Dissident Media
Neither Aquinas or Grotius support your claim that morality changes in war. War doesn’t invent new morality, war tests whether you maintain it under pressure. Aquinas didn’t say, “Sometimes murder is good if it’s in a different country.” He said violence must be just, limited, and ordered toward peace, because killing innocents is inherently wrong, regardless of theater. Grotius didn’t sanctify war either, he sought to place safeguards around it. No serious student of the law of armed conflict would pretend that “proportionality” creates new moral rights. Even the LOAC doesn’t grant moral legitimacy to collateral damage. It merely tolerates it under military necessity, within the strict framework of Additional Protocol “True religion looks for peace, not war, and it is only for the sake of securing peace, of punishing evildoers, and of uplifting the good that wars should be waged.” -Aquinas “The killing of innocent persons, even in war, is never lawful unless it is absolutely necessary to the achievement of a just and proportionate military objective.” -Grotius
John Spencer
I don't assert; I explain. Morality—a system of principles and judgments based on ideas of right and wrong conduct that guides human behavior by setting standards for what is considered acceptable, virtuous, or evil within a community or individual conscience—rises from religious, cultural, social, and philosophical foundations. The application of morality DOES changes in civil life compared to war. I deconstructed the faulty analogy, provided the foundations of the thinking and codification of the morality in war in LOAC being different than civil law. "These are codified moral imperatives that grew out of centuries of moral and legal reasoning about what exactly a good person or group is to do when confronted by systematic lethal violence emanating from a different society, group, or country. From Thomas Aquinas, who articulated the principles of just cause and right intention, to Hugo Grotius, who laid the legal groundwork for distinguishing combatants from civilians, the greatest minds on war have insisted that armed conflict must be governed by reason and ethics. In war, applied morality legitimizes certain acts of violence that would be criminal in peacetime—but only within the strict bounds of moral and legal constraint. These ideas were in place long before modern international law, but they remain central to it."