Proportionality in War is a Stupid Doctrine 2 · Liberty Politics Discussion

Proportionality in War is a Stupid Doctrine 2

Body-count asymmetry is morally indeterminate. Higher civilian deaths on one side do not, by themselves, establish:

unjust intent,
disproportionate force,
or moral equivalence / non-equivalence. They often reflect variables like population density, defensive strategy, evacuation capacity, media access, or who is fighting from among civilians.

Outcome-based morality doesn’t map onto causation.

Moral responsibility in war—if it’s to mean anything—has to track choices under constraint, not raw outcomes abstracted from context.

“More dead civilians” does not equal “more immoral” unless you smuggle in assumptions you haven’t defended:

that both sides had comparable alternatives,
that harm-minimization costs were symmetrical,
or that intent and foreseeability are irrelevant. Most public discourse quietly assumes all three and then treats the conclusion as self-evident.

Structural inevitability forces a shift in moral vocabulary. If civilian harm cannot be reduced below a certain floor without abandoning the war aim entirely, then:

either the war itself is judged illegitimate as such,
or civilian harm must be assessed relative to necessity, alternatives, and responsibility for the structure of the battlefield—not as an absolute metric.

What makes Gaza so morally destabilizing for modern observers is that it exposes a contradiction we’d rather not face: we want wars of annihilation against enemies we define as existential, while also wanting zero civilian blood guilt. History suggests you don’t get both.

Ancient societies were brutally honest about this; early modern ones could occasionally finesse it; modern humanitarian language tries to deny it altogether. That denial produces moral claims that feel profound but dissolve under scrutiny—because they rely on numbers standing in for judgment.

So it's not that civilian deaths “don’t matter.” It’s that they don’t mean what people insist they mean, absent a serious accounting of structure, strategy, and constraint. And once you take those seriously, a lot of confident moral posturing turns out to be empty.

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