JeffEngel wrote:
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But it's a terrible political argument for resolving any civil war: you end up with a resolution of it that amounts to legal genocide. So you get a whole lot of forgiveness, and to make things settle down, you don't even bring up anything but the worst of it: punish the leaders in ways that eliminate their ability to lead any repeats of that, and smack around hard the people whose activities were worse than mere war allows for and for whom you've got knock-down evidence of that wrongdoing.
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This doesn't just apply to civil wars. It can be instructive to look into what was done in Rwanda after the massacre there in order to forgive and reduce the chances of a repeat. It should be noted that Rwanda is under heavy population pressure: we think of it as Hutu vs Tutsi, but there was in-tribe massacre also. The worst of it is that they violated their own principles.
Of course, while sin is often going against solid ethics, anyone who deliberately goes against what he truly believes is wrong, has sinned by definition. This is one argument for trying to use Bayesian thinking. Those who think they have it all correct usually make systematic errors.
