When Killing Costs You Nothing, the Other Side Stops Being Human
Fairness was never kindness. It was the last proof you saw them at all
When children play games, even without any adults around to watch, they will instinctively say: that’s not fair — you have to let me go first.
No one teaches them when to say it. It is almost instinctive: you want to win, but you don’t want to win in a way that means nothing. The person on the other side has to have a chance, otherwise the victory is worth nothing. This instinct to demand reciprocity appears very early — so early that we never think it deserves serious attention. We treat it as nothing more than a rule children make for their games.
Ancient warfare once took this rule seriously.
Not because the ancients were kinder than us, but because they clearly understood that the purpose of war was never only to eliminate the other side. In the Battle of the Hong River, Duke Xiang of Song insisted on waiting until the Chu army had fully crossed the river and formed its ranks before ordering the attack. He lost the battle because of it. Later generations mostly mocked him, calling it foolish benevolence.
But from another angle, he may not have been foolish. He may only have been trying desperately to preserve something: the space in which, after the war, both sides could still sit down and speak. He was fighting not only a battle, but also a ritual — a ritual proving that both sides were people worth taking seriously. Once that ritual is broken, what remains is only naked slaughter.
Dueling pushes this logic to its extreme.
Why must both sides use equal weapons and face equal risk? Because the meaning of victory is precisely built on the fact that both sides shared the danger. If you use poison, or strike when the other side is completely unprepared, you may indeed win — but you have proved nothing, because the other side never truly had a chance.
There is something rarely said out loud here: only when the opponent is acknowledged as equal to you does defeating him mean anything. In other words, rules were never only there to limit the effectiveness of violence. The rules themselves are the way of acknowledging the other as human. The German jurist Carl Schmitt summed up this logic with a term: the just enemy — meaning that even when you are fighting to the death, you still recognize the other side as a combatant with rights like yours, not as a pest to be exterminated.
But what happens once this risk is no longer reciprocal?
The answer is absolute technological advantage — and that advantage quietly turns into moral superiority. When one side can destroy the other with no risk, it gradually stops seeing the other as a rival also exposed to danger, and starts seeing them as something that must simply be removed.
There is something worth pausing over here — even traditional hunting, when facing an animal with no political standing and no speech, still led humans to set some minimum limits of fairness: face the prey directly, give it some chance to escape. Even when the other side is only an animal, we still feel that killing cannot be entirely without limits.
And now some wars, waged against opponents with full personhood, are conducted under ethical constraints that are lower than the minimum standard humans extend to prey.
The two systems used by Israel in Gaza make this painfully concrete.
One system, code-named “Lavender,” trawls massive amounts of phone records, social connections, and location data across Gaza, assigning a score to nearly every Palestinian male. If the score is high enough, the person is flagged as a suspected low-level Hamas or Islamic Jihad operative. At the beginning of the war, this system generated a list of 37,000 people. Manual review of that list took, on average, twenty seconds — not to verify who the person actually was, but merely to check whether he was male, then stamp approval. Military insiders knew the model had roughly a ten percent chance of misidentifying someone — placing police, civil defense personnel, or simply innocent civilians with the same name or a nearby address on the list. That ten percent error rate was treated as an acceptable statistical loss.
The other system, code-named “Where’s Daddy?”, does not find targets; it decides when to strike. It tracks when someone on the list goes home, waits until he returns at night and reunites with his wife and children, then blows up the entire house. To kill one low-level target, internal rules allowed the deaths of fifteen to twenty uninvolved people as collateral; for higher-level targets, that number could rise to more than a hundred. To save money, they often used unguided bombs, wiping out entire families at once.
Once these systems are running, killing is no longer a moment that must be taken seriously. It becomes a job that needs to be completed — punching in a score at work, going home at night. The people being destroyed are not even “people” in the system; they are just probabilities assembled from metadata, points with a high enough match score. Even the word enemy has become unnecessary.
From a child saying “that’s not fair” to a person being assigned a score from metadata and then erased, along with his family, on some night — the whole thing can be said in one sentence: the bottom line that the other side must also have a chance was removed, piece by piece, in the name of efficiency and safety.
No one ever formally announced that this bottom line had been abolished. It was quietly worked around, and the language used was respectable: precision, efficiency, acceptable error rates.
Have you ever thought about this: the moment a person no longer wants to take a risk for something, they are also quietly turning the person on the other side from a person into a target.
And what is even more chilling is that once this starts running, no one even needs to think about it anymore — the score generates itself, the house gets blown up at the correct time on its own, and in the process, no one has to bear even the smallest degree of responsibility for any specific name.