Kristof has been noticeably silent on Libya in recent weeks (as of this writing, despite major developments in Libya such as findings of torture, brutal executions, and other human rights violations by Libyan rebels, culminating in the murder of Gadhafi himself, Kristof hasn’t even mentioned Libya in his column since Sept. 8). Now that the reality that war is always hell has set in, perhaps Kristof has rethought the morality of murdering some people to save others. In any case, I continue to wonder how someone like Kristof, who in his personal life most likely has a fairly normal sense of morality, can be so seduced by the violence of the state as to passionately support dropping hundreds of thousands of pounds of high explosives on people halfway around the world in the name of human rights.
One clue to this mystery of human nature comes from Kristof himself in an article about a Libyan source involved in the rebel movement. Kristof describes a moral dilemma in which the source asked him for assistance in publishing a political video online. Kristof wrote: “I agreed to do so but asked about [his] family. He was in hiding, but what if the government took revenge on his pregnant wife and three children? I didn’t want that on my conscience….” When Kristof was faced with a choice as an individual that would potentially put a woman and three children at risk, it weighed significantly on his conscience. However, when he later considered the risk to the 6.4 million people who live in Libya were their country turned into a war zone, his conscience apparently had nothing to say when he used his widely read column to push for and then support the war in Libya. We are still learning the results of that war in terms of human suffering, but the costs are clearly significant in a country that has been the subject of more than 10,000 “strike missions” by NATO aircraft over the course of this short war.
How could Kristof feel morally responsible for what might happen to a single small family if he were to post a rebel’s video online yet feel no moral qualms about the thousands of people who would inevitably be killed in a bombing campaign of this scope? In the first case, the risk to the family would come from an unelected government with which Kristof had no ties. In the second, the risk to the population of Libya would come from Kristof’s own government, to which he pays taxes and has direct influence over through the U.S. electoral process. Logically, Kristof would therefore have had less responsibility for what happened to the Libyan family than he would for what happened to the far greater numbers of people who were at risk in a bombing campaign. One major difference in these two situations is that in the first, Kristof had to make a choice personally, whereas in the second, he could leave all actual decisions and actions to someone else (the U.S. government and its employees). In my view, this abdication of responsibility from the individual to government does not allow us to ignore the moral consequences of our actions.
If our government must go to war, let its leaders not laugh and cheer over the deaths of human beings; murder is murder and always immoral, even if one thinks it is done for a “good cause.” More importantly, let the actions of our government weigh heavily on our collective conscience, regardless of our own views on the legitimacy of any particular war. We murdered people in Libya. We saved other people. Unlike the cowards who cheer for war while ceding responsibility for its tragic consequences to their government, each of us must decide for ourselves how the moral calculus works out: Would we, as individuals, kill for this cause if we had to make each mortal choice personally?
