Notion: Fighting for a cause (like in war) is different than committing a crime out of hate or greed, or even perceived need. There is no honor in committing a crime.
On certain levels, this is an interesting issue, two seemingly valid opposing viewpoints. But the lines blur, don’t they? I propose that we step further back and question and examine the assumptions involved. We seem to assume an opposition between honor and crime. But is ‘honor’ an illusion? And who decides what is a ‘crime?’ What is it about war that makes all fair? Why is ‘all fair in love and war?’ Why do the rules not matter in these contexts, and then matter again outside of them? What is the point (let alone the validity and legitimacy) of the rules, then? How seriously should we take rules that are made arbitrarily, whose authority is undermined by precisely those who claim the right to decide and enforce them? It undermines credibility and cuts them off from any tenable foundation, for the foundation itself is shown to be without foundation or authority, or at least an authority which is not utterly arbitrary. The point here is the act of undermining one’s own credibility, and getting away with it.
Is not the idea of laws of war, or rules of war, an oxymoron? War is inherently dangerous and difficult to control, let alone define and defend, and it seems a weak proposition to have laws in an inherently lawless enterprise. Why does war make it okay to murder or commit crimes? Why are some crimes seemingly accepted as a price of war (like murder) and others not (like rape)? Who decides this, and by what criteria or authority?
Isn’t this precisely why prisoners of state claim to be prisoners of war, because they want to claim that what they did was not wrong, given that they claim to have been in the context of war, where all bets are off?
We are talking about a double standard here, and more deeply, fundamental hypocrisy and lack of credibility.
The problem with choosing a morality at all is that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to justify it if at any time you undermine your own position by changing the rules when it is convenient to this or that whim or desire, to fit a context which is created to satisfy more base and seemingly indefensible impulses and desires—i.e., it is wrong to kill…but not in war, or not when I do it for reasons that I justify by this or that authority (whether that authority be physical, spiritual, religious, or ideological). If the contexts/situations in which the rules change are arbitrary, then how can one say the rules themselves are not also arbitrary?
The bottom line is that if it is wrong to kill in one context, and right to kill in another context, then it quite simply cannot be said that it is Wrong To Kill, because as we have just seen, it is both right and wrong to kill. Thus, the determination of which to make capital, the Wrong or the Right, of which to make, in effect, universal and ultimate, is wholly arbitrary, mutable, according to changing context.
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From my personal notes, 5/31/00
