To save a life Unless you’re a staunch consequentialist – someone who believes that whether an action is right or wrong should be judged entirely by its consequences – it’s fairly easy to see why deliberately killing civilians is wrong, even when doing so is necessary to hitting a legitimate target. Imagine this scene, familiar from a host of movies: After a long chase, the heroic cop has finally cornered the villain, a terrorist who has killed and vowed to kill again. Our hero has his gun to his enemy, and he’s ready to bring him in. Suddenly, the terrorist pulls a nearby innocent person in front of him. If our hero tries to shoot the terrorist, he’ll also kill the human shield. What should he do? When the hero can’t make a shot that miraculously hits the terrorist without hitting the hostage, he grits his teeth and lets the terrorist get away. It’s a frustrating outcome, but he knows he has no choice; it would be wrong to kill an innocent person, or even risk doing so. There’s no hero who resolves this dilemma by shrugging, shooting the innocent person, and then returning his sights to the villain. We have a strong moral intuition that doing so displays an unacceptable disregard for human life. Alternatively, consider the question from the perspective of Jewish ethics. The Torah issues strong injunctions to respect the sanctity of life. “Pikuakh nefesh,” saving a life, is so important that we must do almost everything necessary to respect life – even when doing so entails violating other commandments. Self-defense is permitted, on this account, because it represents one way of saving a life - your own. As such, killing innocent people could never be a legitimate means of self-defense; taking a life to preserve your own is just a selfish substitution of another life for yours. Referring to Leviticus 18:5, the rabbis of the Talmud say, he shall live by [the commandments], and not that he shall die by them. (Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 85b) As the Lord says to His people in Deuteronomy 16:20, “Justice, justice shalt thou follow, that thou may live, and inherit the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.” The lives of others matter just as much as our own: “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” (Leviticus 19:34) What the Torah emphasizes here is that in doing the right thing by others, we’re also generally doing what’s truly best for ourselves. We must be just not only because it’s right, but because by doing so we ourselves may live. The obligation is practical as well as moral, as much for our sakes as for those we live amongst. In Israel’s case, having an army worthy of the “moral” title really would serve its security interests; the possible short-term reduction in hit targets would be justified by long-term gains in the trust and respect of the international community. As international protests against Operation Protective Edge should remind us, Israels military operations have a major impact on how it is perceived by its neighbors, allies, and enemies. Moral military conduct could defuse the dangers posed by widespread international distrust of Israel’s behavior, not the least of which is the anger aroused by the deaths of innocent Palestinians at Israeli hands. That anger is relevant to Israel’s security; it imperils Israelis from the West Bank to around the globe. Michael Mitchell is a writer living in Tel Aviv. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard International Review. haaretz/jewish-world/jewish-world-opinions/.premium-1.605821
Posted on: Sun, 10 Aug 2014 11:02:28 +0000