defending their cause? When you kill someone, does he/she not usually have a family? Are you not creating another widow and more fatherless children by doing so.

Killing people does not defend the cause of the widow and the fatherless. It only makes more of them, thus compounding the problem.