It seems to me that there are two possible answers to that question. Either:
If it's the first, then it hardly matters who wins a war. Our tenure on this planet is brief; always going, and soon gone; and has no significance; or...
If it's the second, that new perspective may not focus on who won a war.
My friend Mr. Barret, a shrewd, decent and experienced man of tremendous practical, applicable intelligence, who was born in 1926 and is now 87, was 19 and in the USAAF in the Pacific when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. It's possible that without those two bombs, J.P. Barret would have been n an excellent position to die at 19.
He knows that; but his perspective now is different than it was when he was 19; now he thinks the one thing necessary, is to do what is right in the eyes of God --- whose perspective he is persuing.
Thirty, fifty years from now, we will all three--- you, me, and Barret-- be dead. It's quite possible there will nobody on this planet who remembers our names. It will be interesting to see what matters then.
“... it hardly matters who wins a war. ... that new perspective may not focus on who won a war.
... It’s possible that without those two bombs, J.P. Barret would have been n an excellent position to die at 19. ... the one thing necessary, is to do what is right in the eyes of God -— whose perspective he is persuing. ...”
I am at a loss.
Are moral absolutists merely lazy?
Or are they overtoppingly arrogant?
Claiming that it never matters who wins and who loses enables the claimant to avoid any of the hard work of finding what is actually going on, of deciding what to do, and of actually doing it.
Or, in the case of WWII, what went on and why. “It was bad to kill people with atomic bombs” is easier to say, than actually going out and learning something useful about the times, the people who lived through them, and why they did this or that.
And moral absolutists exhibit hubris by claiming The Almighty has issued them direct orders. The truth of that can never be determined: doubt will exist. And as the late Roger Zelazny noted, doubt is the chastity of the mind.
All of the moral absolutists’ protestations are but to say, “We are more moral than the rest of you, therefore we can ignore you. Or order you about, as it strikes our fancy.”