So what's so wrong about that story that holds the public servants on the hook for resisting unjust orders and therefore says that, look, if they decide to carry out those unjust orders, they're then liable to face that first wave of resistance from people pushing back?

Yeah, good.

So as I see it, there are two important reasons to not, if you'll extrapolate from some of the things we might want to say in the just war literature to our thinking about public servants.

One of them is that there's a really important dividing line, at least as I see it, between different kinds of public officials.

Those, if you will, who are primarily interacting with people whom they're also serving.

So you might think, Police departments often purport to be there to serve those with whom they're interacting, right? The LAPD, the Los Angeles Police Department, has the slogan, I mean, what, to protect and to serve, or to serve and to protect, right? Clearly, the aspiration is the people whom we're dealing with on a day-to-day basis are the very people whom we're trying to protect and to serve.

They are, in fact, people who should be benefiting from our actions, right? And if that ideal is...

So what conditions must be met to count as acting