[jrflowers]

It only “doesn’t work” if your goal is to appear morally impeccable to everyone.

If instead of this worrying you

> you will be the one who, according to some, is advocating for things that cause harm and is considered a horrible person.

you have a set of morals that centers something more or different than theoretical other people’s opinions, your example of the current “conflict in the Middle East” is still a good example just not for the reason you stated. It is a perfectly valid ethical position to think that genocide is bad and that people that advocate for genocide are also bad. To pivot to “actually the Really Bad Thing would be if you said that and someone somewhere disagreed with you” is weird and hollow.

“The truly wise know that everything is morally equivalent, except for the pursuit of unbounded approval which is Good for some reason, and believing otherwise is the same thing as getting your morals from comic book movies” isn’t a coherent or defensible moral position. The Marvel movie comparison is a thought terminating cliche.

[foxglacier]

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[jrflowers]

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[KPGv2]

> There is no ethical requirement, upon seeing something happen in the real world, to entertain a series of hypotheticals so tedious and exhaustive that you have to throw your hands up and declare all things to be equally good and bad. That’s a weird habit!

Yeah, and this is the crux of many philosophies, most notably small-l libertarianism, where it seems like the chief appeal is that it's a simple set of axioms that can be followed to their logical conclusions for any moral question with minimal thought and maximal aesthetic "symmetry" and therefore beauty. It's easy to reason about, and therefore it's good.

It extends quite trivially from that to the so-called effective altruism, which relies on a fundamental assumption that a unit of good done to strangers on the other side of the globe is morally equivalent to a unit of good done to your neighbors. It's beautiful and therefore it's good.

It's the moral equivalent of imagining a spherical cow.

Morality is what you do in practice, not what you invent in your head. Treating him only as a literary figure, the reason Jesus is appealing to so many is not because he said "do unto others" and stopped. It's because he actually fed the poor, advocated for social justice, lifted up the injured, spoke truth to power, and gave his life for others.

[foxglacier]

No it's because genocide is too simple and poorly defined a concept to apply appropriately to every situation. It's just the result of people trying to generalize from a few specific events that happened in the past which they already decided were bad for some other reason and ended up creating the label genocide to describe them.

Look at the disagreement people have over whether Israel or Hamas committed genocide in this current war. People can't even agree on the meaning of the word as it applies there. It's a novel situation that doesn't fit the mold of what this word was invented for. Are civilians really civilians if they're complicit in the fighting as in Gaza? Are they really civilians if they've done or are still doing compulsory military service as in Israel? It's just an attempt to draw a line in the sand so people will agree what's bad.

[KPGv2]

> People can't even agree on the meaning of the word as it applies there.

The fact that your average Joe can't explain it is as material as your average Joe being unable to write a Bash script is to computer science not being a real thing.

Essentially everyone on Earth except Israelis and religious sycophants agree what Israel has done is genocide. It is ludicrous to suggest Hamas has conducted a genocide against Israel because then you'd have to say that slaves in the US conducted a genocide against slave owners.