Against The Good Guy License To Kill

Morality doesn't have special carveouts for countries in Europe and North America

One of the more absurd suggestions for why it’s okay for us to lock animals in tiny cages too small for them to turn around in, force them to live in filth and feces, break their bones in overcrowded transport trucks, and grind them up in blenders is that we, unlike them, are capable of moral discernment. Because we are so wise in the ways of morality and they are not, morality does not apply to them—or so this line of thinking claims (strangely, such reasoning does not seem to apply to babies or the mentally disabled. It only seems to crop up when justifying torturing animals. Hmm…)

But there is another similarly absurd notion, quite widely assumed in foreign policy though, of course, never defended. I call it the good guy license to kill.