Keeping the Peace

Really? My best friend from childhood died in Iraq last year because the Pentagon didn't think it was important to secure 200 tons of high explosives. The insurgency - another detail that just slipped under the radar in the pre-war planning - seized those exposives long after two seperate army divisions had decamped in the area, fashioned them into IEDs, and used them to blow up hundreds of our guys.Including my buddy. All because seizing oil fields was a higher priority than seizing weapons.I'm sorry but I see abolutely no indication that the Administration had any wish to prosecute this war with an eye towards effective minimization of casualties. Instead they've pursued this war with nothing but an eye towards political expediency and advantage.

Maybe you've heard of a little action in a place called Kosovo? You know, it's funny - a while back I was looking for statistics on American casualties in Kosovo, because I was sure they were less than Iraq, by far.I googled and googled but I just couldn't find a number of American deaths. I was perplexed because I knew I was a better searcher than that. Finally I read a little further and all was revealed.There were no American casualties in the Kosovo action. We took down a brutal dictator, a genocidal madman with weapons of destruction, and didn't lose a single American life. Did it in months. So, oil is more important to you than human life. Gotcha. It's too bad how many people in our administration are in exact agreement with you.

I guess I don't know how to respond to this. If human life is valueless to you, I guess I don't see under what scheme you can consider yourself a moral person.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 02-08-2006 12:37 AM

I've seen it. Not exactly a date movie.But I don't see how that answers my question.

Both you and Holmes seem to think that I'm not willing to place a greater goal over the value of one or many human lives. How you two got this misconception, I have no idea. Holmes seems to have a problem with basic English but I'm not sure where your mistake is.Let me assure you that you're both wrong. I have no problem with the idea that some goals are worth dying for.What I've asked repeatedly, and what you've consistently dodged, is precisely what goal you believe justified the death of my buddy, and all the rest of the 2,000+ Americans and 30,000+ Iraqis this conflict has killed. "Freedom"? "Democracy"? You can't hand someone democracy at the point of a sword. And if establishing democracy had been the goal, we would have worked hard in the beginning to make sure dangerous weapons didn't fall into the hands of an insurgency. It doesn't take a crystal ball - only a history book - to see that anytime you have an occupation, you have an insurgency. Disarming that insurgency, which begain almost immediately after the invasion, should have been top priority.It's not clear to me how insurgents would have used oil fields as weapons. So the idea that an oil field is a greater priority than taking actions to disarm the enemy directly is laughable to me. The only persons who could place a higher priority on an oil field than on the lives of troops is a person with no regard for human life. When I told you that you had no regard for human life, it was because I had already discounted the possibility that you percieved a greater goal worth dying for. If you had, you would be able to tell me what it is.

I didn't say that you did.

No, you explained how a person could put certain goals or outcomes over the price of a human life.That's not a position I disagree with. I'm responding to the idea that someone would trade a human life for nothing, for accomplishing no goal, and feel justified. That person puts no value on a human life, or rather, a human life is worth nothing, and I don't see how such a person could be considered moral. We took down a dictator, put him up for trial. I don't know what the civilian cost was. Do you? If it was more than Iraq so far I'd be very surprised. As far as I can tell we did almost the exact thing in Kosovo that we did in Iraq, only at a considerably smaller cost in human lives. Again, if someone doesn't consider that the ultimate goal of warfare than that person cannot be considered moral.

But that's still not what we're talking about. I've already agreed, twice now, that you can weigh the lives of individuals against the good of the group and still be a moral person.But if you weigh the lives of individuals against nothing at all and still come out equal, or on the side of nothing, then you're simply an immoral person. "Sociopathy" is the clinical name for that condition. Holmes, how else would means be justified, except by their ends? Christ, who cares if he's a nominal dictator or not? Jesus, Holmes, you'll grasp at anything to disagree with me, won't you?

But the whole is made of individuals. As the saying goes, "two nothin's is nothin'." To put no value on one individual life is to devalue all individual lives.So I literally don't understand what you're trying to tell me. The person you're describing would work for the good of the whole, apparently, but still have no compunction against gunning down some unlucky bastard out in the street for no reason.That doesn't sound like a moral person to me. That's the situation in question. The war planners decided to put the lives of the troops at needless risk, for no reason. They gained nothing they wouldn't have gained if they had stopped to secure the explosives.Thus, they set the lives of thousands of troops in the balance against nothing at all, and found the balance equivalent. Iano doesn't seem to have a problem with it.If the context of this discussion is a surprise to you, then I suggest a little remedial reading. No, but I've heard the expression "the ends don't justify the means." It's always used in the context of a specific case of means and ends.I've never heard it used, except by mistake, to refer to the idea that no ends are ever justified by their means. Of course I believe that means are justified, or unjustified, according their ends. How else would means be justified except by their ends? Are we using two different definitions of "justify"? No, the Iraq war was not fantastic, because the value of the ends was not worth the cost of the means. In this case the ends failed to justify the means, and so the means were unjustified.

Ok, then, now I just don't understand what you're trying to get across here. This paragraph doesn't communicate anything meaningful to me. Explain to me how those aren't the same thing? That's not what I'm saying. I'm asserting that their plan didn't keep troops out of needless risk because they didn't care to keep the troops out of needless risk.It's apathy we're talking about, not malice. They're equally bad in my mind but let's just be clear what we're talking about. I would say that the ommission of a definite article does change the expression, because it takes it from the specific - the definite - to the universal.You still don't understand. The expression is meant to be read as "these ends don't justify these means", not "no ends justify any means." When means are justified, it is because they were justified by their ends. How else would they be justified? You've hinted at deontological rules but looking back I don't see any legal examples. Try not to put words in my mouth. Did I say that I believed Kosovo was justified? I don't know if it was or not. I don't particularly care. The info we get is never viable, which is why the ends of interrogation don't justify the means of torture. If torturing someone to death saved the lives of every person in a city, then that end would justify those means. "The ends justify the means" is another way of describing "the lesser of two evils."

Oh, wait, were you talking about the Bill of Rights?Ok, well, I see it completely differently; the Bill of Rights is a code that documents exactly what ends are required to justify certain means. For instance, the Fourth Amendment tells us what standard of evidence is required before the end of solving or preventing crimes justifies the means of violating your privacy and security by searching and seizing your property, etc.In other words, the Bill of Rights proves to me that some ends to justify some means, and that whether or not certain means are allowed to proceed depends entirely on whether or not the ends justify them.

It's not clear to me how an action could have moral value beyond the effect it would have on an individual actor.I mean, murder is wrong because it kills somebody, and therefore is an immoral action. Therefore someone concerned only with moral actions would still not commit murder, and therefore value the life of a human being. Right. Ok, I don't believe that the administration had any intent in protecting the troops or winning the war. Well, Iano pointed to illusory "goals" as well, but he wasn't able to tell me what those goals were. Apparently you're more charitable than I am, because you're willing to assume the administration had some goal in mind post-invasion, but I don't see any indication that was the case. I'm just going to come out and tell you that I don't understand word one of what you're saying here. I was sort of hoping that if I could get you to talk about it more, I would understand; but I simply don't. Your use of the word "deontological" means nothing to me, and won't, I suspect, without delving into philosophy, which I don't care to do.Can you just quickly summarize what you're trying to refer to, here? I wouldn't say that's the basis, but an indication of the deeper difference - Kosovo wasn't run by a bunch of cock-ups. That's the positive quality. I sued Kosovo not as an example of the perfect war, but of a less incompetent one. But hey, maybe I'm wrong. I'm no military scientist so it may be that I don't know how to judge competence in this regard. Sure. I don't make those arguments myself because I don't find them meritous. If the choice was between torturing someone for information or watching a city blow up, hand me a waterboard and a car battery. I mean it's not even a difficult question for me.But I oppose torture because that hypothetical situation never occurs. The choice is never between torture and a lost city, because torture wouldn't save the city. I don't see how torture would even be considered in these situations. If you want money, open his wallet, not his vein. If you want access, get his keys, not his confession.If you mean you need to torture him to learn where the money is, or what the password is, then that's information, which is what we were talking about in the first place.Or, if you meant "give me money or I'll torture your wife" kinds of situations, I dunno. I hadn't thought of that until just now. I'll have to think about it to arrive at my own moral stance on the issue. Just off-hand I question the practicality of those measures, I guess. Everybody has to come to their own sense of morality, and what exigencies justify what actions. Well, inaction is itself a kind of action, and so an ommission of action that kills many could be viewed as similarly culpable as a direct action that kills many. In fact that's something we have coded into our legal system.Like I said, I would find the choice between a direct action that harms one and an inaction that dooms many to be a simple choice indeed.

I was just extrapolating from your reasoning. But I still don't see how someone who doesn't consider murder a moral question to be moral. Again, I believe that such a person would best be described as a sociopath. I'm absolutely certain that they knew they didn't know, and didn't care. They knew they had no idea about how to accomplish the stated goals and were not concerned about it. Are all deontological systems arbitrary? It would seem like they would have to be.

Like which? I can think of many cultures that didn't consider some killings to be murder - like ours - but I'm not familiar with any cultures like this.

As a martial artist and student of the sword I'm fairly familiar with the culture of feudal Japan, and indeed, murder was a crime under the laws of that culture. So you're quite wrong. As I hinted before they did have a different operating distinction about what killings constituted murder and which did not, based on their hierarchy of which persons actually constituted human beings.Killing eta, for instance, was not really murder - because eta were not considered fully human - but a crime more akin to willful destruction of property; a samurai who killed an eta was considered impolite if he did not inform the eta's lord of the killing (and thus incurring the wasted time of having the local constabulary investigate the killing.)Like I said, cultures have differing ideas about what constitutes the unjustified killing of a human being - murder - based on their different ideas about "justification" and "humanity." But none that I'm aware of actually eschew the concept altogether. I don't know about the indians you refer to but certainly the culture of feudal Japan doesn't qualify.