<You implied that one kind of killing is equivelant to all other kinds of killing.>
I'm saying that, the honest way to evaluate a decision (like a decision to go to war), is to add up all the costs, and compare them to all the benefits. And compare them to the (theoretical) costs and benefits of alternatives.
The costs of war are mainly the human deaths. And it is dishonest, not to count all the deaths that happened as a consequence of the original decision. It is dishonest, to say, "Well, those deaths are unintended, these other deaths weren't specifically called for in the original plan, we didn't target this grandmother pushing a baby carriage (she just happened to be next to a target, not our fault), and this large heap of bodies is from secondary and tertiary effects that nobody could have predicted..." They are all consequences, and the people who made the original decision are still culpable. They wouldn't have happened, if different choices had been made.
There is a huge amount of effort put into elaborating various categories and subcategories of "good killing" and "bad killing". In practice, this almost always boils down to:
Good killing = what we do
Bad killing = what they do |
