I think this mostly tracks with how many military professionals talk about this stuff. It’s beneficial for all sides to have rights of surrender in the special case of surrender, even though it’s beneficial for all sides to be clever generally in war. So, we absolutely ban the act of falsely surrendering under a white flag (to, e.g., enable an ambush) as the war crime of perfidy, even though we allow many other “ruses de guerre” that involve deceit in other contexts.
This makes sense. A subset of “my” theory[1] is that this is the oldest/original theory of taboo actions during war and arose independently in many places (which explains why the norms keep coming back even after violations; divine punishment alone can’t explain it, the Gods are famously fickle). A challenge to this hypothesis is that in some ways its own rarity in discussions is self-refuting.
The fact that military professionals talk about stuff in this way comforts me.
I think this mostly tracks with how many military professionals talk about this stuff. It’s beneficial for all sides to have rights of surrender in the special case of surrender, even though it’s beneficial for all sides to be clever generally in war. So, we absolutely ban the act of falsely surrendering under a white flag (to, e.g., enable an ambush) as the war crime of perfidy, even though we allow many other “ruses de guerre” that involve deceit in other contexts.
This makes sense. A subset of “my” theory[1] is that this is the oldest/original theory of taboo actions during war and arose independently in many places (which explains why the norms keep coming back even after violations; divine punishment alone can’t explain it, the Gods are famously fickle). A challenge to this hypothesis is that in some ways its own rarity in discussions is self-refuting.
The fact that military professionals talk about stuff in this way comforts me.
again, obviously the core is not original to me, and probably not the constituent parts either. Just want to lay it together well.