Hold on. Neutrality can also be, and often is, a meta-value judgment about the importance of the considerations that would lead to non-neutrality. The international relations case is a precise example of this.. Sometimes it really doesn’t matter who started it. It’s not just laziness to say that it doesn’t matter who comitted the first Israel-Palestine atrocity: both have committed so many atrocities that the additional moral opprobrium that comes from having started it is just rounding error. And raising “they started it” as a defense of the next atrocity is just a distraction from the fact that the atrocities are indefensible. Same for the Hutus and the Tutsis, and the Hindus and Muslims in India, and so forth. The moral importance of assigning blame for generations and generations of back-and-forth atrocities when both sides have megagallons of blood on their hands pales in the face of the moral importance of stopping the killing.
On a smaller scale, this holds for the schoolchildren too. If two kids are fighting on the schoolyard, sometimes it matters who started it (one kid is a bully), but often it doesn’t—if one kid insults then thr other pushes then the other punches and the other stabs, both are so guilty that “he started it” is nothing more than a distraction to get out of warranted punishment.
On political issues, neutrality too can be a principled position, either because one has very low confidence in one’s evidence or simply because one thinks the question isn’t one that is appropriate to be resolved by politics.
Hold on. Neutrality can also be, and often is, a meta-value judgment about the importance of the considerations that would lead to non-neutrality. The international relations case is a precise example of this.. Sometimes it really doesn’t matter who started it. It’s not just laziness to say that it doesn’t matter who comitted the first Israel-Palestine atrocity: both have committed so many atrocities that the additional moral opprobrium that comes from having started it is just rounding error. And raising “they started it” as a defense of the next atrocity is just a distraction from the fact that the atrocities are indefensible. Same for the Hutus and the Tutsis, and the Hindus and Muslims in India, and so forth. The moral importance of assigning blame for generations and generations of back-and-forth atrocities when both sides have megagallons of blood on their hands pales in the face of the moral importance of stopping the killing.
On a smaller scale, this holds for the schoolchildren too. If two kids are fighting on the schoolyard, sometimes it matters who started it (one kid is a bully), but often it doesn’t—if one kid insults then thr other pushes then the other punches and the other stabs, both are so guilty that “he started it” is nothing more than a distraction to get out of warranted punishment.
On political issues, neutrality too can be a principled position, either because one has very low confidence in one’s evidence or simply because one thinks the question isn’t one that is appropriate to be resolved by politics.