By that metric, doctors doing triage at a disaster site should be jailed.

This is even more out of touch of the comment you are answering to.

This is a failure to think, disguised as moral judgment.

If a police sniper shoots a mass shooter in the middle of their mass shooting, that's a hero. Not a villain.

To be fair, though, some moral frameworks (not mine) proscribe that any killing is bad, even to save oneself or others.

I don't mean this as a "gotcha", but as a reminder that morality is a human invention, and different humans will take different moral stances on things.

There is a clear difference between "I had to kill someone to save 50 lives" and "I saved 50 lives, so I'm allowed to murder one person as payment"

There is no answer to this. The universe does not provide any mechanisms for moral decision making or evaluation. Rather, morality exists in human minds, not in the external world.

We have to do the best we can to be kind and minimise suffering, while understanding that there will inevitably be a diversity of judgements on moral matters. And if those moral judgements have real-world effects, there will be moral judgements about that too.

The lack of moral universality is how it is, not a failure. And it never ends: there are no right answers, although there might very well be wrong ones. Its up to us.

And that's exactly the thing about cancel culture - it seeks to elevate one particular moral judgement above all others and punish not just those that go against it but also those that advocate for or even just consider any other morality.

Firstly, its not even clear to me that "cancel culture" is anything more than a soundbite.

But even if it is, in fact, a thing - it's clearly not backed by "one particular moral judgement", as it is commonly portrayed. Lots of people face disapproval and punishment for a diversity of chosen moral stance, including people who could be categorised as "liberal" and who are typically considered to be those doing the "cancelling".

Supporers of the abolition of slavery or apartheid, or of human rights for minority communities, were for many years "cancelled" in the US, and in Europe, for example. Today, in the US, supporters of social equality and diversity are being "cancelled".

So I suspect that "cancel culture" is what you get when one moral/political group (of any persuasion) only sees part of the bigger picture, and uses that to manufacture a grievance.

'cancel culture' used to be called 'calling out assholes' before we entered the current period of fetishizing cruelty.

Now, the worst and slimiest amoung us are crawling up on the cross and weeping and gnashing their teeth because people won't buy their book or watch their movie. It's almost always the most powerful who claim to be 'cancelled'.

Calling out assholes is a good and useful function and we should continue to do it.