I would make a special, selfish example for my wife and child, because I am human.
I think I would phrase this differently. I would say that I care about all people just as much as I care about my countrymen. How is that immoral or deficient?
Better off and more secure do equal moral correctness.
Izzy, I’d just like to thank you for actually engaging me in this debate and specifically arguing points with me rather than just posting drive by insults like some others have done in this thread. I know I’ve said some unpopular things in this thread, especially the “thousand American soldiers” remark, but you and nogginhead have forced me to rethink and back off of that kind of hyperbole. I hope that, if I retract that single remark, then my comments in this thread at least don’t seem any more objectionable than any other wild-eyed, liberal, anti-war hippie.
I respect you for staying reasonable when I was not.
Having said all that, I’m interested in your answer to my question about protecting an innocent child from an unjust assault from your countrymen.
Yesterday I was going to post to this train wreck. Naah. Since then, I agree more with DtC than I did yesterday. Look, nobody should die. Saddam’s actions kill innocent Iraqi children. To do a real utilitarian fealitic calculus we should take that into account. To stay the military hand can cost innocent lives. Utilitarianism is a bitch that way. If you want to maximize the number of living Iraqi children, don’t pretend that there are not other factors. What about Saddam’s willingness to sacrifice the just-grown-up children in military adventurism or missile attacks - Kuwait, Saudi, Iran, Israel, the NFZs? He only cooperates with the international community when the US puts an invasion force near his borders.
What I was going to say yesterday, you really cannot calculate the worth of human life. Many of our US troops are ‘innocent’ in the sense that they have never hurt anyone. They don’t decide to go to war. I’d bet most of them wish the war to be a mass surrender with as few casualties as possible. Iraqi children are innocent also. I would prefer to leave the relative worthiness to live to God.
This I could debate, and have on various threads. There is another one now that suggests this is a major motivation for US action. Maybe I’ll go post in that one also.
To confirm, you would do it, but would feel that you had done something morally wrong?
Because you have failed to recognize the bond that you have with your countrymen. Particularly if you benefit from those bonds by partaking of the efforts that others put forth based on them. I guess if you renounced all benefit from the society that you are a part of, and went off to live by yourself in a cave, you owe nothing to anyone and can treat everyone as equals. Until then, not.
What I’m trying to say is that these soldiers have signed up to defend you in the event of some hostile power engaging us. You benefit from this deterrent effect, even if you disagree with the specific actions in Iraq.
Well, I’m just a sweetie. (Ask anyone.)
But seriously, I do want to note that one might separate attitudes about the war from attitudes about the soldiers. I was vehemently opposed to the bombing campaign in Serbia (ambiguous moral issue, no compelling self interest, expanded vision of “military target” - but that’s another issue). But though I felt that Clinton and Blair et al were evil men, I wished only the best on the poor guys out there doing the fighting.
Well it’s a good question. Because if you remove the military aspect of it you are right. Suppose a band of American mass murderers went down to Bolivia and began randomly killing innocent Bolivians for the fun of it. I would certainly want to kill them to save the innocent civilians, and in fact, as a supporter of the death penalty, I would want to kill them even if the innocent civilians were beyond saving.
I would say that the difference here is that the military has to follow a chain of command, and you can’t have each soldier setting his own foreign policy. Unless the command is egregiously wrong by widely recognized standards, I would say a soldier is obligated to follow orders in a military campaign. I think you can hold the commanders responsible for setting immoral policies, but to expect individual soldiers to dissent in a somewhat ambiguous moral issue is not justifiable. In this case, you can argue as to whether the war is justified or not, or whether the policies with regards to risk to civilians are wrong or not, but I don’t think they are enough out of line with accepted and historical military standards to make an individual soldier obligated to conscientiously object. So these guys stay good guys, and I stay loyal to them.
I don’t know. It’s a question I’ve thought about a lot. I’m not sure i really have an answer to it. I’m still pondering it.
Let me be clear about something, here. I do not place any blame or culpability on the soldiers who are over there. I place the blame solely on the president and his cronies. If American soldiers are killed, I will consider them to be victims of their president. I don’t think American troops deserve to die. I think that military casualties are a tragedy. I think that civilian casualties are a worse tragedy.
Let’s just all agree that it would make our consciences uneasy to have to choose who lives and who dies. I’d save my family, of course. And I would feel I’d made the right decision. But I’d regret not being able to save other people too. I’m not sure I’d say I’d done something morally worng, but morally ambiguous, no question.
Diogenes the Cynic - You said that the crew of the Vincennes murdered those passengers. Murder, both morally & legally, means to deliberately kill someone. You cannot accidentally commit murder.
Something needs to be stated here. War is not obsolete. It is unfortunate that it is not, but ultimately if you believe in the concept of international law then you believe in the concept of going to war because this how you have to enforce them. Laws, by definition, stop at nations borders.
And in a war, whether you like it or agree with it or not, enemy civilians are still the enemy. Men, women and children. They may be non-combatants and as such, to a reasonable degree, be kept out of harms way by the military. But their existence does not make going to war immoral and to believe so is just immature and ignorant. The world is a dangerous place.
And 9/11 made it a significantly more dangerous place for American civilians- men, women & children. It showed that members of US-hating and terrorist supporting countries are willing & able & desire to, in the case of 9/11, murder innocent US civilians for no other reason than because of their religion & nationality. Therefore the Iraqi people- men, women & children, are no longer innocent (because of their nationality). Or rather, the protection of innocent American lives is the highest priority even if it means endangering Iraqi lives.
And it is the highest priority not just to the US military but to its citizens as well. Regardless of my previous comment I think its worth risking thousands of Iraqi civilians to keep terrorists from killing you!
[quote] Hail Ants
Diogenes the Cynic - You said that the crew of the Vincennes murdered those passengers.
[quote]
No I didn’t, I cited an example of Bush Sr. showing indifference to Iraqi civilian casualties. The website I quoted from characterized the incident of murder, not me. And I specifically told you that I did not consider it murder when you asked for clarification.
The Iraqi’s flew the planes into the World Trade Center? To quote Maxwell Smart (a show I’m sure you thought was a documentary about the CIA), “missed it by that much”. Hint: go find Saudi Arabia on a map.
And yeah, I am just being a tad snide. In war, I tend to abide by the old motto, “what happens to the other guy doesn’t matter.”
Hmm…looking at now, the mods seem to have removed the url and just left the quotes, but originally the whole thing was a hyperlink. The comments under the quotes were from the link, not from me. (It was an anti-war site.)
This is exactly wrong. If you believe it, you’re saying that the world trade center dead were the enemies of the terrorists, and legitimate targets. And that the villagers at My Lai were valid targets as well. War takes place between states, not individuals. Read the section of the geneva conventions I posted.
Right. Not enemies. Non-combatants.
So under this logic, you are guilty of whatever mass murder any US citizen commits anywhere in the world.
Actaully, AFAIK, none of the 9/11 terrorists were Iraqi, so under this logic, you are guilty of whatever mass murder any Westerner commits anywhere in the world.
Do you agree?
From their point of view, yeah, they were exactly that.
But 9/11 was not carried out by any one country, but by terrorists who believe America & its people to be evil. So I accept the policy that any govt which also believes and practices this attitude of terrorism against the US is a legitamite threat to the lives of American citizens. A threat deserving to be neutralized. And after being emboldened by the amazing success of 9/11, neutralized pre-emptively.
And I understand that the rest of the world doesn’t agree. France & Germany have more to lose than gain. They are not (or at least haven’t been) the terrorist’s targets. But it doesn’t matter whether the agree or not. We don’t need their’s or the UN’s assistance to do this and they can’t prevent us from doing it either.
After 9/11 I value the security of my country & its citizens above all else. And regardless of what they might say, so does every other country on the planet.
The coding in that post was fairly screwed up. Originally there were some URL tags, but no actual URL (i.e., [url=]The quick red fox jumps over the lazy brown dog.[/url], which will produce something that [url=]looks like a hyperlink but doesn’t actually go anywhere.) Feel free to try reposting the link with the URL included.
Then the loss of 1000 soldiers is a thousand times worse a tragedy than the loss of 1 child.
Why should the age matter, if they are equal? Really, why? You might say “because that child has his/her whole life ahead of him”. Given the million different ways to die on this planet, especially under the regime of a madman, you can’t really say that. The future is always uncertain and all we really have is today. I can’t buy the “but the child is innocent” argument, because I cannot look into the souls of the 1000 soldiers. A hefty number of them* may* be beautiful souls and capable of greater contributions to the world than that Iraqi child. We can’t know, can we?
Some of these soldiers are little more than children themselves. (18 years old) For some, it was the best job they could hope to get. And some of these soldiers signed on before Schrub got into the Oval Office. They may not have forseen this situation. I certainly didn’t. For better or worse, they are hip deep in it now.
I admire your passion, but statements like that will NOT help your argument.
(The 1000 soldiers/1 innocent child statement, not the quoted statement)
I will restate my position.
They want to protest by marching on Washington? Cool.
They want to boycott this company or that? Cool.
They want to chuck rotton fruit at the Commander in Chief? Cool.
They want to go to Iraq and be human shields? They are morons and deserve whatever happens to them. It’s not bravery, it’s stupidity.
[sub]I apologize if you’ve already backed away from this. I should probably finish the durned thread[/sub]
