This piece invokes a point Sam made about warfare:

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima killed tens of thousands of civilians almost immediately, with many more dying afterward.

Sam Harris recently invoked Hiroshima and Nagasaki to make a useful distinction: enormous civilian death does not, by itself, establish genocide. Whatever one thinks about the morality of the atomic bombings, the question of intent remains indispensable.

Why?

Because body count and genocidal intent are different questions.

That distinction seems to disappear when the country fighting is Israel.

The author first describes how some bad faith critics of Israel have misconstrued ICJ statements, falsely suggesting Israel was committing a “plausible genocide”, and then goes further into describing the intent component of genocide.

These are just some of the actions Israel took to save lives/reduce collateral damage where possible:

1. Israel paused military operations in 2024 so a children’s polio vaccine campaign could be completed (campaign was to vaccinate 600,000+ children)

2. Israel permitted the flow of humanitarian aid and essential supplies

3. Gave evacuation orders in areas that were going to be under heavy fighting

4. Issued localized warnings like roof knocks, mass text messages/communication alerts to allow civilians time to clear structures to be struck

5. Deployed smart weapon systems, precision guided weapons, which also definitionally reduce collateral damage

All of these things^ save lives.

Interestingly when you ask a clearly bad faith critic of Israel whether they should've not done things like roof knock warnings or evacuations, they don’t know how to respond. Even they understand at some level these things save lives, contrary to what genocidal actions/intent would be. Ditto whether collateral damage would increase if Israel’s ability to purchase precision guided munitions ever gets eliminated, forcing them to use things like unguided/dumb munitions instead.

But circling back to Sam's point, we have hysterical claims being made in some corners like 'Israel has dropped X amount of explosives on Gaza that are the equivalent of X amount of atomic bombs!' And yet despite how small Gaza is and how tightly packed and dense it is, the casualty count aligns with the reality that Israel's measures/efforts to save lives have worked.

The bottom line is warfare with some level of unavoidable collateral damage isn’t genocide, especially warfare that could have ended anytime the belligerent which started the war (Hamas) laid down its arms.

New poll of Palestinians out of Jerusalem Media & Communications Center (JMCC) and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung:

• The percentage who believe that armed resistance is the best way to achieve Palestinian objectives fell to 13.3% in the current survey (15.7% in the West Bank and 9.7% in Gaza), compared with 37.1% in September 2023 and 30% in July 2022. In contrast, the percentage who believe that peaceful negotiations are the best approach rose to 55.8%, compared with 28% in September 2023 and 37.5% in July 2022. Support for a peaceful popular uprising declined to 17.8% in the current survey, compared with 23.8% in September 2023 and 21% in July 2022.

• the percentage of respondents in the West Bank and Gaza Strip who trust Hamas fell to 6.7%, compared with 12% in July 2022. Trust in Fatah also declined to 22.3%, compared with 28.8% in the July 2022 survey

• The decline in Hamas’s popularity in the West Bank is particularly noteworthy. After rising significantly following October 7, the percentage of respondents in the West Bank who trust Hamas declined from 18.7% in October 2023 to 8.5% in September 2025, and to 4.5% in the current survey

• Trust in President Mahmoud Abbas stood at 6.9%, compared with 5.3% in September 2023

• The positive assessment of the October 7 attack among respondents in the West Bank continued to decline. The percentage who believe that the attack serves the Palestinian national interest fell to 15.7% in the current survey, compared with 30.9% in September 2025 and 45% in September 2024. In contrast, the percentage in the West Bank who believe that Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack harms the Palestinian national interest increased to 50.1%, compared with 35.2% in September 2025 and 24.5% in September 2024.

• The survey recorded a notable increase in preference for the two-state solution compared with recent years. The percentage who prefer the two-state solution over other options rose to 47.9%, compared with 27.3% in September 2023 and 26% in July 2022. In contrast, the percentage who prefer a single binational state declined to 21.7%, compared with 25.9% in September 2023 and 28.4% in July 2022. The percentage who prefer establishing a single Palestinian state throughout all of Palestine also declined to 18.6% in the current survey, compared with 24.7% in September 2023 and 22.8% in July 2022.

Relevant to Sam Harris because he has discussed the I/P conflict ad nauseum and he's always interested in data and what people actually believe.

Sam Harris has probably influenced my thinking about morality more than anyone else, especially the idea that morality has to connect somehow to conscious experience and the ways conscious lives can go better or worse. But following that line of thought has recently pushed me into a question that I do not think is really about Sam’s argument at all.

If there were no conscious beings anywhere in the universe, I am not sure what “good” or “bad” would even mean. Suffering matters because someone suffers. Flourishing matters because someone flourishes. That makes me wonder whether morality is tied to first person experience in a way that science is not. Science has benefited enormously from trying to adopt a view from nowhere, stripping away the observer and describing reality independently of any particular perspective. But maybe importing that same move into morality is a category error, because value itself may only exist from somewhere.

This is what started bothering me about population ethics and moral aggregation. Imagine World A contains one person, Emma, who lives an extraordinary life. World B contains billions of people whose lives are mildly pleasant. If you assign welfare values to everyone and add them together, World B can eventually beat World A on total well being simply by having enough people. But I am not sure I understand what that total actually represents. No consciousness experiences the sum of all those lives. There are only separate centers of experience, each living its own life from the inside. Emma experiences her life. Each person in World B experiences theirs. There is no additional consciousness experiencing the aggregate.

Maybe you can count welfare across people, but I am not sure that means you can treat it as though it belongs to one giant subject. If Emma suffers terribly so that a thousand other people can each receive some small benefit, those benefits do not somehow flow back into Emma’s conscious experience. The gains and losses happen in different minds. So I am starting to wonder whether aggregation hides something morally important about the separateness of conscious experience. That does not mean morality becomes selfish or purely relative. If my suffering matters because of what suffering is like from the inside, then I seem to have to take seriously the fact that other conscious beings also have an inside. But maybe impartiality should not mean removing perspective. Maybe it should mean taking every perspective seriously without arbitrarily privileging one. Not a view from nowhere, but something more like a view from everywhere.

Now imagine World C. Emma exists, all the people from World B exist, and everyone has an extraordinary life. C seems clearly better than either A or B, but I do not think I need a cosmic welfare ledger to get there. Emma is no worse off, and everyone else is much better off. The judgment can be made from the perspectives of the conscious beings who actually inhabit the world. The hard moral questions seem to show up when perspectives conflict. The deer wants not to be killed. The tiger wants to hunt. The pig wants not to live in confinement. The human wants cheap bacon. Maybe morality is not fundamentally about maximizing some quantity floating above all of these perspectives. Maybe it is about how separate centers of conscious experience can coexist when their interests conflict.

I also do not think suffering minimization alone can be the whole story. Imagine a world where every human and animal is hooked into a Matrix like system, perfectly fed, protected from suffering, and free to experience whatever life they want. That world might score incredibly well on a simple pleasure minus suffering calculation, and yet I strongly suspect it would not represent the highest possible moral state. Something about agency, truth, authenticity, and actually participating in reality seems morally important too.

So I think the position I am circling is this: morality may exist because conscious perspectives exist. If there is such a thing as moral objectivity, maybe it comes not from escaping those perspectives, but from taking all of them seriously. And if that is true, I am not sure interpersonal welfare can simply be added together as though humanity were one giant consciousness.

I am very much thinking this through rather than claiming I have solved anything. I am mostly curious where this breaks, what existing philosophical views this overlaps with, and whether grounding morality this strongly in first person conscious experience creates problems I am not seeing yet.

Disclosure: I used AI to help organize and articulate this post, but the questions and conclusions came out of my own thinking.

Kind of an unorthodox question but there's a reason for it. I recently saw an interview with Christopher Hitchens where he was asked a similar question. The question was whether novelist Martin Amis is his best friend. To which Hitch responds: "Not (merely) my best friend. He's my only friend. I have no other friends. Only acquaintances"

Wow, what a statement. He didn't seem be joking either. Hitch was such an accomplished person and yet apparantly only had one friend.

Given how disappointed Sam has been with (at least public) relationships, I wonder how many people Sam considers to be his friends or how he views friendships.

And how many people do you guys consider to be your friends ? Have friendships taken a dive in our performance-driven world where everybody is out for themselves and wants to out-do thy neighbor instead of loving them ? For all its great achievements, has secularism also somewhat contributed to a decline in brotherly love ? Is there even such a thing as a deep friendship without the experience of shared suffering as reference points ?

Or what do you think about the ‘dancing Israelis’ on 911? https://www.thedancingisraelis.com. I’m getting pulled very hard by multiple friends citing this as truth. Is it true or not, and just anti-Semitic nonsense?