There is a book that I have returned to over and over again, for years. It fascinates me, because it exposes a lot of philosophical problems that I had never considered.
[worldcat] In my mind, this book is a bookend set with another book that I will comment upon in my next posting. It’s just what the title says: a group of philosophers who concern themselves with morality analyze the morality of defensive warfare. It’s a lot more complicated that you might expect.
First off, let’s dispose of the obvious bit: offensive warfare is immoral, period. It involves a state (usually) summoning up its collective energy, and doing violence on another state; that inevitably involves the citizens of the state under attack, who are considered innocent of any offense that justifies the attack. Justifying aggressive war is a non-starter unless the attacker steps completely off the moral plane into nihilism and says “I do this because I can.” That’s the justification of non-justification. It’s still subtle: let’s say the attacking state attacks only the military of the defender; those soldiers may be collectively considered “the military” but they’re also individual human beings, moral entities that must be considered as having rights and desires. And their desires certainly don’t include being attacked with heavy artillery. The authors don’t spend significant time (a few sentences) on offensive warfare, because the morality of offensive warfare is obvious to anyone with a moral sense.
Now I’ve done it, I invoked “moral sense” – that thing that people who believe in morality usually come back to rely upon as their discriminator of what is right and wrong. I see the objectivist’s “moral calculus” as hand-waving, of course, because even a child can observe that no moral calculus is ever applied effectively in any situation. When you examine the moral dimensions of practically any action, it falls apart in a mountain of “if”, “and”, or “but”. That, in effect, is what this book is: a mountain of “if”, “and”, and “but” For example, we have to take on the question of whether or not a pre-emptive war or a “defensive war” is a valid concept, or if it’s an oxymoron. I tackle that in my piece about Sam Harris’ attitude toward Israel [stderr] and argue that “defensive war” is simply a cover-job of bullshit over top of plain old offensive war. There are people who worry about these things: Augustine notably laid out his ideas of justified war, in order that christians could justify killing each other en masse, in spite of the directives from their divine overlord. I am amazed that Augustine is considered a great philosopher, but there you have it.
Needed some cheerful images!
The idea of a “justified war” (Jus in Bello) is that if you’re attacked, you have a right to defend yourself. If you see a tremendous injustice being done, you can intervene defensively on behalf of the victims. And, if there’s a bunch of protestants, you can ride them down and fucking kill them because jesus. [I made that last one up, just to see if you’re awake] Then, we have to invoke objectivists’ moral calculus: saying something is “unjust” or not depends on our ability to make a moral judgement, and generally people fall back on the “moral calculus” – weighing our opinions about what’s the greater good for the greater number, etc. Many times here, and in comments, I have derided objectivism/utilitarianism as bullshit, so I’ll recap my point: “moral calculus” is impossible because it entails us judging our opinions about the moral value of what we think might happen and our opinion about the current situation – all of which are completely fudgeable because they’re just opinions. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that utilitarians are trying to con us when they talk about “moral calculus”, attempting to make it sound as though there is some kind of sciency process for weighing the value of our decisions. At best, I say, that it’s all fudge – it’s reifying our opinions into moral principles – i.e.: I’m with Nietzsche, arguing that a person’s idea of “right” and “wrong” is simply “what I like” versus “what I don’t like.” To be fair, if you look at the large items, there is often an astonishing level of agreement, e.g.: “Who here thinks it is moral for me to ram this fork into their forehead?” But suddenly that agreement falls apart if I ask, “Who here thinks it is moral for me to ram this fork into Bob’s forehead?”
Utilitarians are easily dismissed simply by asking them “show your work, this ‘moral calculus’, regarding any complex issue.” Try it. Ask them to write it down, as one would a calculus problem. And you’ll find that they fall back to gabbling about “the greatest good for the greatest number” like it’s some kind of mantra. It is easily dismissed by pointing out that their idea of “what is good” embeds the notion of ‘good’ in it; it’s circular argument 101.
All of this is relevant to defensive warfare, because we have a situation in which there are a bunch of bad people doing bad things, and we ask ourselves, “what can we do to stop them?” One of the big problems with bad people is that they don’t pause to reflect over your moral calculus – they just ram a spear through you and move on. So, defensive warfare is the issue of “how do we collectively defend ourselves, without having to make a complex set of moral arguments that our attacker is going to ignore, anyway?”
If you’ve been awake the last 4 months, you will probably be thinking of the situation between Russia and Ukraine. Regardless of what provocation Russia says Ukraine engaged in, it’s hard for them to morally justify attacking the citizens of Ukraine. In principle, they could have/should have somehow identified and attacked the government of Ukraine, but that’s a hazy concept. For example, does Russia’s war on Ukraine’s government include justification for attacking and killing Ukrainian postal workers? Suddenly we are lost in a maze of arguments: what if the postal worker is delivering drone parts that were ordered over the internet, which will be used to make drones that drop bombs on Russians? How do we know if the postal worker is delivering drone parts or dildoes? The answer, from the aggressor’s perspective, is “whatever.” That’s why they are the bad guys.
What is a justifiable amount of force for a defender to use?
The obvious answer, in history, is “whatever we have, because if we lose it’s going to be worse.”
In the book, David Rodin writes a thought-provoking piece called “The Myth of National Self-Defense.” I can’t quote the 8 or so pages at you, so I summarize (fairly, I think):
He tells the story of the take-over of Cadbury Corporation by Kraft Foods, inc. The corporate culture differences between Cadbury and Kraft are stark: Kraft is all about making as much money as possible and Cadbury sees its mission as making yummy cream-filled chocolate eggs. Kraft immediately started backing off on Cadbury’s use of higher quality, expensive chocolate, because it was more profitable. Now, Rodin asks the question: “Why is Cadbury not allowed to defend itself militarily?”
Now, I quote directly:
Michael Waltzer famously argues that when a political community with its traditions, history, language, and culture is faced with destruction at the hands of an enemy, then it is in a situation of “supreme emergency” in which the normal restrictions on permissible defense are suspended. Waltzer specifically argues that when necessary, to avert a supreme emergency, a state is entitled to engage in acts of mass terrorism – that is to say mass intentional killing of innocent civilians. This moral defense of terrorism (and Waltzer, to his credit, is explicit and honest in his use of this terminology) is notorious in some circles since it violates deep prohibitions on the intentional killing of the innocent that has long been accepted by just war theory. But it is sufficiently mainstream to have been accepted by many leading theorists, most notably John Rawls in The Law of Peoples.
The idea of Cadbury engaging in terrorism may initially seem like an absurdity, until we remember that sabotage has long been one of labor’s tools against corporatist oppression: you break the weaving machines, or mis-machine certain components, etc., to frustrate the oppressor’s goals. Go ahead and eat your chocolate egg, there isn’t cyanide in it – they could only get their hands on rat poison. Obviously, Kraft is not threatening to line Cadbury’s chocolate-slingers up and shoot them, but for all intents and purposes, it is threatening their lives and their families just the same.
I will leave that point, now, because it remains unresolved to me. I find it absurd to even try to figure out that sort of stuff, when the reality of the matter is that Russians are firing heavy artillery into cities full of civilians, with knowledge and intent. It seems silly to argue “moral calculus” when the writing is so clearly on the wall: the Ukrainians are justified in retaliating against the Russians in the most horrible possible way; the more horrible the better. Waltzer was right to use the word “terrorism” because that’s what it is: you want to scare the crap out of the Russians so they go home to cry in their mothers’ arms because they fear the sky itself. Would we say that the Ukrainians would be justified if they began fire-bombing Russian cities? Interestingly, the commentary on that is generally, “that would be escalation…” not “that would be immoral…” But, seriously, how can you blow up Babushka’s Borscht Booth in retaliation for what the Russians have been doing to Kyiv? Babushka did not actively help the invasion, by supplying it with Borscht – she may even oppose the war! Blowing her up is blowing up an ally.
This is the next point that the authors of the book dig into, which I will summarize as: collective retaliation is collective punishment, and it’s not moral under any circumstances. If Babushka gets a job loading rockets into Grad launchers, then by all means drop some artillery on her, but as long as she’s slinging Borscht she’s a civilian, not a combatant. The whole just war theory depends on this bad idea, namely that nations are a collective and nations are moral agents. It is “Russia” that is bad, not the Russian soldiers that are scurrying around swapping artillery fire with the residents of Ukraine. Put differently: was 9/11 a justifiable military strike against the economic infrastructure of an enemy that had been attempting to dominate the middle east for decades, or was it an attack against harmless civilians? It did massive economic damage against the great enemy, the USA and the taxpayers who fund American wars around the world. Noam Chomsky has made that point, many times over many years: if you’re an American and you pay taxes you’re supporting the US’ imperial projects. The question is now a matter of degree: are you just a taxpayer (Borscht slinger) or an imperial sardaukar that wears a uniform and carries a gun and shoots civilians?
If the right to the independence of our state is grounded in the moral value of participating in a self-determining community, then why does participation in other forms of self-determining community not generate comparable rights?
There are three possible responses to this conundrum. First we may accord to non-state communities, such as Cadbury, rights to defensive force comparable to those possessed by states. Second, we may provide an account of relevant moral differences between state and non-state communities. Third, we may reject the right of national self-defense through war.
I know that Rodin is doing a reduction ad absurdum, but we should not forget that – at one point – Pepsi Cola, Inc., had the 6th largest navy in the world. [bi] So maybe that’s not so funny. The situation was that Russia bought a lot of Pepsi (not Coke!) and had a shortfall of cash, so it paid Pepsi:
So, the Russians did what any country would do in desperate times: They traded Pepsi a fleet of subs and boats for a whole lot of soda. The new agreement included 17 submarines, a cruiser, a frigate, and a destroyer.
The inevitable end-point of corporate capitalism is that they will have private armies and navies in order to control labor. Remember Blair Mountain. But, I digress. Sort of: did the coal mining companies have a moral right to defend themselves by machine-gunning striking workers? They were, after all, an existential threat to the company. [stderr]
Cécile Fabre writes:
It would seem, from that brief sketch, that cosmopolitanism cannot accomodate the view that a politically self-determining community may wage a war of self-defense. For, at the bar of cosmopolitan morality, it is not clear why the sovereignty rights held by citizens of aggressed country V (henceforth, citizens) should promote their well-being to such a degree as to warrant killing individual combatants from aggressor country A, given that combatants’ individual contributions to V’s loss of sovereignty seem too marginal to warrant killing him or her deliberately.
In other words, if we examining state conflict to try to understand the moral dimensions of what’s going on, we discover incoherent mush. [My description].
Moral philosophers seem to be scared off from talking about revenge.
That is why I wanted to discuss this topic: we discover incoherent mush, amounting to little more than “I am going to do what I want” and a veneer of self-justification.
I nearly titled this piece “In Defense of Nihilism, II” because, it has become impossible for me to see these matters through anything other than the lens of extreme skepticism. Simply put: these people who talk about “morals” clearly have no fucking idea what they are talking about. This entire book, taken in the context of the war in Ukraine (or any other war) is one big reductio ad absurdum for the idea that we can reason about morality, period. It seems to me that the best we can do is lie to ourselves and others and say “this is right” or “this is wrong” when really we just mean “I don’t like that.” Note that philosophers have had thousands of years to work this stuff out, and utilitarianism is basically the best they have come up with. Weak.
War is a mirror in which we see the reflected emptiness of our beliefs in right and wrong.
I have not added this book to my recommended books list, nor would I consider this a “review” of the book. I’ve waded back and forth through it for years (seriously) off and on and I’m still damned if I find anything in it that inspires anything more than WTF. That’s not to say that it’s a bad book or that the authors don’t do a good job of tight reasoning – they do; it’s just that it seems to me to pretty thoroughly destroy any point I might have had to believe in any of this morality nonsense.
I wrote this, saved it, checked the news and saw that the Russians just missile-struck a shopping mall. Why is Babushka’s Borscht Booth not a target now?
Not clear why those words would be problematic, nor it is clear why you ought to demand that attempts to provide some kind of answers for such complex problems be so short and simple (or at least not mountainous) that they don’t need things like that.
Why would it need to be such a pithy and simplistic bit of sloganeering that you could easily print it on a t-shirt? If we’re being serious, why even expect something like that?
For an analogy, it’s kind of like saying this: Write me a big complicated program, let’s say a triple-A video game that does lots of fancy new groundbreaking stuff, except it can’t be big or have any underlying logical structure that makes it complicated. The game has to consist entirely of the output “you win” or “you lose” and nothing else. Then you’re going to act surprised when this kind of game flops, while ones that don’t satisfy your (not obviously necessary) criteria are rejected out of hand merely due to their complexity. It’s at least not clear why we should go about things that way.
You say you’re arguing against utilitarianism (which purports to offer ways for people to actually do a calculation), but you seem to believe your arguments also work for the same reasons against any generic sort of realism (which need not even have anything to say about a utilitarian calculus).
I think you can see the epistemic difference easily, at least once it’s pointed out. But maybe there’s still another question to go through…. Would you really want to say that you just don’t care about the difference between someone saying “I’ve calculated that the answer is X, there you go” and someone else saying “I think there probably are such answers, but don’t claim that anyone must know about them”? If so, then why not? Isn’t that an important part of your complaint about utilitarianism?
I haven’t read it. Do the authors consider escalation (or that particular way of escalating) a form of “offensive war” or something along those lines? It might be passed over just as quickly, without little or no argument, if they take it to be obviously wrong and not worth a lot of discussion.
Sold to Sweden for scrap. It still says a lot that the US even allowed one of its corporations to have them, though. Those are some pretty hefty second amendment rights! (For “corporate persons” only, I’m sure.)
I mean, you might like to treat “do we also have a right to nukes?” as a reductio ad absurdum that pushes things to an extreme way over there, somewhere off in the almost unimaginable distance, but we weren’t really that far from absurdity to begin with, were we?
Presumably, a bunch of these colonial era chartered companies got an awfully big head start on that.
Many philosophers disagree that it’s the best, most of them I bet. You could take that as some kind of sign that nothing much has happened, since they still have to “work this stuff out” among themselves. Or you might be lead to the thought that the sciences (e.g.) are in a similar situation, since we’ve been trying to understand the natural world for thousands of years and are still not finished with that project either. Of course, we’re also not done with math or computer science or history or linguistics or art or music or any academic field whatsoever. So I suppose you could pick any such example you like, although your prior views on them (as a non-expert) presumably change a lot about how you’re going to look at them.
Not clear why those words would be problematic, nor it is clear why you ought to demand that attempts to provide some kind of answers for such complex problems be so short and simple (or at least not mountainous) that they don’t need things like that.
I meant by “ifs…” that the argument quickly turns into a mass of dependent conditionals.
If it turns into a mass of conditionals, then that tells me it’s just common-or-garden argument; there’s no straightforward rules being applied.
You are right that it’s not reasonable to expect moral calculus to be simple, but it must be simplifiable enough that we can discuss it and share understanding. When the argument becomes a mass of conditionals, that seems to me to indicate that it is not likely we will share understanding – i.e: it’s not moral calculus, it’s just someone codifying their opinion.
I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with opinions. After all, everybody’s got one. But they are all fractally complex and generally personal. It seems then that we may as well accept that important things are all a matter of opinion, and we can argue about them until we are blue in the face, but there’s no basis to achieve shared understanding beyond the force with which we argue our opinions. And if you tell Putin “that’s just your opinion, bro. You and what army?” He’s got one. It’s not a great one, but suddenly pure force backing someone’s opinion gives it extra weight.
Also: every time I see people trying to apply this moral calculus it seems to me to be indistinguishable from a squabble.
More later.
I have some machining to do.
Because people find themselves in a lot of different conditions. That’s life for you.
Straightforwardness still sounds a lot like simplicity.
I’m going to guess that I’m pretty much okay with “common-or-garden argument.” I at least didn’t think I was looking for special argument or divinely-inspired argument or magical argument or whatever the alternatives are supposed to be like.
Well, I hope it’s clear I’m not advocating for utilitarianism anyway, just trying to figure out your position. I still don’t get what you’re suggesting. Here’s a very small mass of conditionals:
— “If you’re in situation X, then you should A”
AND
— “If you’re in situation Y, then you should B”
That doesn’t imply there’s no shared understanding. If in fact you are in X while I am in Y, we can both understand those facts about ourselves just fine, then act accordingly. A and B may or may not be wrong, but the issue isn’t that our heads will both explode because we just can’t fathom how some answers could conceivably come in the form.
It’s also not implying that any of this boils down to an opinion. What do you think is supposed to indicate that? Maybe that’s what it is, but I think you’d need some other argument to establish that, because this one doesn’t seem to do it.
Random thought, but when I first read the title, I thought it was going to be about how a cosmopolitan society creates connections throughout the world such that, in wartime, they have a lot of friends and support.
I made that last one up, just to see if you’re awake
Actually, I feel pretty tired right now, so I claim that as pre-emptive self-defense for the rest of this comment.
… you will probably be thinking of the situation between Russia and Ukraine.
The only relevant thought I’ve had about that adds up to the realization that, while offensive and defensive warfare may look vastly different on a moral plane, experientially they probably seem pretty close to identical.
… Russia bought a lot of Pepsi …
Which has been politically aligned with the Republican Party (and Coke with the Democrats) for well over 60 years now (with probably some fudging on all four sides in more recent years (e.g., Trump’s Diet Coke dependency)). I’d call for a Special Prosecutor to sort it all out, if that particular do-list had any more room on it.
It seems to me that the best we can do is lie to ourselves and others and say “this is right” or “this is wrong” when really we just mean “I don’t like that.”
Somewhere a few years ago I ran across the argument that “ethics” and “esthetics” converge in the perception that whatever we consider evil, we find ugly (and good, attractive mutatis mutandis). Haven’t found a way to fully disentangle the concepts since.
@7 Pierce R. Butler:
That is probably hard wired into our brains at some level. For the most part we see fresh fruit as attractive and rotting fruit as ugly. It’s a very obvious survival thing. At the same time, help somebody getting cancer treatment and you can see something good that is often terribly ugly. It’s one of those mental shortcuts that has to be carefully guarded against when trying to do detailed accurate analysis.
I expect it is practicality on the side of the Ukrainians more then anything and has been for a while. The leadership of Ukraine is aware that if they win they will be dependent on the west for protection for some time so they can’t do anything too ugly and that they have to avoid pushing Putin to the point of just ruining the land with nuclear/chemical/biological weapons.
The idea of limited warfare is always an approximation. Who is and who is not a legitimate target is always fuzzy when you move away from the extreme edges and wars are really really messy.
When thinking about the moral calculus of war it’s better to think war > surrender (in the situation Ukraine faces) then try to work up some situation where war is good. It’s always horrible.
consciousness razor@#5:
Straightforwardness still sounds a lot like simplicity.
I’m going to guess that I’m pretty much okay with “common-or-garden argument.” I at least didn’t think I was looking for special argument or divinely-inspired argument or magical argument or whatever the alternatives are supposed to be like.
Alright – if we’re able to present, essentially, a decision-tree that would allow us to achieve various decisions, then I think I’m agreeable to that. I think you also made an extremely enlightening point when you said:
Here’s a very small mass of conditionals:
— “If you’re in situation X, then you should A”
AND
— “If you’re in situation Y, then you should B”
That doesn’t imply there’s no shared understanding. If in fact you are in X while I am in Y, we can both understand those facts about ourselves just fine, then act accordingly.
We can understand each other’s evaluation of a situation and our responses to it, by laying out our decision-making process, including any necessary nuances, and then we can examine and run each other’s decision trees as necessary.
For example, if you told me:
a) if Russia attacks Ukraine, Ukraine should defend itself against the Russian military
b) if Russia attacks Ukrainian civilians, Ukraine should defend itself but attacking Russian civilians is not justified
b-1) if Ukraine is able to identify Russian soldiers and officers who command attacks against Ukrainian civilians, it is reasonable that they be tried in a criminal court and punished according to the jury’s decision
etc.
And you might reply, “yes, I like that reasoning, but we should also consider the case that Russia uses banned weapons”
Oh, right, now we can go ahead with that (no need for further details) or maybe one or the other of us feels that nuclear weapons and biologics should be considered differently from cluster munitions, etc.
Does that work for you? Could we reason together about a morally complicated situation, thus? I would expect that a complicated/fraught situation might result in a pretty interesting decision-tree. And, if we could not come to agreement, we could still match our decision-trees and see the points where we differ.
It also means that we don’t really have to worry about whether we are talking about opinions, or facts. We’re both saying, “given that a certain set of circumstances apply, we can agree to say that something “wrong” is being done.” There’s still a skeptical challenge remaining about the degree to which we can be certain we have communicated the same ideas to each other, but I’m not that extreme a skeptic and I am quite willing to accept that we communicate fairly reliably (and can ask for clarification if we don’t understand). If I didn’t believe reliable communication were possible, I’d be unlikely to write a blog with thousands of entries, right?
Is moral decision-making a process of matching our observations of reality with our decision-trees and comparing them to see if align?
So we could take a detailed point. Let’s say that we work an agreeable set of conditionals, and I then propose to bomb the mess-hall of the invading Russians. Some civilian workers are probably there slinging Borscht for the troops. We have already established agreement that it’s alright to bomb the Russians’ barracks, but the targets there are almost entirely soldiers. Now, we might have a complete agreement (to the degree to which we understand eachother and share an assessment of the situation) we can argue specifically about whether bombing the mess hall is wrong, but the barracks are all right, etc.
It’s also not implying that any of this boils down to an opinion. What do you think is supposed to indicate that? Maybe that’s what it is, but I think you’d need some other argument to establish that, because this one doesn’t seem to do it
This may well be a mental block I have, because I see opinions everywhere even in the shared decision-tree scenario: we are expressing personal opinion about what is or is not important. That’s a philosophical nit-pick, I am willing to admit. But, in the example of bombing the mess hall, it’s my opinion that that question is worth asking, and it may be your opinion that it’s not even worth discussing. The landscape in which we make our moral judgements is also edited by our opinions regarding what should or should not be included. Again: I consider this a quibble. But if I put my skeptic hat on, it’s a pretty important quibble. In the real world, I would be quite comfortable deciding whether or not to bomb a mess hall full of Russians using a process of shared reasoning based on exposing and exploring our shared conditionals.
I may just be making keyboard-shapes right now, I don’t know.
LykeX@#6:
I thought it was going to be about how a cosmopolitan society creates connections throughout the world such that, in wartime, they have a lot of friends and support.
Fabre et al. use the term “cosmopolitan” in that sense. The idea is that states and people form a cooperative society, which makes war almost a contradiction in terms, because the aggressor has to abandon the civilization they are part of, in order to engage in aggressive warfare. I believe that is a fair description of the book’s authors’ point, but obviously I’m boiling a whole book down into a couple sentences, I’m losing a lot of detail.
Another way of thinking about is that many of us (myself, included) are shocked by Russia’s actions because the European Union was seen as a connected economic and cultural sphere (cosmopolitan) and a lot of us expected that it would implicitly rein in Europeans’ passion for war. I am upset by the Russian attack on Ukraine, and to a lesser degree Brexit, because they represent failures of that ideal.
Pierce R. Butler@#7:
The only relevant thought I’ve had about that adds up to the realization that, while offensive and defensive warfare may look vastly different on a moral plane, experientially they probably seem pretty close to identical.
Yes! Exactly!
This whole thing makes me doubt that the idea of pacifism is very good. When a people are attacked, they’ve got to fight like hell, because there really is no alternative. If they’re going to “fight like hell” then it’s going to look the same as being the aggressor except for some mumbled arguments about “who started it.”
“Who started it” is also questionably relevant. Shouldn’t we be arguing about who did the most damage?
Re: the Pepsi navy – since it was a Russian fleet, my guess is that Pepsi knew there was no way they could get the ships across the Atlantic. So selling them for scrap makes sense. There must be marketplaces for these things. Well, the Indians bought the Kuznetsov sister-ship. Why? I don’t know – they can already see what a great ship the Kuznetsov is.
The US has apparently been talking about selling some of the littoral combat ships, the Zumwalt‘s little brothers, which also have tremendous power-train problems. It makes you wonder what country would buy a destroyer, specifically “we’re selling you this thing because it’s a piece of shit!” Well, speaking as a former vintage Land Rover owner, I guess there are always people that think, “no, I can make it great again!”
JM@#9:
When thinking about the moral calculus of war it’s better to think war > surrender (in the situation Ukraine faces) then try to work up some situation where war is good. It’s always horrible.
That’s a good point. We sometimes don’t really have any decisions to make, that matter, since we’re implicitly stuck in “there is no ‘right’ here, we just have to survive.”
I saw this post go up this morning, but it was right before I was about to manically peddle my tired old ass off to work, so I just started to read it, realized it was pretty serious stuff, and pretty long, and that I would have to get back to it later…
I’m not terribly well versed in philosophy, took an intro course in college, and that’s about it. I think Utilitarianism has a lot of promise, but is also capable of justifying and allowing great evils and miscarriages of justice. I think maybe it might be good for determining the cost/benefit aspects of programs and such, where both the cost and the benefit are distributed amongst society? (I’m thinking like taxes to fund education, infrastructure, etc.) But it can get really bad when there is a segregation in who benefits and who suffers the cost (Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” ), or how people like to justify chattel slavery in the U.S…
I also feel it’s really difficult to assign absolute values of “good” or “bad” to individual actions devoid of context. And the context is where it gets really messy… That said, I don’t think I can really envision a situation where rape and/or torture is anything but “bad”
Aside from that, I feel like it’s a lot of complicated scenarios of people dismissing and undervaluing other people’s reasoning and worth, and really difficult to tease out the self interest from the morality…
Apologies if I’m way out of my depth here…
apologies, I borked the link
here, in plain text (but, really, shouldn’t most of the readers of this blog already happened across it? I’m pretty sure I’m the least well-read person who semi-regularly comments here…)
https://learning.hccs.edu/faculty/emily.klotz/engl1302-6/readings/the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas-ursula-le-guin/view
Waltzer specifically argues that when necessary, to avert a supreme emergency, a state is entitled to engage in acts of mass terrorism – that is to say mass intentional killing of innocent civilians.
That sounds like a dishonestly twisted version of the argument I’ve heard, which is, more specifically, that a state is entitled to do what is necessary to destroy the aggressors’ physical ability to wage war. There will of course be collateral damage (i.e., civilians living near the airbases that are bombed, civilians who are stuck near an enemy army when it’s attacked); but that’s a far cry from “mass intentional killing of innocent civilians.”
It seems silly to argue “moral calculus” when the writing is so clearly on the wall: the Ukrainians are justified in retaliating against the Russians in the most horrible possible way; the more horrible the better.
That’s bullshit, and I strongly suspect that only the angriest, most bitter Ukrainians would agree with that, and even then only temporarily (most likely because they’d just seen their own kids killed by Russians). I believe most of humanity, in and out of Ukraine, are agreed that Ukraine is justified in retaliating against the Russians in the most EFFECTIVE possible way, by, as I said before, destroying Russia’s physical ability to wage war. That’s not the same as “most horrible,” and besides, Ukrainians also want to encourage Russians to surrender, and keep the West on their side, both of which seriously limit how horrible they need to get.
Put differently: was 9/11 a justifiable military strike against the economic infrastructure of an enemy that had been attempting to dominate the middle east for decades, or was it an attack against harmless civilians?
That’s pretty easy: it was an attack on harmless civilians (including Muslims) who were not currently engaged in any hostile act against anyone. Furthermore — and this is EXTREMELY important — it was done for the purpose of inciting hatred and war between Christian and Muslim states, by people who didn’t want Muslims to get along decently with others.
It did massive economic damage against the great enemy…
First, LMAO no it did zero damage to any part of our economy: no food shortages, no supply-chain problems, nothing. Bush Jr. told Americans to keep shopping, and America never lost its ability to fully comply.
And second, America at that time was not “the great enemy” it used to be. We weren’t intervening in Mideast affairs like we’d been doing earlier, and Muslims were starting to get along better with the West. That’s precisely why bigoted Muslim extremists had to attack us: they needed us to keep on being The Great Satan, to justify their own domination of Muslim society and culture.
[wakes back up]
*hated cadbury creme eggs anyways, sees no loss because of this opinion*
*looks up sardaukar* Oh yeah decades ago I read that.
Marcus, he sez: “I nearly titled this piece “In Defense of Nihilism, II””
*snerks*
[returns to somnolence]
@mjr, 12:
In my opinion, no. If you invade a country, then until the very last one of your troops is out of that country, you don’t get to complain or get on your moral high horse about ANYTHING your victims do back at you. If you invade MY country, I’m going to empty a tankerload of chlorine from a hijacked truck into a primary school in your state capital if I can (and if you’re the kind of advanced economy that invades other countries – I can).
“Who started it?” is, in almost every case, answered simply by saying “the bigger boys”. The ones who thought they could start it without consequences. My attitude is coloured by a childhood filled with physical bullying up to an including being tortured with a Stanley knife, bullying that was entirely unaddressed by the adults who knew it was going on (although not the full extent of it), bullying by bigger boys who thought (correctly, for a long time) that they could do it without consequence. Bullying that was only even slowed down when massively disproportionate consequences were applied by me. So I have little patience for pacifism, and little patience for people who draw moral equivalence between violence perpetrated by people who enjoy it, and violence perpetrated by people who are doing so that it stops. I recognise this is not morally defensible, but don’t care.
(Incidentally, this strikes me as a problem probably all resistance movements have: while their leadership may be rational, thoughtful and civilised, one difficulty facing them is that they will definitely have a portion of their recruits whose background, motivation and recent experiences tends them more towards splashy, repugnant punishment and away from militarily useful and politically acceptable resistance. For every three or four people ready to blow up an ammo dump, there’ll be someone like me posting the regional commander an ornamental marquetry box with his son’s eyes and testicles in it. How do you reign in someone like that without killing them? Don’t answer that.)
sonofrojblake @20: Actually, the latter type of violence you speak of IS morally defensible, at least when it’s obvious that no one else in power is doing jack shit to stop the injustice. What’s really not morally defensible is the adults’ KNOWING CHOICE not to intervene. Your violent response was THEIR fault, not yours.
I once had a discussion with a lawyer in a coffee shop about life-jackets. It didn’t go the way i thought it should. He is likely right. It seems to me this might be a sufficiently distilled analogue to war that it might provide some insight.
Some how maritime disasters came up. Assuming the water is warm a life-jacket might save your life. Failure to make sure to get one, I’m assuming there were plenty, might foolishly cost you your life.
My view was that if you were sufficiently aware and prepared you would make sure to obtain a life jacket and that once you got one it seemed a violation of common sense, if not maritime law, that anyone seeking to remove the jacket and use it themselves would be in the wrong. The lawyer said it wasn’t so. That while the person stealing the life-jacket might be branded a scoundrel, they could not, as a matter of law, be prosecuted.
This seems much more clear cut. Even so-called wars of national survival are seldom quite so final. Many nations have been conquered, subjugated, and humiliated. Only to reemerge some time later. The issue individually seems much clearer cut. Very few claim to have died and returned.
Can the taking of a device you are using to protect your life be justified? Does the law contemplate and countenance brute force theft that saves the attackers life? Even if it kills the person robbed?
That while the person stealing the life-jacket might be branded a scoundrel, they could not, as a matter of law, be prosecuted.
That doesn’t sound right to me either. Which law was he talking about? Maritime or international law? I’m pretty sure that if such an incident happened in, say, waters within a US State’s jurisdiction, that state could prosecute that person for robbery and maybe 3rd-degree murder (assuming there was enough witnesses and evidence). And I’m sure they would want to do so, especially if it was a case of an able-bodied man taking a life-jacket from an old lady. The defendant might claim “self-defense,” but it would be up to the state’s court to rule on it.
If the incident had happened in international waters, and the survivors made it to a US State’s soil, that might be another matter — but US and state officials might still at least make a good bit of noise about it. That might be a Federal case, or a case for whichever state’s flag the ship was under, or whichever state the ship’s owner was based in.
And yet if I’d been caught and had been old enough to take criminal responsibility (i.e. older than ten, given that this is the UK), they’d have prosecuted ME, not the bully’s parents or the teachers or my parent. Certainly in the 1970s I can’t imagine any court accepting any amount of (unproven) bullying as mitigation for what I did to him. Which is again the point – the people with the power make the rules.
sonofrojblake@#20:
In my opinion, no. If you invade a country, then until the very last one of your troops is out of that country, you don’t get to complain or get on your moral high horse about ANYTHING your victims do back at you. If you invade MY country, I’m going to empty a tankerload of chlorine from a hijacked truck into a primary school in your state capital if I can (and if you’re the kind of advanced economy that invades other countries – I can).
That’s why I see nihilism as a stance a person can take in these situations: don’t worry about right or wrong and just retaliate as hard as you can. It doesn’t seem to me to be any more or less valid than any other approach, and it’s probably the one that humans have preferred the longest.
“Who started it?” is, in almost every case, answered simply by saying “the bigger boys”. The ones who thought they could start it without consequences.
Agreed. There’s not much value to accruing power unless it’s to abuse it. What always saddens me is that it mostly always works for the bullies. I mean, look at Russia, effectively saying “if you retaliate against our homeland, we may nuke you” – their appeal to main force allows them to attack another country and feel that they are free from consequences.
I have long wondered why nations don’t simply adopt a “kill the king” strategy: if you cause us trouble, we’ll kill your leaders that came up with the idea. It’ll certainly discourage them from doing that sort of thing. Why hasn’t that strategy been adopted globally? Something about the leaders not liking having their asses in the crosshairs and, since they’re leaders, they won’t adopt that policy. “Kings don’t kill kings” damn you, Saladin.
lorn@#23:
Can the taking of a device you are using to protect your life be justified? Does the law contemplate and countenance brute force theft that saves the attackers life? Even if it kills the person robbed?
That doesn’t sound right, because the other guy is going to have to assault me to get me to give up my life vest, unless I decide to do it as some sort of noble gesture. If someone appeals “won’t someone please give this child their life vest?” and just tries to grab it, that doesn’t work. Besides, I hate kids. It always drives me nuts that people expect us to bend over backward for their kids. You made ’em they’re your problem.
I have long wondered why nations don’t simply adopt a “kill the king” strategy: if you cause us trouble, we’ll kill your leaders that came up with the idea.
There are several reasons why that doesn’t work. First, the interest-groups who supported the king and his offending policy are unhurt by the loss of their king, and so can simply support another king who continues the same policy, without fear that they or their organizations or resources will be affected. Second, killing a head of state doesn’t affect the state’s physical ability to wage war against anyone. Third, it’s VERY rare that a state that kills another state’s leader can even predict, let alone control, who takes the dead leader’s place, or what he goes on to do; which makes it impossible to trust such a policy to yield beneficial results. (And when has any aggressor nation simply given up their fight as soon as their leader is assassinated?
If a bunch of Indians had taken out, say, William Henry Harrison, would the USA have stopped its western expansion?) Fourth, a single head of state, or a small oligarchic group, can easily hide themselves behind multiple layers of defense and subterfuge and thus make themselves very hard to locate, target and take out. Fifth, a paranoid tyrant like, say, Hitler, Stalin or Saddam can hide from assassins far more easily than an elected leader who needs to stay in touch with his people and other elected lawmakers; so “kill the king” strategies favor tyrants over elected leaders, by a huge margin.
And finally, the leaders aren’t always the ones who actually came up with the ideas that make them deserving of death. Chances are, many other people at all levels of a leader’s governing coalition have the same ideas, and won’t give them up just because their top boss got popped for it.