The Good and the Moral
Morality doesn't care about your feelings
Golda Meir, the fourth Prime Minister of Israel, once said, “We have a secret weapon in our battle with the Arabs – we have no place else to go.”
How could such a tragic state for a people be an advantage?
For one, it means Israel can never afford to stop fighting. The alternative is annihilation—and Israelis know it. This awareness is embedded deeply in the national psyche.
Israel also exposes the hollowness of much of the pacifist rhetoric. Consider the common saying: “In war, there are no winners—only widows.”
This may sound humane, but in Israel, it's an existential contradiction. If no one ever “wins” in war, how does Israel still exist? How did the Allies defeat the Nazis in World War II? Clearly, wars can and sometimes must be won—for survival, for justice, for peace.
The phrase is not just wrong morally—it’s a misleading fact. Israel has many female soldiers. Widows aren’t the only ones who bear the cost; women fight and die too.
Such statements are usually made by people with good intentions who, as George Orwell once said, are “humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point.”
But Orwell’s view is incomplete. People don't simply choose to stop thinking. There’s often a psychological or emotional reason that prevents them from confronting harsh realities.
Why? For one, it’s emotionally unpleasant. People are dying; it’s easier to say “I’m against war” than to engage with the complex reasons behind those deaths.
Second, people want to be perceived as good. In today’s moral framework, “good” is often equated with whatever the opposite of aggression and force is.
The logic becomes simple and seductive:
“War bad” → “I against war” → “Me good.”
‘But people are dying’ is not an argument. People are dying all the time. They die of disease, they die of homicide, they die by their own hands, they die of neglect, they die of heat or cold, they die of heartbreak and loneliness. It matters how and why people are dying, as those indicate who, if anyone, is responsible for their deaths. Only after responsibility is rightly determined can one begin to create possible solutions.
This is the difference between being perceived as good and actually being good (or moral). The ‘perceived to be good person’ is more concerned with outcomes; the ‘actually good and moral’ person looks for explanations.
Trying to be perceived as good is virtue-signalling. You gloss over inconvenient truths to make yourself feel better, to convince yourself and others around you that you’re a good person.
Imagine if the ‘no war’ people ran a country. Now imagine the ‘no war’ people ran a country with neighbours who harbour violent groups that want to either destroy that country or constantly hurt it. Is this country supposed to cower for eternity in perpetual self-defence? Or just offer the other cheek every time someone comes across the border and murders their people?
’No war’ is at best a well-intentioned cry to prevent further death and suffering. But more commonly it is expressed to draw a moral equivalence between two warring parties, to signal that one side is as bad as the other. Thus, it is an injustice to the victim and a favor to the perpetrator.
The world is not a schoolyard. You don’t just “break up the fight” (or think you’re helping in breaking up a fight by posting pacifist slogans on social media) and go home feeling virtuous.
Here in the real world, if you break a ceasefire by murdering or kidnapping civilians, you pay the price. And the price is a heavy one, and the weight of each of those murdered souls and the weight of every dead civilian from here on out is on you.
Notice how the “ceasefire now” crowd rarely ever mentions the original crime. As Douglas Murray puts it, “They skip over the first victims.” They ignore the spark and rush to condemn the fire.
This minimizes the crime and demonizes the response. It helps aggressors and undermines defenders. It cannot be moral to aid the enemies of civilization while hampering its protectors.
People may claim otherwise. But intentions don’t override consequences. After all, war could end forever—if we all surrendered to tyrants and genocidal death cults. But would that be good? Or moral?