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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026

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It's good to destroy evil and it's evil to destroy good.

This is an overly simplistic morality, the real world does not work like forgotten realms, where you have always chaotic evil races which can be slaughtered by good characters as an act of faith.

At best, you get ingroup moralities, where you support your country for the same reasons that a German in the 30s might support the Nazis.

A more universalist morality would start by recognizing that there is no group of school girls -- not American, not Israeli, not Iranian or Gazan or German or British or whatever who are intrinsically evil and thus deserve to be killed by air raids.

The key insight is that most people you are killing with bombs are actually closer to the school girls than to war criminals.

Take Nazi Germany, which established a new standard for evilness. In the Nuremberg trials and the subsequent trials, a few dozen people were found to have committed acts so irredeemably evil that they deserved death for it. Now, I will be the first to point out that this is only the tip of the iceberg, and perhaps hanging every concentration camp guard as an accessory to mass murder would have been closer to justice. If you also count the Einsatzgruppen and everyone who knowingly enabled the genocides, you might make a case that a decent fraction of the German armed forces deserved death, but I would claim that it is still a minority.

The median German soldier killed by the Allies was not killed because his death intrinsically made the world a better place, quite the opposite. Instead, his death was justified merely instrumentally -- he was part of an army which was preventing the liberation of the death camps, and defeating that army so one could liberate the camps had a higher utility than protecting the lives of the soldiers. (Note that this reasoning does not extend to Harris' morale bombing, though.)

Under a universalist morality, the best you can hope for is not that most of the opponents you kill in a war will deserve to die for their crimes, but merely that killing them is the lesser evil compared to letting their state continue with its crimes.

But for that to be the lesser evil, you actually need a plan to put a stop to their crimes. Soviets killing German soldiers in combat was the lesser evil because the Soviets made a ground offense which enabled them to liberate Auschwitz. By contrast, you could bomb Tehran until you only had a few thousand people left without removing the capability of the surviving IRGC members to slaughter civilian protesters.

Now, I will not claim that killing the Ayatollah or his generals is not intrinsically good. The problem is that for a consequentialist, one evil man getting his just rewards is dwarfed by the indirect effects. If we could turn Iran into a democracy just by murdering the Ayatollah, we would have done so a long time ago. Instead, what Trump accomplished was granting an aging old tyrant martyrdom, while replacing him with a guy whose father, wife and sister were murdered by the US. How is that an improvement?

Well I'm not moving to Iran but you're welcome to if you don't see a difference.

All things being equal, I would prefer not to move to any nuclear armed state, perhaps excepting the UK and France. (Not that this is a unique property of nuclear states -- I would nope most non-nuclear states as well.)

My point is that I am rather indifferent between Iran and say North Korea -- both seem about equally terrible in my opinion. And yet we allow one to have nukes but try to prevent the other from gaining them at large human costs.

Are you of the opinion that Iran is a much worse place than North Korea? Would you trade a 1% chance of having to move to Iran (current war aside) against a 10% chance of having to move to North Korea?