Hostage

• It is a matter of dispute in this case as to whether the attack was deliberately intended to target civilians.
• The ICC’s document, however, also charged three leaders of Hamas with war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, torture and the taking of hostages, during the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.
• Tim Anderson, director of the Center for Counter-Hegemonic Studies, wrote that the violence of Hamas was in service of a legitimate struggle “against colonialism and apartheid,” and any assertion of moral equivalence here would wrongly “aid the colonizer.”
  As a political philosopher, I am interested in how concepts like moral equivalence are used in political discussions.

Moral equivalence as moral criticism

• Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a top foreign policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan, did much to popularize this notion of moral equivalence in the 1980s.
• In response, Kirkpatrick argued that there was good reason to distinguish between different types of moral failures, based upon notions of scale and of origin.
• Those who condemn the ICC as engaging in moral equivalence argue that one side has done a more profound wrong, in the service of a more malignant worldview, than the other.

Not an argument for nonintervention

• When the Soviet Union responded to American criticism by invoking America’s own moral failures, it intended to encourage other countries to see moral criticism as a useless endeavor.
• Not all acknowledgments of moral fault, though, are rightly understood as ways of arguing in favor of neutrality or nonintervention.
• Obama, however, did not intend his criticism of Israel to imply that no military response to Hamas was justified.

Human rights and moral action

• Political theorists like Stephen Hopgood have demonstrated how human rights practitioners too often demand that victims of human rights abuses be morally perfect, before their human rights claims are defended.
• Human rights are valid moral claims and can be asserted even on behalf of those who are not themselves morally perfect.

Both victim and victimizer