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The First Casualty of War

By Joel Levin

At least since the Enlightenment, that is, at least since about the time the Pilgrims landed in the 1600s, what is fundamentally important to us has been fought on several different grounds: political, economic, social, commercial, military, religious, and moral (perhaps others). These areas are highly contentious and endlessly disputed, but two are stubbornly resistant to empirical evidence: the religious and the moral realms. The others give way, at least from time to time, if not always as quickly as they should, to empirical evidence, to what the facts on the ground indicate, to what has been demonstrated or proven or verified or shown a failure, in short, to science in the widest sense. In fact, these areas are often seen as the subjects of social science.

That is not the case with the religious or the moral, or at least not readily so. Yet today, the consequences of that lack of a factual check or empirical basis or neutral plane for argument and dispute resolution has led, if not directly to war, to the divergent narratives of war generally and specifically to those of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Little agreement exists as to what counts as evidence, what facts are relevant or more relevant (e.g., the intransigence of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and the settlers, and of Palestinian President Abbas and Hamas), and the appropriateness and accuracy of metaphor (“Gaza is an open-air prison”), exaggeration and hyperbole (“Israel is engaging in genocide”). Tribalism and stereotypes replace observation, analysis, and accuracy. Nothing would seemingly persuade either side of anything, and hardly any actions taken by either side give rise to apology, shame, hypocrisy, or embarrassment. While there is no suggestion here of moral or immoral equivalence, all of this is part of the extremely depressing and terrible effects of this war.

That said, a feature about the moral realm is worth observing, as it reveals our inability to make the kind of judgments we routinely arrive at in every day (peace-time) life. Again, returning to the Enlightenment, two great ethical theories have dominated the moral realm. One theory centers on examining right and wrong; the other theory centers on the good and the bad. These two – the first called ‘deontology,’ and the second ‘consequentialism’ or its only breathing form, ‘utilitarianism’ – have waged an ongoing battle in debates, legislation, journalism, politics, and both fiction and non-fiction literature, although not usually in the fields, homes, hospitals, music festivals and tunnels of the participants.

Deontology, or rights theory, is a view that individuals, as integral to their autonomy, are allowed the freedom to do things despite being distasteful or having negative effects on others or leading to their own self-destruction. For example, it may be bad in several ways to watch pornography, to smoke cigarettes, to abandon a marriage to pursue an affair, or to squander one’s talents, but we might think that people should have the right to do so. That is, people have the right to do the wrong thing. The negative way of expressing deontology is not as a theory of rights but as a theory of duties. We might have a duty to respect people’s worshiping at the altar of a pernicious cult or religion or to respect the rights of individuals to hold despicable political or racial views, to allow others their miserliness toward family and the needy, or even not to get in the way of their spending entire days watching TV soap operas or playing computer games rather than doing anything useful or productive.

This is not the only way to engage in moral reasoning. For example, consequentialism is interested in larger outcomes (typically) regardless of the path of achieving them, and might well condemn much of this squeamishness to achieving the better social outcome. Rights theory will have none of it. It does set limits to autonomy, largely when one’s autonomy interferes with someone else’s or in times of emergency (consider required school-entry vaccinations or the entire problem of quarantines and invasions). Also, there may be times when one lacks the capacity to make autonomous decisions because of cognitive impairment or age, disease, or under threat of coercion or duress.

But these situations are outliers. Deontology generally sees people or individuals (for those who want to include various members of the animal kingdom) as generally having robust rights in the face of what others might want, prefer, or favor. Deontology asks us to put up with the distasteful, odious, disrespectful, disgusting, obnoxious, and appalling in service to individual autonomy, dignity, and respect.

The other widely held moral theory is utilitarianism, a theory that deals with, in general, maximizing people’s happiness, pleasures, or preferences. There, we need to look at the full picture to see what would be best all-around for an individual or an entire society and then deem those outcomes morally preferable. Individual rights may be useful in some ways, as a short-hand, for a series of goods or hasty proxy for happiness, but ultimately, they are not what control. If rights don’t achieve happiness or advantages for the fulfillment of desires and wishes, then so much the worst for them. Of course, figuring out how to do the calculus to measure or sum all the utilities or how to predict how things will go when there is some alteration of utilities in the future is problematic. Still, one might argue that moral reasoning is always problematic, and that utilitarianism makes that difficulty explicit. A different kind of objection is that nobody can be expected to weigh the happiness or advantages of all the people in the world in the same manner but will always try to give the extra edge to their friends and family.

However, that might be a problem for moral reasoning in general, or it may simply be a function of human weakness that we are all more willing to sacrifice others who are more distant than those closer by. We could hardly have the kind of war today between Israel and Hamas – with the indifference to the killing and hostage-taking by Hamas of clearly innocent individuals, and the killing by Israel’s IDF of civilians used by Hamas as human shields. Absent such distinctions based on increasing coolness toward the welfare of others by their distance in time, place, or group identity. In fact, the global treatment of refugees and asylum-seekers points to the universal prejudice in favor of one’s own, in favor of caring more about an individual nearby, or sympathetic to a member of one’s group in an accident nearby but indifferent to the distant fate of thousands of people trying to escape almost certain death from war, warlordism, or natural disasters. This weakness and prejudice are always, sadly, on display. Consider in the Israel-Hamas conflict the antipathy of the claimed sympathizers in the Middle East of the Palestinians to accepting Palestinian refugees, starting with Egypt.

Once war begins, and specifically the Israel-Hamas war began, we are regaled with protestations of purity of purpose, with solemn pronouncements of one-way moral judgments in abundance. Blame is assessed, an apology is deflected, shame is avoided, finger-pointing is rampant, and the usual sides come out in favor of remaining on the usual side. That is not to say that, by any measure, there is an equivalency of moral blame. Initiating violence is always a prima facie mark of moral degradation and requires a remarkably high degree of justification, which is rarely present and entirely missing here. Initiating violence and then hiding within a civilian population, effectively making those civilians human shields, is an additional moral degradation, extremely hard to justify, and again, impossible to justify here. The heavy responsibility lies with the perpetrators of violence and the use of it by those perpetrators of hiding places among innocents.

That said, killing thousands of innocents, as reported by Hamas, in the hopes of eliminating a few dozen guilty may be morally difficult to defend. While it can, at times, have some degree of justification, it requires a great deal of reasoning as to the necessity, exigency, and lack of alternative courses, things that Israel may or may not be able to supply as fully as is necessary. In any case, such actions may rightfully engender outrage and prima facie criticism. That said, a reckless response to mass murder is not the same as initial intentional wrongdoing, and one should not confuse the two. To make better sense of that, consider the difference between someone running over an individual because they want that person dead, for reasons of personal animus or racial prejudice or domestic history or killing for hire, and hitting a different individual with their car, equally killing them, but doing so because a pub crawler got behind the wheel drunk. Drunk driving and planned murder illustrate the difference between recklessness and intention in the act of homicide. Although the consequences are the same – a dead human being – the moral blameworthiness is quite different.

We need to spend at least a moment on this, with perhaps the best analogy, and one now removed from the personal emotions of virtually any direct participants: namely, the origin of World War I. WW I began in 1914, ended in most places in 1918, but continued to slog on in various others, namely, parts of Eastern Europe and the Middle East (and arguably elsewhere, including Ireland and Mexico), for another four or five years. The human toll is staggering: 9 million soldiers killed, 23 million wounded, and 5 million civilians dead. The war allowed for the Armenian genocide, where 1.5 million died; the Syrian genocide, leaving 3/4 of a million dead; the Greek genocide, with 1/2 million fatalities; and various other genocides in the Middle East and North Africa, including Kurds and Yazidis, Libyans, and Ethiopians. Moreover, the war triggered the spread of the so-called Spanish Flu (probably better labeled the Leavenworth, Kansas flu), which infected 1/2 billion people and killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million. One of history’s great catastrophes, and entirely man-made. Whose fault was it?

Perhaps the best analysis of WW I is that of Christopher Clark in his recent book, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went To War In 1914. There, he basically answers the question of “Whose fault was it?” with the answer: “Everyone’s”. Clark does not attempt to say it was equally everyone’s but illustrates in great detail several parties’ intentional and reckless wrongdoing, thoughtless negligence and obliviousness to each nation’s own population and those of others, the casual greed and looking the other way, the inexplicably poor foresight and indifference to consequences, and fundamental misunderstandings of what others were doing to bring about all of it. Greater blame belongs to some, according to Clark, and indeed, we can think that easily after the Hamas slaughter as well. Yet several of Clark’s insights are useful here:

 “We need to distinguish between the objective factors acting on the decision-makers and the stories they told themselves and each other about what they thought they were doing and why they were doing it. All the key actors in our story filtered the world through narratives that were built from pieces of experience, glued together with fears, projections, and interests, masquerading as maxims.”

“The outbreak of war in 1914” is not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over a corpse in the conservatory with a smoking pistol. There is no smoking gun in the story, or, rather, there is one in the hands of every major character. Viewed in this light, the outbreak of war was a tragedy, not a crime “.

He then says: “Acknowledging this does not mean that we should minimize the belligerence and imperialist paranoia of the Austrian and German policymakers “but hold them responsible because their actions were greater, more intentional, more vicious and self-centered, as well as more myopic than the similar conduct of virtually every other power in Europe. The Germans and Austrians were worse but hardly stand alone. All of this serves as a cautionary tale.

I want to return to the question of what standard we ought to employ to judge moral conduct. Using the first, rights theory, we could opt for the theory we tend to use routinely in our normal, everyday lives, with its high bar against allowing justice to be outweighed by the pleasures or preferences of the larger group (e.g., we do not want to execute an innocent man with low self-esteem who is suicidal because millions would be happier or would prefer it). Rather, we elevate individual autonomy and respect, the core of deontology.

Alternatively, we could choose the theory, utilitarianism, favored by economists, developers, and governments when engaged in constructing budgets or large planning models, along with a scattered number of philosophers, accountants, lawyers, government officials, and Wall Street types justifying conduct social or political conduct that, at its best, weighs welfare but gives short shrift to fundamental rights (e.g., the routine example is should the city’s budget surplus be used to build new housing or develop a park or give a tax cut to property owners; the worrying one is, if there is a deficit, should the city confiscate a property owned by a disfavored minority member to alleviate that deficit?), but too easily seems to trample our ordinary notions of autonomy, privacy, freedom, and justice?

 We are normally extremely reluctant simply to throw the right and the just into the undifferentiated mix just to increase the happiness or pleasures of others. We want higher standards when we are asked to curtail them. We want the full package of rights to be wrong, the ability to lead our wayward, halting, and very imperfect lives as we see fit, with those rights to do so trumping the normal outcomes of social and group decision-making. This is not because of some inherent sacredness of rights but because rights are a marker for autonomy, and we wish to give each individual the respect, dignity, and autonomy of being an individual and allowing them to act as fully autonomous individuals. Consequentialism or utilitarianism weakens that, as a single individual, is just another thing to be weighed.

 This is why, whether in private conversation or located in the media and social networks, individuals are not considered to be merely numbers, and human well-being is not just an abstraction but a personal concern. Consider how different it is with conflicts, where we are accustomed to seeing a consequentialist outlook, weighing the body losses like some double entry bookkeeping matter, totaling the results of gains and losses. We become accustomed to hearing – recently in the Russian-Ukraine war, previously in any number of wars in the Middle East, or, if we have paid attention, to conflicts throughout Africa, Asia, and South America – of neighborhoods and schools and hospitals being bombed, of large numbers of casualties during a battle, and of starvation, dislocation, and flight by civilians caught up in the conflict. Now, with the Israel-Hamas war, we are hearing stories like:

 “Palestinian militants who attacked Israel on October 7, killing more than 1400 people, abducted over 200 civilians and soldiers, and brought them back to the Gaza Strip. Israel has taken part in negotiations for the release of hostages while carrying out military efforts to crush Hamas, the militant group that is holding most of them.” (WSJ).

 Or:

“Israeli airstrikes hit a densely populated refugee camp in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, killing at least 50 Palestinians and a Hamas commander, and medics struggled to treat the casualties, even setting up operating rooms and hospital corridors.” (Reuters).

 Utilitarianism is the vocabulary and the logic of both reports. Hamas makes the calculation that it is worth killing 1400 people and taking 200 hostages to achieve uncertain political gains, at a minimum, the enactment of a two-party state and, at a maximum, the destruction of an independent Israeli state. Meanwhile, Israel makes the calculation that it is worth allegedly killing 50 Palestinian civilians to eliminate a single Hamas commander. Both calculations are far from having any certainty of success, but, in any case, both calculations are alien to our normal reasoning. (Predictably, and tragically, the belligerent events and the casualties are greater and continue to grow). They defeat our ordinary sense of right and wrong and obscure an ethic based on autonomy.

  All of this brings us, via a very long road, to challenge a 2500-year-old cliche.

 Somewhere around 500 B.C.E., the Greek playwright Aeschylus famously stated: “Truth is the first casualty of war.” It is hard to know exactly what work is being done by the term “first “here, but I would suggest that the first casualty of war is autonomy or, less elegantly, deontology. Immediately with the onset of war: individuals no longer count, families don’t matter, rights have no meaning, individuals are not individual but part of a larger and much more important collection of goals, and everything is attuned to achieve a greater outcome, the greatest good for the greatest number, regardless of the losses suffered by individuals who fall by the way. We might think, to pick another cliché, that this is a necessary evil. However, as we watch our leaders tell us it is necessary, but not any more than that, the evil seems to disappear. Then, if not sooner, we realize how profound a casualty is the loss.

Joel Levin, November 7, 2023

Addendum

The moral loss is upon us. As I write, hostages are being traded, if not one for another, one for some multiple of another. Humans are impersonally measured. Women count differently than men, children than adults, foreigners than Israelis, and Americans perhaps in a category of their own. Peace is a transactional commodity allowed temporarily for people to find a way to survive, get supplies, arm and rearm on both sides, and figure out what the next days will be. Perhaps, by the time this is printed, all that may well be over and there will again be war. Yet, even in the pause, what has been lost (despite the gains) is clear. People are not autonomous but subjects of trade, objects of some kind of utilitarian calculus of value, used as commodities. Certainly, none of the Israeli hostages should ever have been taken, and, almost just as certainly, many of the Palestinians held without charges in indefinite detention, mainly from the West Bank, should never have been placed in prison either. Too many of those exchanged, perhaps a majority, are without ties to the leadership of Hamas or Israel, and many could well have, instead, real ties to their cross-religion neighbors in local villages, workplaces, markets, and towns.

But autonomy and dignity and humanity are not the currency here: trades are made, time is gained, pressures are applied, and twin narratives arise: one is the traditional upmarket, literary, historical, western narrative, received by those, perhaps 40 or older, who cannot get past the slaughter of over 1200 innocent Israelis and the taking of over 200 innocent hostages. At least 2500 years of Western morality – both secular and Abrahamic – suggests we should not be able to get past that. Under that narrative, being the victim of a first-strike slaughter – think Pearl Harbor or 9/11 – justified a victim of that slaughter to defend themselves, even with greater force, even if there are dire side-consequences, as long as the payback is justifiable, measured, reasonable, and gives some fair notice to noncombatants. It not only seems fair; in many ways, it is fair. It is a fairness, though, visited upon and killing millions of noncombatants, one done for thousands of years, but not one that precedent alone makes right. In World War II, the victims were found in the aerial destruction of Berlin, the firestorm bombings of Dresden, and the dropping of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All were done in the name of the greater good, all against much worse, more evil, more pernicious, and more aggressive enemies. The argument of those doing the so-called strategic bombing was, as it typically is, that more lives were saved by bombing Berlin or Dresden or Hiroshima, say, than had there been no such bombing, and the war would have continued longer. Strategic destruction of civilian populations to terrorize and cause them to despair and then give up was the order of the day, of many days of war. Such was the norm on both sides (consider the London Blitz), rarely considered as an ethical problem.

Notice, though, that even the calculus of human trades – one against another, human trades against supplies of food and medicine, continued trading for the lives of nameable people as hostages or prisoners as opposed to the death of soldiers and civilians unnamed but who will die later in greater numbers – is one that makes people fungible in a non-human way. Sacrificed in every war are the collateral dead, the unsaved from Berlin or Dresden or Hiroshima. War causes us to flee the moral realm and enter a world of macabre and morbid counting of potential dead, with amoral judgments that include who are the more and the less important dead, for that matter. This is the moral calculus of consequentialism.

The second narrative, held by those under 40, is that of TikTok and social media generally, where only video images count. The terrible consequences to the noncombatants (Gazans) are where life starts. History is missing. Erased is all the misconduct of Hamas from the beginning – the killing and the hostages, the murder of babies, and the rape of women – but instead, what is viewed with justified horror and outrage is the killing of thousands and thousands of innocent Palestinians as collateral damage, as human shields, as those in the way of the enemy. Justifications or self-defense are not on the screen. The complexities of survival against those who hide among the innocents are not, perhaps cannot be, pictured. Moral debate in pursuit of a rational solution is no longer on the table, just bleakness and sadness. We are fully engulfed in the fog of war and have no way to see ourselves out of it.

November 30, 2023