The Hidden Cost of War: Human, Economic, and Legal Consequences

A blindfold over the eyes of Justice

There is a profound reason why Justice is depicted in art with a blindfold: impartiality is not merely a philosophical ideal, but also a structural prerequisite for any judgment to be legitimate. The philosopher John Rawls, in his seminal work A Theory of Justice, proposed the thought experiment of the veil of ignorance—the idea that just principles can only be conceived when we do not know what position we will occupy in the resulting society.

It is precisely this exercise that the conflict in the Middle East invites us to undertake: to look at the consequences of war not through the prism of political sympathies or antipathies, but through the lens of what is universally human—suffering, loss, and the civilizational cost that no official narrative can completely conceal. Discussing events is, in fact, less fruitful than discussing ideas. However, the events in the Middle East offer us a cruel empirical laboratory, where abstract principles materialize into concrete numbers, displaced faces, disrupted supply chains, and legal norms that are quietly crumbling. This article does not aim to point fingers. Rather, it seeks to examine what war costs and to whom.

The cost that doesn't show up in the war reports

When financial markets report that oil prices have risen above $90 per barrel due to tensions in the Strait of Hormuz, what the news rarely explains is that this figure is not merely a portfolio variable for investors. It is the price of bread rising in Nairobi, it is the cost of fertilizer putting pressure on agribusiness in Pará, it is inflation eroding the wages of workers who have never heard of Hormuz.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has demonstrated, with methodological rigor, through his analysis of the Iraq War, that the true costs of armed conflict are systematically underestimated by governments. According to Stiglitz, the war in Iraq cost American taxpayers more than $3 trillion, when accounting not only for military operations but also for long-term costs: veteran assistance, macroeconomic impacts, rising oil prices, and the deterioration of public credit. The same logic applies, with variations in scale, to any prolonged conflict in the most strategically important region on the planet in terms of energy. The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) estimates that the global cost of violence reached nearly $20 trillion in 2023, equivalent to 13.5% of global Gross Domestic Product. For comparison, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimates that less than 2% of that amount would be needed to eradicate extreme poverty worldwide. War, in this sense, is not merely a moral tragedy; it is an economic choice with global consequences.

The human face behind the numbers

Beyond the numbers and treaties, the most devastating cost is the one that statistics try, unsuccessfully, to capture. The philosopher Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, warned that the greatest danger of modern wars is not explicit brutality, but the trivialization of others’ suffering—the capacity that societies develop to process death statistics without it provoking a commensurate moral outcry. When the UN reports that 275,000 people were displaced in the first weeks of the most recent conflict in the Middle East, and that more than 58,000 of them fled from Lebanon alone, these numbers risk becoming just another line in a technical report.
Amartya Sen, an Indian economist and philosopher and Nobel laureate in Economics, developed the concept of human capabilities to measure development not by GDP, but by the actual freedom people have to live lives they consider valuable. Armed conflict systematically and often irreversibly destroys human capabilities: a child who misses out on school loses decades of productive potential; a doctor who flees takes with them human capital that their country of origin took generations to build; a woman who loses her social safety net loses the support that no public policy can fully replace. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that, in 2024, more than 120 million people were forced to leave their homes due to conflict and violence—the highest number recorded since the end of World War II. This is a crisis of civilization that strains health, education, and social security systems in countries that often have no direct connection to the original conflict.

The Legal Framework That Must Not Collapse

International humanitarian law, as codified in the 1949 Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, establishes a set of rules designed to limit the impact of armed conflicts on the civilian population. The principle of distinction, which requires combatants to differentiate between military targets and civilians, and the principle of proportionality, which prohibits attacks whose civilian casualties are excessive in relation to the expected military advantage, are pillars of this legal framework built upon the ashes of World War II.

In his theory of international law, legal scholar Hans Kelsen argued that the effectiveness of any legal norm depends on its consistent application, and that selective enforcement of norms is, in itself, a form of systemic violation of the legal order. When the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) issues urgent appeals to protect the civilian population, and these appeals are regularly ignored, what is at stake is not merely the violation of a specific norm, but the erosion of the very idea that law can govern war. The United Nations Charter, in its Article 2(4), prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State. The doctrine of preventive war represents a direct challenge to this principle. The philosopher Michael Walzer, in Just and Unjust Wars, distinguishes between preventive war—against an imminent and concrete threat—and preemptive war—against a hypothetical future threat—arguing that only the former finds justification in the tradition of just war. The deliberate confusion between these concepts in contemporary discourse has served to legitimize actions that would not pass the test of jus ad bellum. What is at stake is the integrity of the international normative system, which, since 1945, has been the only mechanism available to curb barbarism among states. Every time a norm is violated without consequences, the cost is not merely legal; it is civilizational.

The Paradox of Stalled Development

In *The Age of Extremes*, historian Eric Hobsbawm observed that the 20th century was simultaneously the most violent and the most prosperous in human history, and that this contradiction is not accidental but structural: violence and prosperity compete for the same resources, the same human capital, and the same institutional attention. The 21st century seems to be repeating this pattern with increasing intensity.
In 2025, the UN warned that 305 million people would need humanitarian assistance due to 134 ongoing armed conflicts around the world. At the same time, global military spending reached a historic record of $2.7 trillion, a figure that, according to the UN Secretariat itself, is 750 times greater than the organization’s regular budget and, if redirected, would be sufficient to finance the global energy transition, eradicate hunger, and ensure universal access to basic education. Thomas Piketty, in *Capital in the Twenty-First Century*, demonstrated that the wars of the 20th century were, paradoxically, the greatest mechanisms for wealth redistribution in modern history—not because war is good, but because they destroyed accumulated wealth and forced reconstruction efforts that temporarily reduced inequalities. The perverse lesson of this observation is that, in the absence of effective wealth redistribution policies, societies tend to accumulate tensions that eventually manifest as conflict. War, in this sense, is not only a cause of suffering; it is also a symptom of structural failures that societies refuse to address through peaceful means.

What "Justice with a Blindfold" asks of us

The statue of Justice does not wear a blindfold to ignore reality. She wears it to remind us that reality must be judged by standards that transcend contingent loyalties. When we look at the Middle East through this blindfold—not one of indifference, but of impartiality—what we see is a price that all of humanity is paying, regardless of where we live or which side we support.

The data is clear: armed conflicts destroy human capital, disrupt global supply chains, overwhelm already fragile humanitarian systems, erode legal norms that took decades to build, and divert resources that could transform lives. No political narrative, however sophisticated, can make these costs disappear. They are merely redistributed and, invariably, fall more heavily on those who have the least voice to protest them. The philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas said that ethics begins with the recognition of the other’s face. Perhaps the first step toward a more just international policy is simply to have the courage to look—with open eyes this time—at the faces that war produces. Blindfolded justice demands that we apply Rawls’s veil of ignorance to assess the international landscape: if we did not know which position we would occupy, we would invariably be defenders of human dignity and the rule of law over brute force.

The Failure of Sterile Empathy

This article confronts us with a brutal reckoning, detailing the human, economic, and legal consequences that conflicts—such as those in the Middle East—impose on civilization. It invites us to don Rawls’s veil of ignorance, to transcend our political sympathies, and to view war through the only lens that matters: that of universal suffering. However, an uncomfortable and provocative question arises: if humanity has been so adept at documenting, analyzing, and dissecting the cost of war, why does it prove so powerless to prevent it?

Perhaps the uncomfortable answer is that humanity, philosophy, history, the arts, and the law have failed in their most critical mission. We have turned tragedy into statistics, horror into an object of academic study, and pain into narratives that we consume from a safe distance. We generate knowledge, but we do not generate visceral interest. The empathy we cultivate is sterile, a laboratory-bred compassion that allows us to mourn others’ suffering without it truly disturbing our comfort. What if the real challenge is not to produce more reports, but to make the cost of war impossible to ignore? What if the purpose of the humanities were to tear down the barriers that allow us to observe suffering from afar? Peace will not be achieved with yet another article or documentary, but rather when the pain of a mother, on any front, is felt as a stab in the heart of those living in Paris, New York, or São Paulo. The real task is not to appeal to reason, but to shake off our indifference and face the truth: if we had to pay the visible price of war in our own lives, would we still consider it an option?