It's an unprovable, but I'd bet a considerable sum that there were more than a few Aztecs who had some serious doubts about the whole human sacrifice thing.

Voicing those doubts, of course, seems like it would have been an excellent way to find yourself next at the sharp end of the priest's knife.

And I'm sure you'll find a non-zero number of Americans who think we should do human sacrifice again but think that voicing those doubts about not doing human sacrifice would have them at the sharp end of a twitter shitstorm, resulting in eternal unemployability for jobs paying above minimum wage.

> This seems like an excellent example of postmodernist notion of moral relativism getting too far.

I mean, if we want to be morally objective... what does the war on terror's body count say about the United States relative to the Aztecs? We're 10x as evil?

It says nothing, because this variable is not enough to make any kind of moral judgement. In fact, I just had almost exactly the same discussion here on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17367827) merely two days ago and I don't expect to anything deeper than typical cliches anymore.

You're just replacing moral relativism with counterfactual thinking. Just because you can imagine an alternate scenario where things might have been worse, that doesn't provide moral justification for an action. This is especially true since we know what the original justification for the invasion of Iraq and I can't imagine it being aligned with any counterfactual thinking on the subject.

The type of thinking you espouse can be used to justify virtually any military action, including war crimes. All you'd have to say is "it could have been worse..."

No, I'm imagining the whole space of the alternatives not just "it could've been worse". You clearly are constructing a strawman out of my argument and it doesn't feel that well-constructed, because my argument is not about giving a judgement to a particular situation (especially Iraq) but about the whole method you use for such judgements.

Again, what you’re describing is counterfactual thinking. It doesn’t stop being counterfactual just because you considered lots of stuff.

And if you want to make the extraordinary claim of “Imagining the whole space of the alternatives” you should provide some evidence of such. Because right now, most experts who have attempted that have come to the conclusion that Operation Iraqi Freedom was a mistake: not merely one of bad planning or execution, but rather it never should have been attempted to begin with. This includes some of its biggest architects and boosters.