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It's a question of ethics. Utilitarian ethics make it easy to give a formula for assessing this, whereas deontological ones (meaning rule-based, eg Kant's) state that don't do something you know is wrong, because the act itself has moral value, no matter the consequences. Of course the fusion of consequentalist ethics with rule based ones have been proposed, and there is some data suggesting people do think like this. (Depending on the context we will either have strict rules or we'll become more analytical.) War, weapons, violence, death/life, quality of life, are always nasty problems in terms of moral philosophy. What's worse, creating life and then taking other lives, or not creating any nor taking any? There's path dependence, sure, the arrow of time cannot be really ignored, and intent matters, and so on, yet we know humans always viewed war/fighting/conflict as a two sided thing. The just wars and the unjust ones. So the question becomes what is justice? How to reconcile everyone's personal concept of justice? John Rawls proposed fairness, and a very clever yet simple (even if maybe ultimately unworkable) method to determine what's fair: thought experiments that consider every possible life (a beggar's, a king's, and everything in between), and as people elaborate in what each one should do in various situations people's views should converge. (See reflective equilibrium.) ... and then there's virtue ethics too, which focuses on, kind of a personal best. Be excellent to each other. And this sounds like utilitarianism with an utility function that has already built in targets that clean up a lot of abstract nonsense from it and place a big emphasis on agency (and thus it kind of captures intent too - because it talks about the virtues and vices of agents' overall character too). I hope that both does and doesn't answer your question. :) |