Surely in your first example, you can either save 4 lives or one. You are presumably not responsible for the situation and are only trying to help. (You could probably add “3. You risk your own death trying to stop the train”, and get some heroic answers.)
The second example is of cold-bloodedly killing someone in the hope that his organs will be suitable, that no-one will die in the transplant and that no other donor will turn up. Not heroic.
This is also not a good example because there’s a clear moral calculus here – there’s a clear and present danger that if we don’t act, the passengers die and they take others, perhaps many others, with them. Frankly, I don’t see much of a moral dilemma here at all. You don’t want to kill the passengers, but the hijackers force your hand.
I am beginning to think that what it boils down to is that, however reckless an attack on an enemy is, we can always justify the resulting collateral damage as being accidental. This we can never to for sanctioned torture.
Evil Captor, please see second point made in post #58.
No - it cannot be always justified as ‘accidental’ Like firing rockets into civilian crowded streets to kill a single terrorist leader, or car-bombing a lot of civilians to kill collaborators (in their eyes), there is ‘callous disregard’.
The guys on the ground are not going to have the luxury of considering a hijacker’s motives any more, if the plane is near any large cities, any more than the passengers are. Anybody who tries to hijack a plane with a box cutter is gonna get rushed by his intended victims, and any hijacked ll be shot out of the sky. Would you advocate letting hjijackers pull another 9/11? It’s not callous if you really have no choice.
Your example doesn’t make any sense. Moral duty is not exhausted by previous good deeds. If you persist in trying imagine to bogus examples, then of course you’ll find things that seem silly to you.
Well, in many of our operations, that’s exactly what it is. We want certain bad guys to die so that they cannot do further harm later. Sure, there are also other ends, but I don’t think this particular digression really goes anywhere.
Ok: so what? I agree: it may well be that our operations in Fallujah are essentially a pointless show. Our military is engaging in some of the most sophiscated manuver’s in history, all to an end that isn’t clear at all given that we aren’t fighting a conventional force.
And…
Are you relaly trying to hjiack my thread into yet another discussion of Iraq?
How do you feel about operations that end up missing their targets but causing CD?
That depends on how it is used.
That’s nice, and I appreciate your sentiments. It’s just that your view happens to be a lot less interesting to me, because it does seem consistent, albiet at the price of also being, I believe, not very realistic. I have no interest in discussing whether the particular actions taking place in Iraq are worth the CD they cause: only that people agree that sometimes military goals are legitimately considered to be worth it even though there will be, our regrets aside, CD.
Yes.
I suppose. But this is neither here nor there as far as the topic of this thread since I’m not talking about politicians, but moral choices.
The problem is that I think this excuse is tissuepaper thin. If we can predict that there will be CD, then it is a known price that we choose to pay in order to achieve our objective.
I think the major reason we are unwilling to accept this is because most CD is more distant and hands off than torture. Just as people are more willing to accede to hypothetical situations in which they are asked to pull a lever to kill a man than to shoot them in the face (i.e. Polerius train examples, except instead of a lever to divert the train from killing the five towards killing the one, we are asked to shoot a man as a means of diverting the train from killing five.) In other words, sometimes what we think is moral discretion actually seems more like amoral squeamishness.
We will let ourselves and others do distant horrors as long they are abstract, and not act as quickly as we would if they are near and personal. That’s another reason not to trust clairobscur’s proud elevation of “gut” feelings: often they not only willy-nilly, but coldly evil.
My point entirely.
The reason I brought up this example was in reply to the post that claimed we do not torture enemy captives because they under our protection. I was merely pointing out that innocent airline passengers are also “under our protection” and I was specifically refuting **Apos’ ** post that this is irrelevant because they will probably die anyway - I was giving a situation in which they may not die anyway.
Some people’s sense of moral duty appears to be inexhaustible. I suppose the only truly moral thing for American soldiers to do is dig pits in the ground and strangle themselves to death so they don’t hurt anybody and will replenish the Earth.
Apos, what would you say to the families of soldiers who die for lack of air cover because we’ve embraced your moral calculus, and what do you suppose the odds are that they would think you rather … callous and indifferent … to the lives of their loved ones?
I’ve tried and tried, and I can’t seem to understand what the hell you are tlaking about here.
Or here:
Eh? I’ve not offered any opinion what’s the correct moral calculus is: only discussed two issues comparitively. To say I’ve advocated anything regarding not giving soliders air cover is pretty darn outlandish.
What do you suppose the odds are that I know what you are talking about? 0? .0001? Seriously: what are you talking about? What lack of air cover? What indifference?
Is there some sort of confusion party here that I wasn’t invited to?
The only thing I pointed out in your example was that any plane worth shooting down contains people that were going to die anyway if we didn’t act, and so are in that sense a sort of “sunk cost” (i.e., we can’t save them no matter what we do) And the reason I pointed this out was not anything to do with anything other than the fact that it doesn’t give us a clear analougy to the CD situation in which it’s NOT clear that the people we kill will die anyway. Not that it really much matters whether they will or they wont: I just wanted to make sure we had clear examples that weren’t confused by extra layers of issues.
You weren’t refuting anything, at least not in any way I can understand. I don’t agree that people being “under our protection” makes their lives any more or less valuable and worth consideration. THAT is what I said was irrelevant, not whether or not they’d die (which IS relevant in the sense that if they were to doomed to die no matter what, then shooting them down wouldn’t be as problematic as CD).
Well, you are correct there. It’s not your moral calculus in that sense. So let’s say it’s a moral calculus not your moral calculus. The idea of this OP is, it’s morally inconsistent to refrain from torturing terrorists – people we know or strongly suspect are guilty of having done Bad Things – and yet are indifferent to killing innocents due to collateral damage from bombing and missiles.
So we say, whoa, to be morally consistent, which is of course a VERY IMPORTANT thing, we need to stop using bombs and missiles and probably artillery too. Just tanks, rifles and machine guns that can be aimed at specific targets. Might have to give up tanks, too.
That’s when we have to address the issue of callous indifference to the lives of American servicemen, who would undoubtedly suffer many more casualties without air cover and artillery and missile support. You seem to be saying that there’s a simple two-sided calculus here. I’m saying there’s a third side, one that involves our moral duty to our troops. How do you account for that?
‘Callous disregard’ you say ?
How is that different from the life-altering destruction/punishment of the innocent lives of the family of a murderer condemned to death which no one seems to give a shit about.
I’m not sure where I advocated this position. If anything, I’vee suggested that it might make more sense to lean the other way.
Is that the same moral duty you couldn’t care less about when torture could perhaps save those same troops from a massive suicide attack?
Moral consistency is important not because we are obsessive compulsive but because it serves to illuminate our biases and prejeduces when it comes to our gut feelings about what is right and what is wrong.
Not very different at all, I’d say.
Let me get this straight. You’re claiming that an equal amount of disregard is shown to a family killed in a CD incident as to the bereaved family of an executed murderer?
If so, I don’t see it.
I appreciate they are both (presumably) innocent victims but at least the murderer’s family still have their lives.
[QUOTE=Apos]
I believe we’ve already covered this. Yes, just as the efficacy of specific military attacks can be questioned because the CD might be too high, the efficacy of certain tortures might be questioned because the subject might be too well-trained or not well informed. But this is, again, just a matter of haggling over the relative price of the acts in specific situations, which is not the same thing as saying one is permissible and the other is not. Even if it is far less likely that we’ll find ourselves in a situation in which torture is worth the risk of trying it, that doesn’t make torture less viable or justifiable as an option: it just means that the chance comes up less.
[/quoe]
I disagree. Collateral damage is not a means to an end. Torture is. The correct analogue to torture would be deliberately attacking innocent people as a means to an end, which IS disallowed as a military strategy, just as torture is. Collateral damage is not analagous to torture. And excessive collateral damage is disallowed as well.
As I’ve said before, I can imagine a situation in which it might be necessary to launch an assault against an enemy in order to protect one’s own life, even if it might not be possible to guarantee that no innocent people would be killed. However, I cannot imagine a realistic situation in which it would be necessary to torture an individual. Sure, one could devise a fictional situation where it would be the case, in the same way that Hollywood producers devise situations where a bus driver must continue driving above 50 mph, etc., but such situations don’t exist in real life.
Of course it is. While it isn’t something that we like, it’s something that’s an inevtiable part of many sorts of military operations.
The whole point of moral comparison is to figure out what differences are relevant and which are not between two situations. It doesn’t matter that torture and CD aren’t directly, exactly analagous. What matters is that the fact that we wish wasn’t a part of accomplishing our goals just isn’t a relevant difference.
Good to know that you think it’s impossible. We’d better not think about it then!