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Nick_Tarleton comments on Morality and International Humanitarian Law - Less Wrong
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In a symmetric war, not targeting civilians is cooperating in an iterated prisoner's dilemma; you don't want to switch from C/C, except in the (seemingly very unlikely) event that the war will end so much more quickly that overall suffering is reduced.
What you say seems correct as a matter of pure terminal values, but this also seems like a great example of a situation where common-sense values that claim to be terminal* are implausible as such but contain real instrumental wisdom.
* to the incomplete extent that common-sense morality makes this distinction
I'll agree that, a lot of the time, going out of one's way to kill non-combatants just isn't very useful. They're non-combatants, after all, so they're much, much less of a threat. It's generally more efficient to kill only the people shooting back at you. But if your cause isn't worth killing civilians over, should it become expedient to do so, then maybe it's better not to resort to violence in the first place. Indeed, you can't send a foreign army anywhere and expect to be considered liberators, or, at least, you can't expect to be considered liberators for very long. If you're going to invade some other country and expect to have a lasting influence on it, you're a conqueror - so if you want to be successful, you have to admit that conquering is what you are doing, and do the job right!
(The U.S. really sucks at conquering these days; we haven't conquered anything successfully since World War II ended, and I'm not sure that really counted. I suspect the last time we really conquered something was during the Philippine-American War...)
True, but these are pretty rare these days.