WHEN MORAL JUDGMENT BECOMES SELECTIVE
One of the most troubling aspects of the public debate surrounding the Israel–Hamas war is not disagreement itself. Disagreement is both inevitable and healthy in any democratic society. What is troubling is the increasing tendency to reduce moral judgment to visible outcomes alone, while ignoring intention, agency and the sequence of events that produced those outcomes. Images of destruction in Gaza evoke horror, compassion and outrage. They should. Every innocent life lost is a tragedy. Every child killed is a wound to our common humanity. Yet moral judgment cannot stop there. A society that judges solely by outcomes risks abandoning one of the oldest foundations of ethical reasoning: the distinction between deliberate aggression and legitimate defence, between intention and consequence, between those who initiate violence and those who respond to it. This distinction is hardly new. From Aristotle to Kant, from Roman law to contemporary jurisprudence, intention has played a cen...
