Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure I follow your logic. So if the US doesn't intervene to stop genocide in the Sudan, it is unethical for them to stop genocide anywhere else? If the US was to get involved in a war every time they thought something unethical was happening would that be good? If the US made a policy to never intervene anywhere, even if trivial intervention could improve the lives of millions, would that be good? I find that peo…
My point is not about being ethical or not ethical. It is about the ethicality being an excuse more than anything else to intervene. For example the US will never intervene in a conflict between Russia and neighboring regions, or genocides in China if they ever occur. It would be ethical to do so, but keeping good relationships with powerful countries is the prime consideration. It would also be ethical to remove the…
Really think about it. Is it ethical to start a war that is otherwise meritorious but that you cannot win? If you would be unable to create a good result, going to war would only add more misery to the process of getting to the inevitable bad result. This is not so 2 dimensional. You cannot say, these sets of values are parts of ethical decision making, and these other sets of values, that also impact people's lives, have no part in ethical considerations. The chances of success in a military action are a crucial component of whether it is ethical to even try it.
It is simpler to look at the results. Perhaps if the people in Iraq or Afghanistan are not better off than they would have been otherwise, and the rest of the people of the world are not safer and more prosperous than they would have been otherwise, then there was probably something unethical about the prosecution of the recent wars there.
We are just really bad at predicting the future, and even understanding the present or past. That is another ethical consideration. We should be very careful about using "ends to justify means", meaning that we do something that we know is bad for a good result of greater magnitude. The result will likely be something we did not predict, and therefore we have done a bad thing and gotten possibly a bad result as well.
The challenge would be to find a way to actually do things in the best way possible, while attaining good results. So we should avoid killing people. But if we must kill people, or even if we should kill certain very bad people (who makes those decisions?), you want to only kill the "bad" ones, therefore you should use the most discriminate weapons possible. Is it possible to do so? To achieve your aim can you use a sniper's bullet, a drone which can surveil it's target for days, or would you need to use nuclear weapons?
How would you approach North Korea, which is evil by almost any standard, when any war that lasts longer than 5 minutes results in the death of every inhabitant of Seoul?
I write all this because these are both very important and very difficult decisions. And it feels like we are not even trying. People cling to silly shallow principles and sling them around at each other, preventing the deeper discourse that should be taking place so that we can do better at dealing with horrible situations that remain in the world.