quote: Tom Davidson. I go with my sf guru Spider Robinson on this. He had a character say (paraphrased) "it depends on the ends, and the means."
This is incorrect. Ends cannot justify means. If the means seem justified by an end, that's only because we have decided that the means aren't all that bad. That does not mean that the means have themselves become acceptable; it means that we are able to rationalize using them.
Shooting someone to save someone else is not justified. It is rationalized.Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Trevor, one of the main reasons for our bloody revolution was arbitrary governance from the English Crown. Which is why the Constitution and Bill of Rights attempted to limit broad application of executive powers--limits which recent events have shown to be threadbare or nonexistant.
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Mormo - nothing stays the same. Perhaps the naive idealism has outlived it's time.
Although I suppose I should point out I'm not condoning or supporting my government's actions, although I am not taking any active measure to oppose them either.
-Trevor
Edit: Although I suppose we could argue the realistic effectiveness of trying to limit a government's broad powers.
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"that is only true if we accept the premise that killing a human being can never be justified."
That is an operating premise I'm willing to accept, yes. I will also grant that killing someone can, in extremis, be rationalized. Justification, however, is something else altogether.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote: Shooting someone to save someone else is not justified. It is rationalized.
Then why do they call it justifiable homicide? Shooting someone in self-defense of self or others when they are shooting at you is both justified and rational, not rationalized, assuming you use rationalized to mean "to devise self-satisfying but incorrect reasons for one's behavior." rationalizedPosts: 327 | Registered: Oct 2003
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"I am against violence generally, but violence in self-defence is completely justified, assuming it's proportional."
Based on what premise? Does self-determination trump the sanctity of life? Or does someone forfeit their right to life the instant they try to take it away from you?
If so, under what other circumstances can someone forfeit their right to life without actually wanting to die?
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Nope. You still have a right to live. But does that grant you the right to ignore someone else's right to live?
Only if their denial of your right nullifies theirs. Otherwise, even in saving yourself, you have violated their right to live.
I believe that you DO violate their right to live if you kill in self-defense, that it is not possible to unwillingly commute that right under any circumstances. That does not mean that, given the two options, you have made a poor decision; it merely means that you have murdered.
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I think we presume too much when we assume that any of us has the inalienable right to anything, even life. Therefore the justification of any act neither impinges on or supresses anyone else's rights on a very macroscopic level. However, once you form a society, these "rights" can be agreed upon and protected to a degree. But as we've seen with so many other societies, as morals and attitudes change, what constitues an individuals rights also changes.
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Are we disputing on legal or moral grounds?
Killing - the act of ending life.
Murder - the act of ending life for unlawful reasons.
Are we expanding the definition of murder to include motivations outside of the current legal canon? Thus any act of killing is automatically murder, regardless of circumstance?
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I don't know about you, but I'm disputing on moral grounds. As far as I'm concerned, murder is the killing of anyone who doesn't want to die.
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No, I consider morality to be fundamental, and I vehemently disagree with the definition of murder that is part of your moral framework because of the definition I give it in my moral framework.
quote:as opposed to an arbitrary and artificial construct of society.
You've made an unfounded assumption about why I disagree with you on the most fundamental level.
Let me quote something I just posted on Ornery, on a similar topic. The first quote is someone else's post, to which I was replying.
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quote:On the surface, imposing freedom and liberty abroad by American force of arms seem noble and even courageous. The notion that we, as Americans, are willing to pay a price in blood, toil, tears, and sweat to save the oppressed peoples from tyranny has a nice ring to it.
Allow me to explain why I am a pacifist. Or, rather, let me explain why the above paragraph, quoted verbatim, explains why I am a pacifist. *grin*
Because when we send people abroad to fight wars to "liberate" countries, we are not sending them abroad to shed their own blood. If we were, I wouldn't have a problem with it; if we could turn Iraq into a peaceful democracy by lining up 15,000 willing Americans in New York and asking them to shoot themselves, I'd be fine with it. A voluntary sacrifice to bring peace and prosperity to someone else is nifty-keen.
But war doesn't work like that. We don't send our boys out to shed their own blood. We send them out to draw blood, and in fact want them to shed as little of their own blood as possible. Our soldiers are not martyrs; they do not intend to sacrifice themselves. If they die, it is because they failed to kill -- because killing the other guy is the intention of a war.
And who is the other guy, precisely? We speak of collateral damage. We speak of tens of thousands of conscripted Iraqi soldiers dead. We speak of houses destroyed, towns abandoned, hospitals shelled.
This may be a cost worth paying. But we do not give Iraq the choice to pay it. We invade, taking upon ourselves the decision not just to let our boys die but the decision to kill thousands of Iraqis and blow up thousands of buildings. To bring them freedom.
We present this as a burden we bear, as a cost we are willing to pay. But we don't pay it. They pay it.
We take unto ourselves the supreme right of God: the right to renounce someone else's right to life. We say "this is a cost we are willing to pay" and what we mean is "your life is worth this goal."
I do not believe that anyone -- anyone -- has the right to tell me that my life is not worth living. That is a decision I may someday make for myself, but I will not contract that decision to a third party. And yet we as a country, by invading a country to bring it "freedom," don the mantle of God.
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The U.S. had a limited life span anyways. It's built up a good bit of momentum, but it's one of the only countries in the world whose society and structure is over two hundred year olds, and we're statistically due for drastic changes. Probably negative.
Under very rare circumstances do I accept torture. For one thing, there's the whole "not becoming what you fight". And random, hidden, unsubstantiated--if you are to torture, then you are our government and at least somewhat responsible to tell us, that we may denounce you. Naive, yes, because what government would tell its people? But if the government refuses to disclose any practices because they fear great public outcry and disgust, then it is no government of mine.
*buys ticket back to Germany and prepares to head out*
Posts: 1735 | Registered: Oct 2004
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Wow, Tom is pushing a pretty hard line here, and one which I think is obviously wrong. It's quite clear that the wrongness of an action depends in part upon its foreseeable consequences. Lying is wrong in most cases, except when a would-be murderer asks you where his victim is hiding. In such a case it is obviously wrong not to lie.
Similarly, if someone is holding three hostages and intends to kill them, it is wrong not to stop him in some way, even if that means killing him.
Tom does have a good point in the following way: insofar as you have a right to life, it makes no sense to say that you forfeit that right when you threaten someone else's life. If I'm holding a pistol in one hand and a tranquilizer gun in the other, and you approach me with a knife intending to kill me, it would be wrong for me to use lethal force to stop you when I could just as easily save my own life with non-lethal force.
Posts: 4600 | Registered: Mar 2000
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FYI, my last post was a response to Tom's point about the morality of killing. I pretty much agree with what he said about the war.
Posts: 4600 | Registered: Mar 2000
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But in the case where you're killing one hostage-taker to save three hostages, the killing absolutely is avoidable. You could easily walk away and let him go on with what he was doing. And like I said, it seems morally wrong not to save the hostages, even if it means killing the guy.
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I mean unavoidable in the "obviously in this case it is better to commit the crime and save the people" sense.
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It's not wrong, it's just not right. It's a choice that should be made grudgingly and unhappily.
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Have you ever heard the term "the best of bad options"? How about "the lesser of two evils"? Just because something is not as bad as something worse does not make it good.
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quote:Tom does have a good point in the following way: insofar as you have a right to life, it makes no sense to say that you forfeit that right when you threaten someone else's life. If I'm holding a pistol in one hand and a tranquilizer gun in the other, and you approach me with a knife intending to kill me, it would be wrong for me to use lethal force to stop you when I could just as easily save my own life with non-lethal force.
That's all well and good for the situation where you do in fact have the option to use non lethal force. But if someone comes at me with a gun or knife with the intention of killing me, and I have a gun or knife, I don't think it is immoral to kill them in self defense.
You have two options in that circumstance. You can let yourself be killed, sacrificing yourself for the sake of the immoral actions of your attacker, or you can kill them first.
I also disagree that a would be murderer doesn't forfeit his right to life when he tries to murder. I think he does. If someone tries to murder you I think he breaks whatever moral covenant exists between man that murder is wrong, and once he does that, he forfeits his own safety under the covenant. And if he is willing to break it, and is willing to murder you, he has no right to claim protection for himself.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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I just want to go on the record as stating the fact that your all paranoid.
I'd also like to point out that you only hear about the government screw ups.... literally thousands of terrorists have been found and plots uncovered by these techniques. So the only question in my mind is whether we'd rather these people complete their missions before we take away their rights or allow them to be caught red handed?
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So, you're saying you're ok with the notion of picking up citizens, holding them indefinitely without proof or criminal charges and shipping them abroad for some inquisitive torture?
quote: Should we start randomly picking up people and executing them because they MIGHT murder someone? Or know someone that has/will?
Don't know who you are making a response to with your comment, but if it's me, I was only talking about murder in self defense, though I suppose the argument could be stretched to the death penalty, though I don't intend for it to be.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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We don't declare war on people or groups - at best we undertake legal/police actions against them.
Until or unless we decide to re-define our concepts of waging war and what constitutes war, we should err on the side of caution and not lash out blindly, wantonly in some misguided notion of "preserving the peace" or "doing what must be done."
I have no objections to violence when and where appropriate, but if all you use is a hammer, all your problems will look like nails.
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I don't think war will ever again be what it was before world war two. We aren't going to get polite announcements of formal declarations.
Wars of now and the future, fought against groups without official status cannot be declared in the same sense.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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Then we really need to redefine war - as such, our terms of engagement only address the notion of wars against nations.
Until we decide to change our notion of war and define the rules of engagement, we will continue to flounder aimlessly.
Although I will point out, current US military planners also believed the need for large-scale divisions needed to fight a WW2-type engagement were no longer needed.
And then we occupied Iraq. Yep, great planning there.
quote: I also disagree that a would be murderer doesn't forfeit his right to life when he tries to murder. I think he does. If someone tries to murder you I think he breaks whatever moral covenant exists between man that murder is wrong, and once he does that, he forfeits his own safety under the covenant.
Out of interest, what other actions break this covenant? Does anything besides explicitly trying to kill someone else waive your own right to live?
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"literally thousands of terrorists have been found and plots uncovered by these techniques"
Name one, Stryker. Heck, name a couple hundred. There've been "literally thousands," right, so it shouldn't be too hard. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:I also disagree that a would be murderer doesn't forfeit his right to life when he tries to murder. I think he does. If someone tries to murder you I think he breaks whatever moral covenant exists between man that murder is wrong, and once he does that, he forfeits his own safety under the covenant.
This means that it's ok to shoot the guy with the pistol instead of the tranquilizer gun. Do you really believe that that's permissible? You can just kill someone even though you have it in your power to accomplish the same end with non-lethal means?
Posts: 4600 | Registered: Mar 2000
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Destineer you misunderstood me, I meant that only if all you had with you was lethal means, you should be morally justified to use them. If you have non-lethal means, then that's a judgement call. But personally I think you should use the non lethal. But in how many circumstances is that likely to happen?
quote: Out of interest, what other actions break this covenant? Does anything besides explicitly trying to kill someone else waive your own right to live?
As for that, I'm not really sure. Certainly trying to kill someone would break it with that person. But other than that, I really don't know. Maybe if someone were holding their finger to the trigger of a bomb that will kill people and you have lethal means of stopping them then you have the right to, and maybe in that instance you would have the obligation to.
It's a case by case basis, but works on the foundation of a one on one situation. One person trying to kill another waives any rights the attacker has.
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