Moral murder

YouTube channels dedicated to criminal investigations are enjoyable. The sophistication of the investigative tools and science behind forensic evidence are astounding. One case was particularly interesting, as it required the deployment of hundreds of officers, dozen detectives, thousands of volunteers, years of investigations, hundreds of thousands of dollars in administrative cost, and cross-national cooperation and deployments to uncover the murderer of one woman. The murder was found and tried to ensure that justice is observed and that society is safe. Such manpower and resources were a necessary expense to root out bad citizens that commit a capital crime that cannot, in any shape or form, be forgiven. 

But armies kill thousands in one go, and no one is alarmed. There is no public outcry or a YouTube channel that summarises 15 years of investigations to capture the murderers and exile them from the virtuous society. Soldiers are trusted to act responsibly when having the tools, power, and freehand to end lives the way they see appropriate. The determining factor here is the key word of: morality. 

A November 2024 article published by the British Journal of Politics and International Relations discussed the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). This theory predicates that "ethical frameworks are a product of innate psychological systems which have evolved to help individuals navigate social life (Haidt and Joseph, 2004)". As such, despite vast differences across cultures, morality often has shared themes and similarities across populations, nested in the core of our intuitive ethics. 

Morality is understood to be the "code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational people". But rationality is also a relative notion, and is determined by subjective factors and ideological interpretations of the world. For instance, Israel's Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, wrote on X that "2025 would be the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria”. The choice of the Jewish biblical name of the West Bank reflects the rationale followed by the Israeli politician. Biblical scripts dictate that the region is for Jews, must be owned by Jews, run by Jews, and governed by Jews. As such, it is not only biblically imperative, but morally compulsory to return these lands to those they were assigned to, even if by force, and even if that means the moral killing for civilians. Death is allowed if the moral duty is the driver. Settlers killing Palestinians is also justified, and does not require the deployment of police forces for an in-depth investigation, because the act was a result of a moral duty: that of restoring biblical lands to Jews.

The life of the woman who was unlawfully murdered had much more value than the lives of thousands who perished following military acts. Her life, and death, merited an entire show....the others only a headline. Her killer was labelled a dangerous murderer, the others are hailed as heros. 

The argument to make here is that whilst we tend to believe that we have a Moral Foundations Theory that glues humanity into one big basic system of beliefs based on shared morals, humans actually use morality to justify every immoral act, including murder. As long as society sees it as moral, then go ahead and kill.