
If War Can Have Ethics, Wall Street Can, Too - teslacar
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/03/opinion/if-war-can-have-ethics-wall-street-can-too.html?_r=00
======
nostrademons
Historically the idea of war having rules has had a very unfortunate past. In
WW1, Germany began unrestricted submarine warfare in 1915 and torpedoed the
passenger liner Lusitania (filled with neutral civilians). There's a long list
[1] of hospital ships deliberately sunk in WW1.

Then in WW2, aside from even more unrestricted submarine warfare and sinkings
of hospital ships [2], we also have the firebombings of Dresden, Tokyo, and
every other major axis city; machine-gunning of shipwreck survivors in the
water; the atom bombs; the impressment of Koreans into service as "comfort
women" for Japanese servicemen; forced labor at both axis & allied prisoner
camps; the internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps; and of
course the Holocaust.

Modern-day, there's the My Lai massacre and Obama's attack on a Doctors
Without Borders hospital [3]. Probably more too, but you don't hear about
them.

The author cites that war has rules because _rules are written down_ , but
rules are written down for Wall Street as well. They're just not enforced. And
similarly, the laws of war are only enforced on the losing side, or on
scapegoats that the actual decision-makers make available as a token
sacrifice. When it comes to actually conducting a war, belligerents usually
follow just one rule: win.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hospital_ships_sunk_in...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hospital_ships_sunk_in_World_War_I)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hospital_ships_sunk_in...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hospital_ships_sunk_in_World_War_II)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunduz_hospital_airstrike](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunduz_hospital_airstrike)

~~~
ferentchak
[http://www.centenarynews.com/article?id=1616](http://www.centenarynews.com/article?id=1616)
My understanding is that the Americans were using these ships to carry arms.
Is it even in debate anymore that the Lusitania was carrying arms anymore?

Hiding bombs under orphans and sick folks is dirty business I recall how much
we criticized the Iraqis for doing the same.

~~~
nostrademons
My point is that in times of war, belligerents on all sides will resort to
dirty business regardless of what the rules of war say. If the Lusitania was
carrying arms (which I'd vaguely heard and have no reason to doubt), that'd
support my point.

~~~
24837
Honestly, I'm not sure if you're trolling.

Your first post went on at length (and with sources!) about how rules aren't
worth anything because they'd be broken anyway. Example: German submarines
attacking a civilian ship in WWI.

Unfortunately you missed the most important point in your story - which is
that this ship wasn't so innocent and civilian after all. Rather than ignoring
the rules, the Germans broke them in retaliation AFTER the Americans had done
so first.

The message here is not "rules never work", as your first post implies. It's
rather "if you (US) brake the rules, expect the others (Germany) to do so as
well in retaliation."

The fact that Lusitania was carrying arms does not support your initial point
but rather changes the story and implications entirely.

~~~
nostrademons
I said nothing about whether rules aren't worth anything or not. I said that
they _will_ be broken.

The former is a normative statement. The latter is a positive one. A lot of my
comments here attempt to describe the world as I've observed it, not the world
as I'd like it to be. I have plenty of opinions about how I'd like it to be,
as well, but I usually don't share them because opinions are like assholes:
everybody has one but thinks that others' stinks.

------
sfard
Wallstreet has rules. They're just not enforced. People would be shocked if
they knew, for instance, how many hedge funds simply operate on a model of
"black edge" insider trading.

~~~
jswny
I'd be interested in hearing more about how these firms get away with this
kind of thing. I interned at an investment firm last year and the lawyer who
worked in their compliance department told me how detailed, thorough, and
stringent the audit that was done by the SEC the year before I got there was.
Keep in mind, this was a small firm. Do larger firms have some way of keeping
those kinds of things secret? Sorry if I'm misinterpreting something here, I
have almost no financial knowledge as I worked in the tech department as a
programmer.

~~~
camelNotation
I work in an area of finance technology connected to this process. It's no
different than escalation in any other form of criminality. Cops wear armor,
criminals buy armor-piercing rounds. Auditors looks deeper, so the pertinent
information is masked deeper.

At this point, the major gap in our financial regulatory process is at the
detection layer, not the investigations layer. If you can keep specific
scenarios under wraps, you can avoid things quite easily, especially if the
scenarios you do cover are impressively complex and thorough. So you hire PhDs
in math and physics to identify and create your algorithms. They do a great
job identifying scenarios where known criminal activity occurs, but they
aren't informed on the specific, complicated, and should-be-totally-illegal
actions your firm is engaged in, so they are basically shooting in the dark
with no chance of finding the real misdeeds. These algorithms are genius-level
complex, greatly reducing the number of government employees that will be able
to decipher them. You create hundreds or thousands of them, making it
prohibitively difficult for anyone in a regulatory agency to take the time to
understand them all, then you assure the regulators you have all your bases
covered. You show them the evidence of all the wrongdoing you've identified
(also an insurmountable mountain of data) and if you do not leave any glaring
holes, they have to nod and walk away.

Financial regulations are important, but the idea that regulators could every
truly keep the financial markets from abusing the rest of us is nonsense. They
can only do so much.

~~~
scj
What if the policy was that once a year, a set amount of people will be
prosecuted? Kind of like setting quotas for speeding tickets... Where firms
are ranked in terms of the volume/egregiousness of the actions committed.

Oh, and setup an anonymous tip-line. To allow other firms to "investigate"
others in order to make themselves look better (might not happen every year,
but I'd imagine it would be an option of last resort if something really bad
needed to be covered).

Shady things will still happen, but there will be attempts to reduce it just
enough so others take the hit. Plus, the public gets a few show trials to make
them believe the regulators have teeth.

------
gumby
This is an interesting and broad analogy which I hadn't heard of before.

The military, at the end of the day, is a tool (famously, another tool of
diplomacy). Either it's useful or not. Likewise finance is a tool
(fundamentally a service industry like gardening or medicine). We support it
because it helps finance business, helps people manage their pensions etc.
Sometimes sidelines are useful too (DARPA, gun hobbyists, weird financial
instruments that increase liquidity for everyone).

Yet lately the ends have been forgotten and the means elevated. The recent US
proposed budget suggests increasing expenditures but there is no discussion as
to whether that would be useful or not (and thus whether the increase is
unnecessary, too big to even too small). The same problem has emerged in
Finance: the point of an financial instrument is the instrument itself. HFT
that skims a bit out of the transaction (thus is worse for the fundamental
buyer and seller) is considered good. etc.

~~~
ble
People who have memorized the "marketmaking is essential" arguments for HFT
may disagree with you. People who dislike arguments from "does this serve its
stated purpose for society" may reject your argumentation style. I think
you've got a hell of a point on both sides.

If a teeny-tiny fraction of a percentage or a penny flat tax would cause a
trade to not be profitable in expectation, then that trade probably never had
anything to do with the real economy in the first place.

~~~
ikeboy
HFT takes market share from market makers and reduces spread sizes. I don't
know where your strawman is from, but you're missing the point.

~~~
mundo
Isn't "reduces spread sizes" a fancy way of saying that when a big pension
fund decides to move a billion dollars from Coke to Pepsi, they pay slightly
more to do so than they would if HFT didn't exist? That's what people mean
when they complain about HFT affecting retail investors (as opposed to someone
selling 100 shares of something on Etrade).

~~~
ikeboy
What no, it means they pay less. They sell coke and get slightly more, and buy
Pepsi and get a slightly lower price.

Instead of say, Coke being at 194.01 bid and 194.02 ask, that might narrow to
194.012 bid and 194.018 ask. If you trade in that market, you're better off.

The loser is the company previously making the market, which had been buying
at 194.01 and selling at 194.02.

There are more complicated ways in which HFTs can indeed be at odds with
institutional investors. See e.g.
[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-03-31/michael-l...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-03-31/michael-
lewis-doesn-t-like-high-frequency-traders)

But if they couldn't adjust their price so fast, the spreads would be higher
in the first place to account for the risk.

Nobody has the right, or should have the right, to sell a billion dollars in
any market without moving the market before it's over. Why should someone take
the other side of that trade, knowing the price will crash as soon as it's
over?

~~~
mundo
All of these details sound plausible, but as whole this (the assertion that
the profit made by HFT comes primarily at the expense of other market makers)
smells wrong. If that assertion were true, it would seem to imply that market-
making is less profitable today than in the past. Is that the case? I was
under the impression that it was more profitable.

~~~
ikeboy
Virtu is a huge market maker. They are/were 3-5% of all equity trades in the
US [0]. They make $200 million a year in profit [1].

[0]
[https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/VirtuOverv...](https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/VirtuOverview.pdf)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtu_Financial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtu_Financial)

------
vfclists
Frankly I don't see the point of these meaningless articles. You have a
financial system which is akin to a police force whose commanders are chosen
by the drug dealers, and the police employ former drug dealers on the grounds
that haven been drug dealers, they know more about the drug business and they
can turn their knowledge to fighting the drug war.

After a few years in drug enforcement the ex drug dealers return to work for
their gangs, taking all the knowledge from working in drug enforcement with
them, not to mention that they were still receiving dividends and profits from
the the drug dealers who previously employed them during their stint in drug
enforcement.

I really can't comprehend why any intelligent people can expect this depraved,
corrupt farcical system to work. Now you have Trump, unashamedly pro-business
(ie leaving the inmates in control of the asylum) and people seriously expect
things to get better.

Here are your brave American presidents who can bravely and patriotically
authorize the executions (ie murder) of alleged terrorists in Yemen and
Afghanistan who have done diddly squat to Americans, but can't/won't a lift a
finger against corrupt predatory malign financiers whose actions leave
Americans indebted, dying prematurely because they can't afford good housing
and good health care. Compare the deaths of Americans due to terrorism by
Yemenis or Somalis, and the premature deaths of Americans due to poverty and
ill-health which these banksters frauds have worsened, and tell me who Trump
should be executing without any meaningful evidence or even a trial.

I am sorry but due to their corrupt financial system the politicians of the
Western world are becoming more and more of a joke.

------
fennecfoxen
If war can have ethics, can the Times have ethics? If the times CAN have
ethics, why did it report this headline:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/international-
students...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/international-students-us-
colleges-trump.html)

for this study?

[http://www.aacrao.org/docs/default-
source/TrendTopic/Immigra...](http://www.aacrao.org/docs/default-
source/TrendTopic/Immigration/intl-survey-results-released.pdf)

(see bottom of page 1 in particular.)

Sigh.

~~~
ryandrake
Headline: [...] 40% of Colleges See Dip in Foreign Applicants

Study: 39% of responding instituions reported a decline in international
applicatons

Are you complaining about a 1% difference, or the difference between
"colleges" and "responding institutions"?

~~~
Klockan
The study also says that 35% reported an increase so this could just be random
noise. So the headline isn't directly wrong but it isn't sending an honest
message.

------
erikig
I disagree with the author's premise: "Nearly a decade after one of the most
devastating financial collapses in modern history, Wall Street appears as
corrupt as ever."

Considering the size of 'Wall Street' the size of the ethics violations that
he uses as an example are miniscule. In addition, due to the increased
scrutiny that financial institutions face and the potential damage that
scandals can cause, legitimate organizations seem less willing to risk ethics
violations.

Also, unlike in war, ethics violations on Wall Street can be reported and
prosecuted relatively easily.

As mentioned in many comments above - Wall Street has ethics, one can only
hope that the current administration doesn't take steps to weaken threaten
these.

~~~
TelmoMenezes
I wonder how one could say this stuff with a straight face after witnessing
the credit crisis of 2007, and the not only lack of consequences for the
highly unethical and very likely illegal activities that lead to it, but also
the subsequent largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich that ever
took place in human history.

Bankers were literally rewarded by the system for being evil.

Many lives and families across the globe were destroyed by their actions -- be
it by evictions, loss of pensions and savings that took a lifetime to build
and related suicides.

Let us not whitewash all of this stuff.

------
rallycarre
In war, there is a benefit to treating your enemy with dignity. Treatment of
prisoners, morale("we are the good guys"), etc. In Wall Street there isn't
with white collar crime only getting a slap on the risk when they put millions
of people on the street.

The system is broken when corruption and misdirection is not punished with the
weight of their crimes.

------
titraprutr
"Ethics of War" sounds like an oxymoron.

~~~
wolfram74
And yet it is internationally recognized to exist. Here's a video that goes
into how war has more formalized ethics than, say romance.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oThh3_Srxtc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oThh3_Srxtc)

~~~
M_Grey
It's useful to recognize it, while simply abiding by only the parts of it
which suit you. After all, if you need to, you can always ignore it and deny
it.

That's the reality of war.

~~~
jt2190
True, but this fatalistic view alone isn't an argument to stop trying to
maintain ethical behavior even when when waging war.

~~~
M_Grey
Absolutely, and I didn't mean my post to come across that way. This topic
makes me a bit glum, and I think that comes across as defeatist, but I'd
rather take on the correct, losing fight, than not fight at all.

------
kolbe
The vast majority of "wall street's" corruption is its relationship to the
rent seeking opportunities that the US government makes available for them.
And what's hilarious is that its the same bleeding heart liberals who demand
things like the government provide low interest home loans who are shocked and
outraged to learn that "wall street" commits "frauds" around them (i.e.
bankers are doing what they're asked to, and when it blows up in the
government's face, get scapegoated).

~~~
cowpig
You've used a lot of incendiary language here but I am struggling to find a
concrete point.

What rent seeking opportunities? Who are "bleeding heart liberals" and what
"demands" are you talking about?

What fraud are you talking about specifically? Who was scapegoated? What
should have happened, in your view?

------
Eridrus
This seems like a reasonable place to start a discussion, but hard to assess
without real proposals. If I had to guess at what he is suggesting it seems to
argue for all risk to be borne by the company, which really seems like an
argument for less risk taking and more consolidation, not too surprising from
a military man, but pretty anathema to technologists.

------
mjfl
Standard ignorant and hyperbolic discourse about Wall Street.

> When faced with illegal or immoral orders, it is the duty of professional
> soldiers to refuse such orders. When such a refusal occurs, it is followed
> by thorough investigations, and potentially courts-martial or war crimes
> prosecutions for those who issue such orders. In the case of the former
> Wells Fargo employees, the opposite occurred. Imagine the moral and societal
> hazard if the military permitted such retaliation against those who reported
> illegal and immoral behaviors.

Well's Fargo is a bank that makes money by selling financial products to
people including bank accounts and credit cards. To do this they employ
salespeople. These salespeople are tasked with selling these products, as much
as they can. They have a compliance department that explicitly says "don't lie
to people when you sell to them". The salespeople broke those rules in order
to meet the sales goals, so they were fired. The way the author writes this
article, it's as if they think it is immoral to be a salesman and that the
executives of Wells Fargo should be court marshaled for requiring them to sell
a lot of things. The analogy, and to equate selling things with war crimes on
the battlefield is absurd.

> Hedge funds and investment banks utilize high-speed trading to place the
> individual investor at an insurmountable disadvantage.

It's unclear what the author mean's by "high-speed" trading here, I assume
they mean high-frequency market making, but most hedge funds are not in high
frequency market making business. Does the author know what they are talking
about? Probably not. High frequency market-makers like Virtu and Hudson River
are in the high-frequency market making business. And it's unclear how high-
frequency market making hurts the individual investor, it's much more concrete
how high frequency market makers hurt the banks (old-school market makers) and
_help_ the individual investor by closing down the bid-ask spread.

Even if hedge funds were employing techniques to put an individual investor at
a disadvantage, isn't that their _job_? Hedge funds are in the business
because they can presumably make better trades than average, and so anyone who
is on the other side of the trades they are making is presumably going to be
losing out. This would be like challenging an NFL team to a football game and
complaining that their wide receivers are too good athletes. And why should we
prioritize the "individual investor" over institutional investors? A pension
fund handles money for retired pensioners, while an individual investor might
be some dentist day-trader - why should we prioritize his well being over the
pensioners? He presumably has enough disposable income already.

~~~
chadgeidel
Wells Fargo destroyed sales peoples careers for calling attention to their
(WF) illegal behavior.
[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/28/499805238/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/28/499805238/episode-732-bad-
form-wells-fargo)

If someone trains for 5-10 years in a career, and then a company retaliates by
putting a hidden, un-removable "black mark" on their record preventing them
from employment in said career is despicable. It's not a war crime, but it's
pretty close.

~~~
mjfl
Suppression of whistle-blowers is a different crime and certainly isn't
concentrated in Wall Street or even private industry (see Snowden, Uber).

------
eip
You mean like white phosphorus and depleted uranium? Those kind of ethics? Not
sure I want Wall Street having those kind of ethics.

------
dlwdlw
The article's premise is that war is vicious yet moral, so something less
vicious like wall street has no right to complain that morality is a second
level concern.

A king not killing another king is moral between kings, but those that
followed the loser can suffer greatly. The closer you get to becoming god, the
more callous the hands gambled.

The definition of being god here is how effective you are at controlling
perceptions, how your followers perceive reality, your personal religion in a
way.

So from the peasants view, the kings and gods are corrupt, removed from
reality. That is because the god of peasants has always been the god of
livelihood, while the elites worship the god of power. The greater god ignores
the lesser god.

------
randyrand
The moral police are here! The moral police are here! Wee-woo wee-woo.

The amount of moral policing these days is way too much. It seems to have
grown significantly these past couple decades.

------
econner
It saddens me that we've gotten to the point of comparing Wall Street ethics
to war ethics and even entertaining the idea that war has better ethics than
Wall Street.

------
muninn_
If Wall Street can have ethics, the US government can, too.

~~~
dickbasedregex
We're all doomed.

------
jamisteven
War has ethics?

~~~
etjossem
Yes, see the Geneva Conventions for a good example of an ethical code for war
that signatory nations can formally agree to. [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions)

------
grandalf
In war, morality is a propaganda technique to convince mothers to let their
sons die hero's deaths, and to convince the young and foolhardy to join a
crusade that is likely to result in their death. Periods of the biggest moral
clarity in war are the periods where the propaganda is the thickest and human
rationality the weakest.

To believe otherwise one must believe in forces of evil that animate one side
and forces of good that animate another, which is a profoundly supernatural
view.

Similarly, this article suggests that Wall Street lacks morality and uses as
an example a VC considering layoffs that would occur if she fails to fund a
round.

If there is a finite amount of money, an investor will invest in the firm that
shows the most promise. Many teams of hard working people are seeking
investment, but only some will get it. The investor must use the available
information to decide where to place her bet.

If the investor is wrong, she will not be able to afford to bet again in the
future. Should we all fell sorry if the investor makes a bad decision and a
team of people spent several years getting paid to pursue an ill-fated idea?
Arguably, the cost to society for this misstep is great, so perhaps we ought
to appoint a wise _investment minister_ to make the choices judiciously on
behalf of investors? Why not also appoint a hiring minister to direct job-
seekers only toward the most promising startups? For that matter, why not also
appoint a business strategy minister to help startups make good decisions and
avoid bad ones?

While these ministerial posts sound absurd in the context of startups, this is
our reality in the world of banking and housing. Ministers tell our banks how
much reserve capital they ought to carry, they tell our housing market what a
reasonable rate is for a 30 year mortgage, etc.

Fannie and Freddie flew under the radar for years without revealing their
balance sheet, drastically altering the US (and world) economy all at the
behest of a small number of officials. I think the reason this was allowed to
occur was (ironically enough) to avoid financial bad news when our leaders
were trying to sell a war.

When you introduce socialized risk the market cannot be counted on to prevent
socialized losses. The game is changed. The normal incentives and
disincentives do not apply.

After 9/11 for example, the government became the insurer of last resort for
terrorism related claims. This came as a relief to anyone building a
skyscraper or running an airline, but at what cost? It eliminated much of the
incentive that would have existed in the economy to prevent terrorism.

We let our ministers create very bad policy. Rather than just writing poor
people a check to help them get a mortgage, they create artificial demand for
high risk housing loans, which creates a broad incentive for reckless
expansion of a whole sector of the economy. They keep much of this risk on the
government's books, making taxpayers accountable not for a simple payment to
the poor person to allow him/her to get housing, but for the entire house of
cards built upon those loans.

We cannot allow our government to try to address so-called "market failures"
by creating _infrastructure_ that distorts and hides information from the
market. Not only is it paternalistic, but it also creates a tremendous amount
of risk for the whole economy.

This is not an argument against welfare. We have two options for how we can
think about giving welfare, either as a cash payment (with or without strings
attached, fwiw) or by greasing the core infrastructure of the economy to slip
in some subprime loans among the many non-subprime loans, figuring that the
risk won't really be discernible by financial markets and all will be well.

When capitalism contains a lot of incentives imposed by various government
ministers, "free" economic behavior adapts to exploit those incentives. This
is what the author of the article disagrees with. He thinks that we should all
act genteel and avoid transactions that have moral consequences. The problem
is that such transactions rarely occur, finance creates abstracted
transactions that are rarely correlated with a desirable or undesirable social
outcome.

In many industries (healthcare, finance, automotive, solar, etc.) government-
sponsored incentives dominate free-market incentives. When we allow this to
happen, we are effectively saying that we do not want individuals to have free
economic choice, we instead want a select group of ministers to create a
socially responsible landscape.

Welfare is distortionary, but few would argue that it is unnecessary. What
_is_ very harmful is when welfare programs corrupt the infrastructure of
markets and lead to widespread behavior that exploits the programs.

The goal of every industry, and of every firm is to become "essential" or "too
big to fail"... in other words, to be declared to be worthy of the guaranteed
support of taxpayers.

Think about it this way, if issued a credit card with very low interest and a
very high limit, most people could easily become billionaires simply by using
low risk investment strategies. The problem is that if for even a day, the
strategy requires more of a limit than is available, the whole plan comes
crashing down. Even with low-risk endeavors, losses must be covered. Without
forcing firms to cover their own downside risk, they of course will leverage
to the max. This is what has happened in our modern finance industry, the
growth since the 1990s has been due to consolidation and increased leveraging.

FWIW I think that what is needed is a new financial statement to be added to
GAAP which is a statement of risk, which recursively points to all assets and
liabilities whose market risks correlate with solvency risk of other firms, so
that a broad, a view of the risk a company faces (market, and systemic) that
can be viewed in aggregate, so that we can more easily understand the factors
that impact an entire portfolio.

Ironically, such a statement would allow Wall Street to invest most heavily in
firms with socialized risk (for those are the lowest risk bets), but at least
then, regulators could impose a limit on the amount of socialized risk firms
were allowed to invest in, which is one of the few things that can be done to
actually stop the cycle of exploitation. Firms should have an incentive _not
to_ be classified as "too big to fail" and not to attempt reclassification if
things go worse than expected.

------
linkmotif
Bad premise war is a crime against humanity, or eh, should be.

~~~
Coding_Cat
Wars are fought not only by the aggressors. And the aggressor can be acting to
prevent amoral behavior (attacking a state which is engaging in
slavery/genocide of its people, but one might argue that is an act of war in
the moral sense).

If one accepts that acting in a war in such a capacity is the more moral
choice than inaction, then it makes sense to talk about the ethics of war,
such as: when is lethal force against enemy combatants acceptable, what
weapons of war have justifiable risks?

------
Entangled
War has ethics? That's new to me.

The fact that some "rules" are set so idiots follow them doesn't mean
everybody does, specially when they are not seen. Abu ghraib anyone?

Wall street has a very clear ethics set on stone, profits no matter the loss.

~~~
timthelion
War does have ethics. For example, the US military has rules of engagement. A
great example of this is that the US at one point (70% sure) knew where the
head of ISIS was. He was alegedly in an appartment building in a city in
Syria. The US rules of engagement prevent the airforce from simply bombing an
appartment building full of civilians, so they did nothing. That means a lot.
It means that they don't simply bomb large numbers of civilians, which is a
good thing. It is what makes it easy for the US military to point to ISIS and
say "those fighers are uncivilized they kill civilians". It is a significant
advantage on the ground, because civilians are less hatefull towards the US as
a result. It is also the right thing to do.

Edit: Abu Ghraib was horrible and the solders should have been sent to prison
for the rest of their lives and not just a few years.

Also, I do not support the US military and think that they cause more harm
than good in their foreign engagements.

~~~
nostrademons
Much of this is because we're nominally at peace with Syria. _ISIS_ is the
belligerent party.

We absolutely did bomb large numbers of civilians in WW2, Iraq, and Vietnam,
and in the latter two cases we hadn't even formally declared war.

~~~
mod
Are you nitpicking the examples as stand-alone, or as part of the greater
argument: that war does have ethics?

If you're intending to say that it doesn't, I think you should revisit your
conclusion.

Otherwise, these were just examples of war having ethics.

~~~
nostrademons
My argument is that war has ethics as long as it is peacetime. As soon as it
is wartime, the ethics are quickly forgotten. The ethics are remembered again
once peace is restored, but only for the losing side.

I've got another comment that lays out some historical examples of this [1],
but there are plenty more.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13897486](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13897486)

(In particular, I'm not commenting on whether war _should_ have ethics; I
agree that it should. But factually, looking at what belligerents actually do
in wartime, _it doesn 't_, at least in any meaningful sense.)

