But if you advocate for pursuing your aims with depraved violence against innocent civilians then I will never agree with you.
This feels to general to me. I don’t want to claim anything specific about the Hamas/Israel conflict, but I think we’re sometimes too complacent when making such a simplified statement supposed to be a everywhere applicable rule.
Let’s assume—and maybe that’s very HYPOTHETICAL; here I’m using it only as a hypothetical case for making the general point—P is extremely powerless compared to J, and J oppresses P severely, and the rest of the world just is too busy enjoying or fighting other things to care, and P can do exactly only one thing: terrorize some innocents of J. Else, J will continue to oppress millions from P, eternally and potentially ever more severely. Let’s assume, by terrorizing, there is some non-zero chance of a rearranging the cards in the game by one mechanism or the other.As P, you feel so strongly & unfairly deprived you don’t see you have much to loose anyway. Again, the world really doesn’t care about you, or at least won’t act against the oppressor.
To me it seems at some point, the cost benefit trade-off would tilt. So our moral intuitions are easily held as you do, because we’re used to being among +- powerful, among the not so oppressed-feeling, but if push came to shove, in the worst case I think we’d have to reconsider. I reckon something in the direction of the above is what terrorists often believe to face. Now, that they’re wrong, or that only the pawns among them think it, misled by power hungry leaders for whom the narrative is convenient, doesn’t change it: It’s easy for us to reject such violence but, for those concerned it might be not as easy as it seems to us. And maybe, by superficially caring but not really caring to change things for the many oppressed in the world, as rest of the world we’re at least somewhat guilty for it too, if things go awry.
(Or maybe one could spin this thought even a bit further, maybe even oppression isn’t the key ingredient in reality. Maybe, by letting people in many areas remain utterly poor, losers in the relentless economic competition war that goes on between all countries, where everyone tries to attract the productive heads, resources, firms with zero regard as to losses by others, maybe we equally seed such hate or desperation more broadly too, until it comes back to bite us—our civilians—one way or another once the losers in the competition can achieve it).
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to really justify any specific actions you wrote about in any way; reality is much more complex usually and certainly in the case you described.
This feels to general to me. I don’t want to claim anything specific about the Hamas/Israel conflict, but I think we’re sometimes too complacent when making such a simplified statement supposed to be a everywhere applicable rule.
Let’s assume—and maybe that’s very HYPOTHETICAL; here I’m using it only as a hypothetical case for making the general point—P is extremely powerless compared to J, and J oppresses P severely, and the rest of the world just is too busy enjoying or fighting other things to care, and P can do exactly only one thing: terrorize some innocents of J. Else, J will continue to oppress millions from P, eternally and potentially ever more severely. Let’s assume, by terrorizing, there is some non-zero chance of a rearranging the cards in the game by one mechanism or the other. As P, you feel so strongly & unfairly deprived you don’t see you have much to loose anyway. Again, the world really doesn’t care about you, or at least won’t act against the oppressor.
To me it seems at some point, the cost benefit trade-off would tilt. So our moral intuitions are easily held as you do, because we’re used to being among +- powerful, among the not so oppressed-feeling, but if push came to shove, in the worst case I think we’d have to reconsider. I reckon something in the direction of the above is what terrorists often believe to face. Now, that they’re wrong, or that only the pawns among them think it, misled by power hungry leaders for whom the narrative is convenient, doesn’t change it: It’s easy for us to reject such violence but, for those concerned it might be not as easy as it seems to us. And maybe, by superficially caring but not really caring to change things for the many oppressed in the world, as rest of the world we’re at least somewhat guilty for it too, if things go awry.
(Or maybe one could spin this thought even a bit further, maybe even oppression isn’t the key ingredient in reality. Maybe, by letting people in many areas remain utterly poor, losers in the relentless economic competition war that goes on between all countries, where everyone tries to attract the productive heads, resources, firms with zero regard as to losses by others, maybe we equally seed such hate or desperation more broadly too, until it comes back to bite us—our civilians—one way or another once the losers in the competition can achieve it).
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to really justify any specific actions you wrote about in any way; reality is much more complex usually and certainly in the case you described.