Consider this:
Actor A does nothing wrong
Actor B does nothing wrong
Direct violent conflict occurs between actors A and B necessarily results.
Most people should have a problem with this. And most people do. How can two different actors not do anything wrong, but it still lead to fists and guns? I certainly don’t think that all suffering is an inherent result of doing what is wrong, but with the case of direct personal violence I think one or both of them must be wrong. A world of morally perfect actors still scrape their knees and get cancer, but they do not go to war with each other.
So we can rephrase it in a way to test what we believe for consistency:
If direct violent conflict between actors A and B necessarily results, at least one of them did something wrong
Applications? I’m thinking in terms of immigration and military warfare. These are particularly quality places to look because so many people hold that the way we treat other human beings is dependent on which side of the border they live on. The popular view is that one’s moral obligation to abstain from violent conflict against a foreigner is much more lax than violent conflict against a fellow citizen (if terrorists were hiding in Bowling Green, Kentucky we wouldn’t bomb them). Since we’re all foreigners to each other, we often feel that violence is morally permissible because we’re working under different sets of rules.
Immigration:
Immigrants often come from heart breakingly poor countries, and they have families to feed. They have no power to change the economic system of their own country. They have no way of finding a job in their own country, especially one that pays more than scraps. Some of them have an opportunity to move to a developed country. It is illegal in the developed country. Is it wrong to take that opportunity?
If they were on the other side of the fence, I think that not only would most people take that opportunity, but wouldn’t feel like they were doing anything immoral at all. The idea that one is morally obligated to stay in a desperately poor situation just because they were born there is very disconcerting. On the contrary, if their situation is desperate enough and their families are on the line, many would say that it is not only morally permissible to move, but morally obligatory.
Who is actor B? Immigration enforcers! How are they going to get all these illegal immigrants away? With hugs and lectures and an infinite succession of one more chance? Nope, with violent conflict. If immigrants aren’t doing anything wrong, and its leading to violent conflict with immigration enforcers, the only logical option is that immigration enforcement is wrong. Their wrongness spreads to their supporters of course. Universally, one who supports another’s moral wrong is also morally wrong.
People will try to squirm their way out of the conclusions they don’t like. Inevitably, they have to say one of these easily refuted things.
A) Immigrants are morally obligated remain in their horribly conditioned countries.
B) Immigration restrictions are not enforced with violence
C) Direct violent conflict results even when nobody did anything wrong.
