Ok, let’s stay within the confines of individual self-preservation.
If it is necessary for you to have a new organ to survive, but not enough are available through organ donation programs, does the fact that it is necessary to your survival mean that acquiring an organ from an unwilling donor (directly or though black market proxy) is a justified action?
How about a murderer that killed someone and left witnesses? If they are caught, it would mean they are sentenced to death. So it is necessary for their continued self-preservation to minimize the chances of being caught. Does that make their murder of the witnesses of their earlier crime justified?
Your pithy take on necessity = justification is BS at even a cursory examination.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have freed the slaves. Just that neither the Union nor the Confederate killing of each other was justified. I’m not saying that the US shouldn’t have fought in WW2. Just that bombing Hiroshima wasn’t justified.
You are the one conflating necessity with justification. And as such you seem to not be able to wrap your head around that while I’m saying mass violence is never justified, that doesn’t mean I’m saying the relative necessity for admirable goals means it was in the best interest of the US to have had a show of overwhelming force at the end of the WW2 conflict in mind of Stalin’s USSR post-war or that Sherman was wise to burn crops as he marched through the South to reduce supplies for Confederate opposition.
Edit: Also, thank you for making my point about how the notion of justified violence is a slippery slope that can easily end up justifying atrocities by relativist moralizing there with the whole “by any means necessary.”
If you want a diamond necklace that you can’t afford, it is necessary to steal it in order to have it.
It is not justified to steal it simply because it was necessary to meet your goals.
You are implicitly assuming that the necessity of self-preservation equates justification on the premise that self-preservation is a just result.
I don’t agree.
If two soldiers are fighting for their lives against each other, it may be necessary for each to survive to kill the other.
But the family of the one that dies may not see their loved one’s death as justified even if the family of the one that survived sees it that way.
Your self-preservation is worthless to me, and thus justifies nothing. My own self-preservation is literally worth everything to me - and yet if still does not justify my taking everything from you, even if I deem it necessary to achieve my own desires and goals, any more than my desire for a necklace I cannot afford justifies its theft.
There is a distinction between things like stealing bread to save a life where a necessary action is justified by the good that comes out of it and stealing bread to throw away in order to achieve a thrill. Both are necessary to their goals, but one has a goal that justifies the necessary action while the other does not.
I’m saying that there is no goal or good in existence that justifies the inherit evil of mass violence, even if there are a myriad of ways in which mass violence might be necessary to one’s goals, with those ranging from ethnic cleansing to fighting tyranny.
While climate is new, corruption among ruling classes is a story as old as civilization.
Was living ever motivated?
Well, one of the differences between now and then is the access to bad information.
If you were living in a village and a village far away from you was all killed off, maybe you’d hear about it eventually.
Today, you’d be able to see photos the same day.
So online access is overstimulating your “wow this is screwed” circuitry in ways you wouldn’t have experienced decades, centuries, millennia ago.
Maybe a bit of a break from online news would be helpful.
The world has always sucked and had issues. But you were just way less likely to be constantly aware of it.
If anything, the past few years show some incredible promise for things changing in terms of corruption among ruling classes, even if the climate is long term going to completely screw us.
But humanity was never going to last forever, and whether or not you are part of the last hurrah for the species shouldn’t necessarily detract from your experience in the here and now of it.
Find your own meaning and path on a relative basis, and be less caught up in existential dread, especially given there’s little benefit to absorbing yourself in the latter.