The problem with that is it ceases to be a (nearly perfect) objective standard. Bush will tell you that slaughtering Iraqis is necessary to save 300,000,000 lives. He regularly looks right at the camera and says, “I’m doing it to protect you!” He’s full of beans, and dangerously mad, but I’m sure he believes what he says. He would say that his actions are moral by your standard.
You would counter that it’s not good enough to think aggression will save millions of lives; it actually must save millions of lives to be justified. That standard is objective, but completely useless: humans only ever think something is true, because we perceive reality through thought. It’s impossible to identify those cases where aggression is objectively justified. We could only do it if we could travel through time, observe the deaths, then go back and aggress, and count the dead again.
–Len.