On Disgust

War is different because, unlike almost every other act of government, it authorizes the deliberate taking of human life. Such an expensive moral debit incurs moral obligation and in a nation founded upon the revolutionary idea that all men are created equal the most fundamental of these is candor about who is being killed in our name. If the government sends young Americans into harm’s way and they die, the nation deserves to know, and their names deserve to be spoken. Their sacrifice deserves to be measured against the purpose for which they were sent, and the citizens in whose name they died deserve enough information to decide whether that sacrifice was justified.

The sine qua non of my philosophy is that human life is sacred. Sacred does not mean untouchable. There are circumstances in which taking a life is morally permissible or even necessary, and we wrestle with those questions in debates over capital punishment, physician-assisted suicide, and war. The sanctity of life should outweigh almost every competing consideration. Not every consideration, but almost every one. Convenience, news cycles, and the political embarrassment of the tiniest of men who started this war should not outweigh it.

This administration, by turns criminal and stupid, is making precisely that trade. It is implicitly saying that preserving a political narrative is more important than fully informing the public about the price being paid in its name. That should offend every American, especially those who have served in uniform. This is what our enemies do. This is what the Nazis did as dead Germans littered Europe, and it is what the Soviet Union did in Afghanistan with sealed zinc coffins quietly returned to families.

A republic owes them better.

The burden of citizenship is not merely waving flags on holidays or applauding soldiers at sporting events; it is accepting responsibility for what our government does in our name. If American forces kill, we should know where, why, and under what legal and strategic rationale. If American service members are killed, we should know that too, not months later, not after political calculations have been exhausted, and not only when disclosure becomes unavoidable. Democracies cannot meaningfully consent to wars whose costs are intentionally hidden from them.

Transparency is not merely an administrative virtue. It is a moral obligation that we honor the dead and inform the living. Authoritarian regimes often honor dead with showmanship, pageantry, and ceremony to the point of cringe, but they skip the most important honor an young soldier coming home in a box deserves: accountability for his government.

When governments obscure casualties or selectively disclose them, they distort democratic accountability itself. This is what Trump and Hegseth are doing. Citizens cannot judge whether a campaign is succeeding if they do not know its human cost, and Congress cannot meaningfully exercise oversight if the public remains unaware of the consequences of executive decisions. President Donald Trump has repeatedly failed this obligation, and decisions made under his leadership have cost the lives of young Americans while his administration seeks to minimize public attention to those losses. That represents more than poor leadership. It is a betrayal of the moral compact between a free people and those who volunteer to defend them.

Political leaders speak reverently of “the fallen.” They invoke sacrifice, courage, and patriotism. Those words mean very little if they are unwilling to allow the public to confront the actual cost of their decisions. Patriotism has nothing to do with “thank you for your service” or how often one praises the military. It is measured by whether one treats the lives of service members as infinitely precious, worthy of honesty even when the truth is politically inconvenient. Dictatorships wave flags and cheer, democracies ask questions and hold leadership to the fire when American children come home mangled in boxes.

Every death in uniform deserves a national accounting. Every family deserves to know that their loved one’s sacrifice was neither hidden nor exploited. Every citizen deserves the opportunity to ask the hardest question any democracy can ask: Was this worth it?

The answer in Iran is obviously no, and a just America would be holding impeachment hearings for these high crimes as we speak. A just world would see Trump and Hegseth walking slowly past open caskets on a Dover tarmac, trailed by a phalanx of men and women with cameras and microphones asking them if these cold, twisted bodies have been worth it.