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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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Even if it can't sway Israel (let alone Hamas), it can influences the choices of people on the sidelines ie the rest of the world. Whether we're talking about the big picture of "should America support Israel's war effort even though it results in starving children", or the small picture of "should I, personally, donate to that online fundraiser to send help to starving little Abdul".

It can, and has influenced people, but to whose benefit outside of Hamas'? This influence appears to actually be leading to more death and suffering. So, to the extent that your moral correctness on this issue intersects with realpolitik, I see it as a mechanism that prolongs the conflict and props up the worst actors. The dilemma as I see it is if the practical outcome of your moral correctness is just more suffering then do you accept that suffering so that you can stay ideologically consistent, or do you abandon it for what you would consider a more favorable practical outcome?

Well, about donations, a deontologist might very well say "the correct choice for me today is to donate to the starving kids; if Hamas steal some of my donations tomorrow, that is their own evil act, exercising their own free will, they could have chosen to do otherwise and I do not bear the blame if they choose evil, however likely that is". So might a utilitarian who thinks about the very big picture, and thinks maintaining a global norm of "if any children are starving anywhere on the planet, the developed world will intervene; we Do Not Do famine anymore, we have outgrown it as a species, end-of-story" has better outcomes in the very long run than examining each particular famine and determining if there could be unintended harms from intervention - just as most utilitarians agree that in practice you have a moral duty to abide by any law of the land banning murder, instead of calculating the moral cost-benefits of killing someone for the greater good all by your lonesome, because the outcomes from everybody taking it upon themselves to decide who lives and who dies are inevitably a blood-soaked hellscape.

(Similarly, America might choose to stay out of the war for virtue-ethics reasons - "it sullies the soul to ally oneself with a side that would starve children to achieve their ends, even if the other guys are also horrible barbarians" - or maintaining-global-norms reasons - "banning war crimes in a genuinely effective way that disincentivizes committing them can only be achieved if we hold to precommitments about withholding aid to people who commit them, even if those people were historically our friends and we don't want the people they're currently fighting to win".)