One of the most important ethical practices is to know where your red lines are.

What won’t you do? What won’t you accept or let go?

If you don’t think about this in advance you risk doing abominable things and then realizing you have gone too far.

This is true in personal life, and it’s true in political life.

Two simple personal lines I have are that I won’t rape, I won’t torture, and I don’t approve of those who do.

Those don’t seem, to me, to be lines that should be all that controversial, but if often seems like they are. A lot of people, especially, are willing to excuse torture, and a lot of people rape.

Heck, a lot of people excuse rape. I recently saw a picture of the “Proud Boys” wearing shirts proclaiming that Pinochet did nothing wrong. Pinochet had dogs trained to rape women.

If you support Pinochet, you’re unutterable scum. No exceptions.

One of the simple rules for living in a good world is taking certain actions off the board. There are some things, which if you do, you lose the right to call yourself a good person, or the right to the good will and opinion of other people.

In geopolitics, aggressive war, like Iraq or Libya or the current Saudi attack in Yemen, mark a country as beyond the pale, because war always includes a myriad of evils, and should be engaged in only, truly, as a last resort.

If you violate hard, red lines you morally destroy yourself, and it’s a hard thing to come back from. Part of it is the human need to justify ourselves: If we do something bad, we like to pretend it wasn’t “so bad.” Part of it is that we normalize whatever we do.

Doing evil, to put it poetically, stains our souls, and getting them clean again isn’t easy. Most people never really manage it, not if they’ve done true evil.

Then there is the issue of hypocrisy. When our people do it, somehow it isn’t as bad as when their people do this.

I see this with a lot of the opposition to Trump. Oh, Trump’s evil. He was always clearly evil, as when he endorsed torture. But Obama engaged in the Libyan war, which, of course, led to mass rapes, murder, torture and open air slave markets.

The same people screaming about Trump’s evils, which are certainly real, somehow said little about Obama’s evils.

Because Obama was their guy.

Nor, of course, is it only Democratic partisans who are hypocrites this way.

We all have our tribes: The groups and beliefs and symbols we identify with. And when they do evil, well, somehow we just don’t find the outrage in ourselves that we find for our enemy’s evils.

Trump may yet cause a war. He’s sure trying with Iran. If he does, he’ll wind up worse than Obama, odds are (since a war with Iran will do even more harm than the Libyan war). But he hasn’t yet.

Domestically, of course, he’s been worse, and is due criticism. But absent an aggressive war, well…

Be careful who and what you justify. Think about your own red lines. Do it for your soul, and do it so the actions of your tribe, your country, don’t cost you your soul.

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