Why do Children not Have Human Rights?

[bennyboy]

Sure you can. It is moral to let people function freely who seem unlikely to do others harm. It is immoral to let confirmed murderes do the same.

If you are engaged in a war, it is moral to kill enemy soldiers. It is (usually) immoral to kill civilians, or anyone on your own side.

Let's talk about that for a second. If you are in a war, it is moral to kill enemy soldiers?

Granted I think it's moral for someone to defend yourself from physical harm even if you have to kill someone. So if you were face to face with an enemy soldier and they were trying to shoot you then yeah it would be moral to kill them.

But what blurs the lines is the notion of war. Today war is declared not by soldiers themselves but by people above them in the hierarchy. Those people are the ones who declare war and they are the ones who decide who or what your enemy is. Now assuming that they are human beings they are by default not infallible.

So if you depend SOLELY on their word that a certain person or group is an enemy it may not be moral.

Normally, when we talk about a social contract, we are talking about the mutual agreement to benefit others. But there's nothing intrinsically wrong with a mutual agreement to harm and be harmed, especially given the fuckfest that is 7 billion people, most of whom are little more than eating, fucking, shitting machines.

Now, American wars are different. There's unlikely to be a mutual agreement in which a man permits the US to cruise-missile bomb his family home, given that he has the right to throw WWII army-surplus grenades at them as they fly by. That's a pretty shitty contract. But if you have lines of Yanks and Confederates lined up with flag-bearers and trumpets, ready to test their respective fates, there's nothing immoral about pulling the trigger.

As for whether it's immoral to decide on your own whether to engage in war-- I don't think soldiers have that right. Drafted civilians might, but even then you have the case of Socrates-- not liking the law, and being horribly misused by that law, but accepting that the individual self must be subjected to the will of the whole.