by committing atrocities, you become the evil, even if you have an utilitarian excuse. saving more lives is ultimately meaningless as evil will always exist and people will always die as a result of it but the one thing we have complete agency in is our own actions and that will ultimately be what we will be held accountable for

I'm not religious, I only care about concepts such as "evil" so far as they are semantically useful lingual constructs.

> we have complete agency in is our own actions and that will ultimately be what we will be held accountable for

By who, and for what; consequence or intention? A utilitarian justification seems to me as good as any.

Was my comment religious in any way? There's multiple ways that one could be held accountable for crimes against humanity, either by your government and laws or by the international community. There's really no point considering the issue from a nakedly utilitarian justification - why would you care about how many people you save then? If it's for their economic output or because of economic damage, why not just kill the poor or enslave the populace? Your stance is pure sociopathy and as such we obviously have no room for a reasoned discussion.

“We had to destroy the village in order to save it,” is a justification that rings hollow.

Depends what that means, it sounds like it's meant to sound hollow.