The janny smacked you but I thought you raised a valid point. The "moral high ground" is and has always been subjective. Do the ends justify the means? Depends on the ideology. Is a soldier surrendering a dishonorable act, or should he be treated with professional dignity? During WW2 the Japanese thought that surrender was dishonorable and treated POWs very poorly. They also deliberately shot at combat medics, they didn't have any sort of taboo against that. Nor did Europeans, until most of the way through the 19th century, think much about leaving wounded soldiers to lay dying in the field, or even casually murdering the wounded as they lay helpless after the battle was already decided (these sort of behaviors lead to the creation of the Red Cross.) In all of these cases it wasn't because those people were fundamentally evil. They were acting according to the norms and expectations of their culture. When two sides with radically different norms encounter each other in conflict, both can feel as though the other is depraved. But that's not necessarily an accurate reflection of the mental state of the other guys. American soldiers in the Pacific thought that the Japanese were savage animals, but with cooler hindsight we know that the Japanese had and still have a strong sense of honor. The catch is that it is, or at least then was, a very different sort of honor that held people to different expectations than Americans were accustomed to.