Morally, the same arguments made to justify the war are also made to condemn it.

Few,… Morally, the same arguments made to justify the war are also made to condemn it.

Few, far between, and utterly insane are those who would argue that killing is not wrong. But warmongers affix a certain logic to this moral basis: the killing that Hussein has done in Iraq was wrong, and needed to be stopped.

Those who oppose the war in Iraq say that, since killing is wrong, we cannot then send our soldiers to do still more killing.

But those for and against the war are similar in that they have a threshold for events, beyond which they feel that, though violence is inherently wrong, a violent response is less wrong than the event that it is in response to. A debate about war, therefore, usually comes down to a debate about which evil is greater.

Some people claim to be unequivocally opposed to all war. This reminds me of Gandhi’s principle of Satyagraha, which roughly translates to “One bears what one must.” One who embraces this principle claims that they would never react violently, no matter what befell them. I don’t think anyone can live up to that.

Even for the most peaceable of us, there is an instance, thankfully one that will almost certainly never come, where war becomes acceptable.

Let me provide an example. If someone were about to rape a friend of mine, and I could respond, I imagine I would respond violently, and very possibly murderously. For me, though I think violence is wrong, and killing is wrong, at that point, violence somehow becomes acceptable to me.

If the victim were a total stranger, I imagine I would react violently, but I doubt it would be as severe.

As much as it disgusts me, I would be lying if I said that this sort of proximity didn’t affect my position on the war. I could no more be happy with the fact that I afford greater value to the lives of those close to me than I could be happy with not doing so. My loved ones should mean more to me, but in another sense, they should not. After all, why should one human life mean more than another?

An altogether different sort of proximity factors into my position on the war. I never saw Hussein gassing Iraqi civilians on the news, but I have seen video of Tomahawk missiles leveling buildings. Because my perception is largely visual, the latter sort of killing somehow seems more real to me, and I am certain it would seem still more concrete if I saw it in person.

There are some “facts” about the war that I have to choose to believe or disbelieve because I have not seen them for myself. Perhaps, should I know anything for certain, I could make an educated decision. I don’t, and so I have to guess at the truth. In the absence of individually verifiable fact, concrete fact that resonates in our senses, we all lend credence and gravity to some facts, and not to others.

Some people, I’m sure, oppose the war because they believe wholeheartedly that the war will result in an exchange of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, or terrorism here in the United States. I don’t think either is an imminent threat, but I could be wrong.

Each and every one of us has a stance regarding war based upon our individual thresholds for violent response, and each of us unconsciously uses the information we have about the war to determine whether we have reached that threshold. But we should remember, before we look with disdain on those who hold opinions that differ from ours, that, with few exceptions, we all make these decisions based upon our individual interpretations of the same moral rule.

Marty Flaherty can be reached at [email protected].