What's the difference between a soldier, an assassin, and a mercenary?

[onelifecrisis]

Originally Posted by Skybird

War and peace are two totally different states of the human world, and both have very different sets of morality, with only partial overlaps.

I couldn't more strongly disagree with this. Again, where is the crossover from one to the other? When one man attacks? Two? Three? A hundred? A thousand? Must they be acting in the name of a government? A religion? Is it simply a case of when your government declares war? In which case, your statement would mean that you'd change your morals from one predefined set to another because someone else says that, in their opinion, the state of the world you now live in has changed?

Boiling it down to the simplest form, at what point does a disagreement between two individuals become a "war" in miniature? When a fist is raised, or after it has struck? When a weapon is pulled? When it is aimed? Fired? What if these things are threatened verbally first?

There are no such lines and any you try to draw can be picked apart a thousand times. We live in one reality, not two or three or more.