I recently became aware of Walter Block’s expulsion from the Libertarian movement by its elites due to his support for Israel’s military response after the atrocities of October 7, 2023. In discussing this, Block raised Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields. This is an interesting topic in its own right. Suppose a man with children strapped to him, front and back, is charging toward you with knife raised. “I will kill you!” he shouts. You are holding a gun and can stop him only by shooting him, killing the children in the process. Should you shoot him or let him kill you? If you do shoot him, who is responsible for the deaths of the children strapped to him: he or you? My intuition tells me fairly clearly that you are justified in shooting him and that he is responsible for the children’s deaths, not you. To push this example to its extreme, let’s jettison the laws of nature and suppose there is an arbitrarily large number of children, say, one million. Even then, it seems to me you are justified in shooting the man even though all one million children will die, though I doubt this answer will win any popularity contests. That defending yourself is justified doesn’t mean sacrificing your life to save the children is not a moral good. It may well be the case that such self-sacrifice is a supererogatory moral act–something praiseworthy that goes above and beyond the call of duty–like a soldier jumping on a grenade to save others.