"The Objectivist Death Cult"

[galtgulch]

Food for thought, although this article appeared some time ago. I don't know if it was discussed on OL. I do wonder where those who justify such things as firebombing Dresden during WWII, which certainly caused the deaths of innumerable innocent children, are sympathetic to the position of ARI in our present undeclared war? This came from www.LewRockwell.com

<<<"The Objectivist Death Cult

by Justin Raimondo

In some ways, it really isn’t fair to raise the most extreme example of the pro-war faction of the libertarian movement, the orthodox Objectivists centered around Dr. Leonard Peikoff and the Ayn Rand Institute, because – judging from his pronouncements on the subject of the Iraq war – the man is clearly crazed, as his Ford Hall Forum speech, "America Versus Americans," given last year, makes all too abundantly clear. But it is really such a clear distillation of pure evil that I can’t resist citing it: it is far too inviting a target.

Peikoff is sorely disappointed by this war, for a number of reasons, first and foremost being that his preferred target, Iran, is not yet in America’s crosshairs. The war in Afghanistan was a letdown for him because we took care not to inflict civilian casualties. This, says Peikoff, is immoral: in Iraq, too, we are far too squeamish about innocent civilians. And I note that Peikoff emphasizes the word "innocent," even as he proclaims that it would be immoral not to condemn these innocents to death. When someone in the audience cried out in horror at this brazen display of naked evil, Peikoff interrupted his talk and imperiously demanded "please throw that man out." A far cry from Ayn Rand herself, who, during the 1930s, took to the stump for Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, and, when confronted by hecklers – of which there were plenty – gave as good or better than she got. But the thuggish, hectoring Peikoff, whose high-pitched voice is in stark contrast to his stern admonitions, will have none of that.

Unlike the neocons, whose foreign policy he faithfully echoes, up to and including their iconization of Israel, Peikoff doesn’t hide behind any beneficent-sounding slogans, like "exporting democracy" and implanting free markets and the rule of law. This, he claims, would be "altruism," the worst sin in the Objectivist theology – although why freedom, in the abstract, and not just one’s own freedom, cannot be a value in and of itself is not at all clear to me. And the clear implication is that the Iraqis, like the Palestinians, are considered "savages" by Peikoff, who wouldn’t appreciate such a gift in any case. No, what we must do, says Peikoff, is kill them – enemy soldiers and innocent civilians alike.

This same maniacal bloodthirstiness is expressed by Yaron Brook, the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, in a recent lecture on "The Morality of War," in which he outdoes Peikoff – and also Cuffy Meigs – in the complete thuggishness of his stance, advocating the wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians in a total war of annihilation against the entire Middle East – except Israel, of course. When one timorous questioner raises the issue of how Mr. Brook reconciles such a view with the central doctrine of individualism, which is that all people are endowed with inalienable rights, Brook brushes this aside with an impatient wave of his hand and declares that all enemy civilians are legitimate targets. The reason is because your government represents you, whether you like it or not.

So much for the idea of individualism.

Yes, but what about a six-year-old child, asks the persistent – and clearly perplexed – questioner, who complains that he has trouble "internalizing" (his word) this monstrous doctrine of collective responsibility for the crimes of a ruling elite. What, he wants to know, has the child done to deserve such a fate? Brook hems, and haws, apparently reluctant to come right out and advocate child murder on a mass scale – and in the name of "individualism," yet! – but, in the end, he gathers up his courage, and, in a wavering voice that sounds eerily like Elmer Fudd, declares that six-year-old kids suffer all the time because of their parents’ behavior. This instance – in his view – is no different, he says, except in degree, reiterating his crazed view that when a government violates rights, all the citizens of that state are guilty, and can therefore be put to death.

How can people who claim to hold "rationality" as their highest value sink to such depths of depravity? The problem is that these people are living in a fantasy world of pure abstractions, in which everything is viewed through the lens of a Manichean struggle between Reason and Unreason, Modernity and Primitivism, the West and the Rest. The humanity and reality of anyone deemed "irrational" is defined out of existence, so that it’s okay to torture and kill six-year-olds. Because, you see, they aren’t really people. Not like us.

As I said, it is a bit unfair to hold up the Ayn Rand Institute and the Peikoff cult as an example of anything but pure psychopathology. Because they really have gone over the edge. But the influence of their West versus the Rest mentality runs deep in libertarian circles, due almost entirely, I would submit, to the influence of Ayn Rand, who dismissed Palestinians as subhuman "savages" and whose foreign policy views were based, not only any knowledge of specific areas of the world, but on highly stylized abstractions unconnected to any facts.

The same abstract, supposedly "philosophical" outlook is shared by the "soft" Objectivists, represented by the Objectivist Center, headed up by David Kelley. In a statement, the Center had the following to say:

"The attack was a deliberate assault not only on America's civilian population and government, but on its culture of reason, individualism, achievement, and freedom, with all their derivatives such as science, technology, capitalism, progress, and toleration. In many public statements – and in their choice of the World Trade Center as a target – the terrorists have declared their hatred for this culture and their wish to destroy it."

The idea that Osama bin Laden and his cohorts, sitting in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan, suddenly came upon a copy of the Bill of Rights, and were so outraged that they decided to put a big dent in the New York City skyline is absolute nonsense. The last time we had a problem with these people was back in the late eighteenth century, when the Barbary pirates decided to hijack American shipping. To imagine that, suddenly, the Muslim world has decided to go on a crusade against America because we’re so rational, so tolerant, so wonderful, and so free is narcissism, pure and simple – and just plain wrong.

Listen to what Michael Scheuer, a currently serving CIA analyst who had served for years on the Agency’s Al Qaeda task force, has to say about this Bushian-Objectivist view of 9/11:

The United States is hated across the Islamic world because of specific U.S. government policies and actions. That hatred is concrete not abstract, martial not intellectual, and it will grow for the foreseeable future. While important voices in the United States claim the intent of US policy is misunderstood by Muslims, that Arabic satellite television deliberately distorts the policy, and that better public diplomacy is the remedy, they are wrong. America is hated and attacked because Muslims believe they know precisely what the United States is doing in the Islamic world. They know partly because of bin Laden’s words, partly because of satellite television, but mostly because of the tangible reality of US policy. We are at war with an Al-Qaeda-led worldwide Islamist insurgency because of and to defend those policies, and not, as President Bush mistakenly has said, "to defend freedom and all that is good and just in the world.

Bin Laden’s credibility and stature in the eyes of Muslims is due to his success in persuading them that they must fight a defensive jihad against those intent on eradicating Islam and conquering the Middle East. The invasion of Iraq has certainly done much to convince any skeptics that he has a point, but many did not need much convincing, as our record in that part of the world already provided bin Laden with plenty of grist for his mill. As anyone who examines what bin Laden and his allies have actually said – and Scheuer's recent book, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, is a rich source of information on this subject – the Islamists are up in arms over five issues of major import:

US support for Israel that keeps Palestinians in the Israelis' thrall

US and other Western troops on the Arabian Peninsula

US support for Russia, India, and China against their Muslim militants

US pressure on Arab energy producers to keep oil prices low

US support for apostate, corrupt, and often tyrannical Muslim governments

In short: They are over here, because we are over there.

Chalmers Johnson, the foreign policy analyst, has popularized the concept of "blowback" – the unintended consequences of government action in the international arena. It is an idea that ought to be all too familiar to libertarians, who are second to none in tracing the origins of these consequences when it comes to government intervention in domestic affairs. We face a worldwide insurgency directed at the American homeland as a direct consequence of our interventionist foreign policy.

Its roots, however, are not in abstractions, such as the terrorists’ alleged hatred of our way of life, but in blood-and-flesh realities such as the March 8, 1985 car bomb that went off in a Beirut suburb. The intended target, a radical Muslim leader, was shaken but left alive. Eighty others, mostly women and children, were killed, and 200 were wounded. The bombing, according to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, was the work of CIA director William Casey, who had enlisted the cooperation of the Saudis. Retribution was not long in coming.

A few months later, Arab terrorists took over a TWA flight from Athens and executed a US Navy seaman on board, as they railed that it was payback time for the Beirut bombing. One hijacker kept yelling "New Jersey! New Jersey!" as terrified passengers cowered in their seats. He was talking about the battleship New Jersey, which had rained down death and, yes, terror in the form of 2000-pound shells on Beirut the previous year.

Scheuer deals, not in abstractions, but in specifics: not in "philosophy," but in empirical, verifiable facts. In order to discover the truth about what is going on in the world, it is necessary know what you are talking about: you can’t derive the answers to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, or the how to defeat Al Qaeda, or what position to take on the Iraq war, from knowing that "A is A." The daffy method of Peikoff, of Kelley, and of all too many libertarians leads to support for militarism, empire-building, and the defeat of the very values they claim to uphold.

The abstractionists are taking the easy way out: all they have to do is repeat a few rote formulas, insert a few words here and there, and – bingo – they have a glib explanation, an instant position, all worked out in advance. That’s a lot easier than taking a reality-based approach: it means you don’t have to do any research, you don’t have to read the newspapers (except the editorial page) and you don’t have to educate others, except to inculcate in them the same formulas you have memorized for the occasion.

The policy of global interventionism has a long and complex and bloody history, and it must be understood in order to see the present horror we face in context. Osama bin Laden did not just pop up out of nowhere: he was, in a sense, our own creation. We funded him, supported him, armed him in order to "liberate" Afghanistan from the Red Army – and when he turned on us, like a "tame" cobra gone rogue, we had to "liberate" Afghanistan again – essentially undoing the previous "liberation."

Antiwar.com, the popular website of which I am editorial director, exists to educate Americans and readers worldwide. What is the War Party up to? Where will they strike next? What is the history of the latest target of our campaign of "liberation"? Like our sister site, LewRockwell.com, we debunk the lies, expose the frauds, and take a magnifying lens to the elaborate deceptions that rationalize America’s policy of perpetual war. And we do it because this is the central issue of our times. If we take the road to Empire, then the idea of limited government is doomed: the crushing weight of confiscatory taxation will smother our old republic, and stamp out the last vestiges of America’s libertarian legacy.

Every war is a test, and, with this war we face our greatest test. Most libertarians, I am glad to say, are rising to the occasion: others – swept along by the rising tide of militarism and statism, enthralled by the rhetoric of warmongering demagogues, blinded by narcissism and hubris – are falling by the wayside. The American libertarian movement has gone full circle: we have come, in the end, to a replication of our beginnings. The modern libertarian movement was born in the shadow of the Vietnam war, and the split with the neocon-ized conservative movement over the question of the war and civil liberties. Only this time, we are bigger, stronger, more confident: we have not forgotten our history. Now let us prove ourselves worthy of it.

October 12, 2004

Justin Raimondo [send him mail] is editorial director of Antiwar.com and is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement. This article is adapted from his talk to the 2004 Freedom Summit.

Copyright © 2004 LewRockwell.com">>>

www.campaignforliberty.com 29Jun 11AM 164,331; 1July 6PM 164,947; 2 July 5AM 165,032, 10PM 165,213

Edited July 3, 2009 by galtgulch

[Selene]

Gulch:

The comparison with Dresden is that since there were innocent children killed in the Dresden WW II bombings, that these two wars are similar to each other because innocent children are killed in the current "war on terror"?

Adam

[Michelle]

I love the allusion to Cuffy Meigs. It is remarkable how many of the orthodox Objectivists look and act like the villains in ATLAS SHRUGGED. Take Peikoff: scrawny man with a whiny, nasally voice who looks like a cross between a Bond villain and that bespectacled Nazi from Raiders of the Lost Ark and who preaches a doctrine of collective guilt and advocates for the murder of innocents. I can't help but feel that the guy probably deserved to be on that last train that went into the Taggart Tunnel. He's had his rare moments of sanity, but nothing excuses the murderous rubbish he has been peddling for some time now.

That opinion might seem extreme, but I have no sympathy for people who thirst for the blood of children and innocents

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Michelle,

The whole ARI stance on killing innocents has me creeped out, but not because I believe they thirst for the blood of innocents. Obviously, I mind people who thirst for the blood of innocents, but not nearly so much as those who preach indifference to killing innocents as a moral ideal.

Those who thirst for blood are kooks and psychopaths. They are easy to identify and deal with. That's why I don't mind them so much.

I don't believe this shoe fits ARI (with a few exceptions like Craig Biddle's terrified spite-ridden call for the USA to bomb schools and mosques). This is where Raimondo goes too far the other way. In fact, I believe Raimondo is the same animal as that which he damns, but on the opposite side of the rivalry. But that's another issue.

My real problem is with philosophical gobbledygook for justifying evil and calling it good, and then calling that Objectivism. ARI has taken an inhuman death premise, cloaked in somewhat clever gobbledygook, and passed it off as reason. So it fools people.

This boneheaded and evil policy, i.e., preaching the moral goodness of indifference to the slaughter of innocents just because an innocent person was born and grew up in the wrong place, is so many ways to creepy I almost walked away from this whole mess.

But I decided I would not leave. I just can't stand by silent and observe this. What is being preached is not choosing a lesser evil over a greater one where no other alternative is available. I could live with that (and in fact this is what I hold.) What is preached is the goodness of total indifference to the lesser evil because someone else can be blamed.

I can't condone that.

I wish the ARI policy sounded totally evil like Raimondo pretends it does, but it doesn't. It sounds more like the soul of a government bureaucrat when denying paper-work to an applicant because of a technicality.

Michael

[Michelle]

Michelle,

The whole ARI stance on killing innocents has me creeped out, but not because I believe they thirst for the blood of innocents. Obviously, I mind people who thirst for the blood of innocents, but not nearly so much as those who preach indifference to killing innocents as a moral ideal.

Those who thirst for blood are kooks and psychopaths. They are easy to identify and deal with. That's why I don't mind them so much.

I don't believe this shoe fits ARI (with a few exceptions like Craig Biddle's terrified spite-ridden call for the USA to bomb schools and mosques). This is where Raimondo goes too far the other way. In fact, I believe Raimondo is the same animal as that which he damns, but on the opposite side of the rivalry. But that's another issue.

My real problem is with philosophical gobbledygook for justifying evil and calling it good, and then calling that Objectivism. ARI has taken an inhuman death premise, cloaked in somewhat clever gobbledygook, and passed it off as reason. So it fools people.

This boneheaded and evil policy, i.e., preaching the moral goodness of indifference to the slaughter of innocents just because an innocent person was born and grew up in the wrong place, is so many ways to creepy I almost walked away from this whole mess.

But I decided I would not leave. I just can't stand by silent and observe this. What is being preached is not choosing a lesser evil over a greater one where no other alternative is available. I could live with that (and in fact this is what I hold.) What is preached is the goodness of total indifference to the lesser evil because someone else can be blamed.

I can't condone that.

I wish the ARI policy sounded totally evil like Raimondo pretends it does, but it doesn't. It sounds more like the soul of a government bureaucrat when denying paper-work to an applicant because of a technicality.

Michael

I see your objection. The ARI position is one of total war with no respect for the lives of enemy civilians, whereas this guy makes it sound like Peikoff is saying that we should specifically target civilians (a position Mr. Biddle takes, however, as you've noted). The way I see it, though, this is absolutely worse than pure psychotic malevolence. Psychopaths are obviously sick and need treatment, whereas Peikoff and co. can make their murderous rubbish sound slightly rational, which is enough for some Objectivists. Mr Peikoff associates his bloodlust (I'd have to disagree with your comparison of the ARI position to the government denying paperwork based on a technicality in association with Peikoff: every time I've watched him talk about this particular issue, actually watched him, I could almost see him smacking his grubby lips as he preached collective guilt and collective damnation for people in the Islamic world) with reason, thereby dirtying reason by virtue of that association. Pure evil is impotent and more pathetic than fearsome, as it is a negation. What Peikoff and co. are doing is way worse.

That author was obviously going to extremes. Hell, he's a member of antiwar.com. You're not going to get a balanced view from him. And he, like most contributors to the Lew Rockwell site, is partially a nutter, and probably thinks that the American South was fully justified in tearing the country apart and that Somalia is a great place to live, like most of the von Mises-Rockwellians tend to.

Either way, the ARI position is monstrous, and Mr. Peikoff is evil for preaching it.

I read The Roots of War recently. Quite an interesting contrast to the people now carrying the banner of Objectivism. America might need a philosophical renaissance, but if Objectivists want to pave the way for this renaissance, they need to kick this creepy second-hander out to the curb.

If I'm going to extremes, I'll have to apologize, but I love the works of Ayn Rand, and what she stood for, and what Objectivism as a philosophy stands for, and this creep, who is Rand's "intellectual heir," is associating Miss Rand and her legacy with terror, violence, and irrationality.

[thomtg]

I disagree with the deep premise of the anarchist article in the root post.

The epistemological question is who is waging a war? On the Objectivist categorial theory (in accordance with the axiom of identity, which subsume MSK's holon idea), it is not soldiers who wage war, nor is it civilians who suffer from war. Technically speaking, waging war and sufferance from war are properties not of invididuals but of the entity "government." "Government" is a social institution in a geographical area with a few purposes related to the citizenry. In this sense, the military is nothing more than an instrument for the government to fulfill its purposes. As guns don't kill people, but people kill people; so neither militaries wage war nor civilians being war victims, but governments do and are.

So, if a government declares war on another, then the better military is one that will cause the opposing government to surrender. Other considerations are side issues and are irrelevant at this macro level. Below this level, there are other considerations of course, and anyone not a medical professional should creep out at the sight of bloodshed. But at the level of governments, ARI's position is consistent with that of TOC/TAS, including the response to the Barbary coast of pirates. The principle is, when a society is attacked (e.g., 9/11), its government must defend its citizens, and that defensive action is war.

This seventeen-minute video from PajamasTV by Bill Whittle explains very well the story of the dropping of the atomic bombs in Japan. Surely, "innocent civilians" were killed, but the real issue is, was the action of the U.S. government moral? With their stolen concepts, the anarchists would say no.

Edited June 29, 2009 by Thom T G

[BaalChatzaf]

I disagree with the deep premise of the anarchist article in the root post.

The epistemological question is who is waging a war? On the Objectivist categorial theory (in accordance with the axiom of identity and which subsume MSK's holon theory), it is not soldiers who wage war, nor is it civilians who suffer from war. Technically speaking, waging war and sufferance from war are properties not of invididuals but of the entity "government." "Government" is a social institution in a geographical area with a few purposes related to the citizenry. In this sense, the military is nothing more than an instrument for the government to fulfill its purposes. As guns don't kill people, but people kill people; so neither militaries wage war nor civilians being war victims, but governments do and are.

So, if a government declares war on another, then the better military is one that will cause the opposing government to surrender. Other considerations are side issues and are irrelevant at this macro level. Below this level, there are other considerations of course, and anyone not a medical profession should creep out at the sight of bloodshed. But at the level of governments, ARI's position is consistent with that of TOC/TAS, including the response to the Barbary coast of pirates. The principle is, when a society is attacked (e.g., 9/11), its government must defend its citizens, and that defensive action is war.

Beware of reifying abstractions. I have yet to see a government bleed out or have its intestines exposed to daylight. This kind of abstraction-itis leads to madness and destruction.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Thom,

If that is where it stopped, that would be fine. But you find the two following points consistently hammered over and over in public from ARI speakers (at least in the material I have read and videos I have seen). These points are not just stated, they are heavily emphasized:

1. Since the enemy put the lives of the innocents at risk, all the moral blame goes to the enemy for whatever innocents get killed. A variation on this is to do an oversimplified numbers game, claiming that the lives of all the innocents of the entire enemy nation are not worth the life of a single American soldier.

2. Most enemy innocents in war are guilty anyway because they did not find a means of leaving the country during peacetime when it was under a dictatorship. A variation on this is that they are tacit supporters of the enemy by producing goods and services under that regime, so they are also the enemy.

In the first case, the people who emphasize this stress it so much that they end up saying in public that the life or death of an enemy innocent is basically not a proper moral concern nor their concern at all. I have heard Yaron Brook say something along these lines (actually worse, since he says that thinking about preserving the lives of enemy innocents is immoral and evil since it makes our soldiers pull their punches), and then there was the famous O'Reilly interview with Peikoff. When the "not my concern" thing got blurted out (the context was the possibility of nuking major Iranian cities if I remember correctly), O'Reilly mocked him and called him "Dr. Strangelove."

For the variation (the oversimplified numbers game), they treat a soldier going into a dangerous situation against an enemy army during hostilities as the same thing as him or her being executed—like nuking civilians is an execution.

The idea mostly promoted is that nukes should be a first resort, not last resort in dealing with hostile nations. Nukes are not treated as the lesser of two evils, but instead as something morally good.

I find that view repulsive.

I am not against using nukes if needed, but only as a last resort. And only with great sadness in my heart. Certainly not indifference.

The second case has not been promoted as heavily as the first, but it is still around. I find it hard to believe that educated people could possibly believe that poor uneducated people are responsible for the regime that oppresses them, but there it is. Some educated people do believe this and many of those are Objectivists.

Michael

[Michelle]

The assertion that American military personnel are not morally responsible for the people they have killed is absolutely amazing. You know you've destroyed the very concept of reality itself when you can see one man gut or shoot another and then say with a straight face that he was absolutely not morally responsible for the death of the other man. The question isn't "is he morally responsible," which he obviously is, but: "was it justified?" War, by its nature, is reprehensible. There is nothing good or noble about murder. The question is whether the murder is morally justifiable or not.

Edited June 29, 2009 by Michelle R

[Robert Campbell]

A few further thoughts:

(1) Although Ayn Rand's writings concerning foreign policy were not always consistent with one another, the current spokespeople for ARI either never read "The Roots of War" or have completely forgotten it.

(2) Their attachment to "total war" and unconditional surrender comes from nowhere in the Randian corpus that I know of.

(3) The Mises Institute is really the Rothbard-Rockwell Institute. I doubt that Ludwig von Mises would have much cared for their views on foreign policy. But Murray Rothbard would have. Justin Raimondo wrote a highly partisan biography of him.

(4) If the cornerstone of your foreign policy is opposition to empire, you'd better oppose all empires. Making excuses for a Russian empire, an Iranian empire, a Chinese empire, etc., while denouncing American empire doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Robert Campbell

[Selene]

Michael and all those who slogged through these "O'ist" wars:

I am coming irrevocably to the conclusion that this is the way, the path that a message as powerful as Rand's objectivism, or marxism, Freudianism, etc. just cannot avoid the centralization of "the truth" into one center, church or mystical cave.

In general, eventually, they either die or go away. Sometimes they become rabidly aggressive and must be shot through the head.

I actually, idealistically, thought it would not happen to the Rand movement.

I was quite wrong.

So, we survivors will just have to continue to introduce folks in the most positive way. OL is a great base. I actually thought of posting on SOLOP [a.f.a. Slop].

Adam

[Selene]

The assertion that American military personnel are not morally responsible for the people they have killed is absolutely amazing. You know you've destroyed the very concept of reality itself when you can see one man gut or shoot another and then say with a straight face that he was absolutely not morally responsible for the death of the other man. The question isn't "is he morally responsible," which he obviously is, but: "was it justified?" War, by its nature, is reprehensible. There is nothing good or noble about murder. The question is whether the murder is morally justifiable or not.

Michele:

Good points. I would modify your statement:

"There is nothing good or noble about murder. The question is whether the murder is morally justifiable or not."

to:

"There is nothing good or noble about murder. The question is whether the killing is morally justifiable or not."

"Murder, as defined in common law countries, is the unlawful killing of another human being with intent (or malice aforethought), and generally this state of mind distinguishes murder from other forms of unlawful homicide.

All jurisdictions, ancient and modern, consider it a most serious crime and therefore impose severe penalty on its commission. The word murder is related, in old English, to the French word mordre (bite) in reference to the heavy compensation one must pay for causing an unjust death.[1]" WIKI

Adam

[Michelle]

The assertion that American military personnel are not morally responsible for the people they have killed is absolutely amazing. You know you've destroyed the very concept of reality itself when you can see one man gut or shoot another and then say with a straight face that he was absolutely not morally responsible for the death of the other man. The question isn't "is he morally responsible," which he obviously is, but: "was it justified?" War, by its nature, is reprehensible. There is nothing good or noble about murder. The question is whether the murder is morally justifiable or not.

Michele:

Good points. I would modify your statement:

"There is nothing good or noble about murder. The question is whether the murder is morally justifiable or not."

to:

"There is nothing good or noble about murder. The question is whether the killing is morally justifiable or not."

"Murder, as defined in common law countries, is the unlawful killing of another human being with intent (or malice aforethought), and generally this state of mind distinguishes murder from other forms of unlawful homicide.

All jurisdictions, ancient and modern, consider it a most serious crime and therefore impose severe penalty on its commission. The word murder is related, in old English, to the French word mordre (bite) in reference to the heavy compensation one must pay for causing an unjust death.[1]" WIKI

Adam

If you like. But then both sentences would have to refer to killing. So: "There is nothing good or noble about killing. The question is whether the killing is morally justifiable or not." If the words are different in both sentences, the meaning is lost. I tend to refer to any intentional killing of another human being as murder, but the legal definition of the word, along with its emotional weight, make it unsuitable for our purposes. So you're right.

Edited June 29, 2009 by Michelle R

[Selene]

As you are right with the agreement of the words. Oh my a collective conclusion! :thumbsup:

Establishing the old NASA experiment that I always used in my sensitivity training and small group classes.

It invariably showed that the group would make a better collective decision than one single individual in ranking the items in order of their importance for the mission.

Great exercise in the hands of a good teacher like I am.

Lost on the Moon - An Exercise in Group Problem Solving

You and four to seven other people should take this test individually, without knowing one another's answers, then take the test as a group. Share your individual solutions and reach a consensus - one ranking for each item that best satisfies all group members.

Your spaceship has just crash-landed on the moon. You were scheduled to rendezvous with the mother ship 200 miles away on the lighted surface of the moon, but the rough landing has ruined your ship and destroyed all the equipment on board, except for the fifteen items listed below.

Your crew's survival depends on reaching the mother ship, so you must choose the most critical items available for the 200-mile trip. Your task is to rank the fifteen items in terms of their importance for survival. Place a 1 by the most important item, a 2 by the second most important, and so on through 15, the least important.

# box of matches

# food concentrate

# 50 feet of nylon rope

# parachute silk

# solar-powered portable heating unit

# two .45-caliber pistols

# one case of dehydrated evaporated milk

# two 100-pound tanks of oxygen

# stellar map (of the moon's constellation)

# self-inflating life raft

# magnetic compass

# 5 gallons of water

# signal flares

# first-aid kit containing injection needles

# solar-powered FM receiver-transmitter

[Guyau]

One classic essay on this topic written during WWII is The Morality of Obliteration Bombing.

Previously at OL here about.

Previously at RoR here about.

Previously at SOLO here about.

[PS for Dr. Cohen: I deleted your friendly note from my Corner only because I want to keep that sector as a haven free of political discussion, as was my journal Objectivity. Thanks for your participation at this site.]

[galtgulch]

One classic essay on this topic written during WWII is The Morality of Obliteration Bombing.

Previously at OL here about.

Previously at RoR here about.

Previously at SOLO here about.

[PS for Dr. Cohen: I deleted your friendly note from my Corner only because I want to keep that sector as a haven free of political discussion, as was my journal Objectivity. Thanks for your participation at this site.]

Stephen,

I appreciate all your contributions here and should apologize for intruding as I did.

www.campaignforliberty.com 29Jun 10PM 165,471

gulch

[Jonathan]

You'd think that a principle which allows people to blame the deaths of all innocents on the initiators of force in any conflict would also apply to domestic initiators of force. Shouldn't ARIan spokesmen be advocating the carpet bombing of American neighborhoods which are infested with violent crime? After all, it could be argued that fewer innocent lives would be lost in the long run, and bombing neighborhoods would be much safer for the police since it wouldn't put them in danger, and, of course, it would be the criminals' fault that the police had to blow up innocent people in order to wipe out crime. Shouldn't ARIans be arguing that if one police officer dies in the name of justice, it's one too many, and if citizens aren't rising up against the criminals in their neighborhoods, well, then they've made their choice and they deserve what they get -- they're either with us or against us?

J

Edited June 30, 2009 by Jonathan

[Selene]

Jonathan:

Well the ARI group, as far as my observations, have never shied away from the reductio ad absurdum, so your excellent use of that argumentation principle made me laugh.

For Ba'al and the "0" discussion:

3. A Classical Example of Reductio Argumentation

A classic instance of reductio reasoning in Greek mathematics relates to the discovery by Pythagoras - disclosed to the chagrin of his associates by Hippasus of Metapontum in the fifth century BC - of the incommensurability of the diagonal of a square with its sides. The reasoning at issue runs as follows:

Let d be the length of the diagonal of a square and s the length of its sides. Then by the Pythagorean theorem we have it that d² = 2s². Now suppose (by way of a reductio assumption) that d and s were commensurable in terms of a common unit n, so that d = n x u and s = m x u, where m and n are whole numbers (integers) that have no common divisor. (If there were a common divisor, we could simply shift it into u.) Now we know that

(n x u)² = 2(m x u)²

We then have it that n² = 2m². This means that n must be even, since only even integers have even squares. So n = 2k. But now n² = (2k)² = 4k² = 2m², so that 2k² = m². But this means that m must be even (by the same reasoning as before). And this means that m and n, both being even, will have common divisors (namely 2), contrary to the hypothesis that they do not. Accordingly, since that initial commensurability assumption engendered a contradiction, we have no alternative but to reject it. The incommensurability thesis is accordingly established.

An example my help to clarify matters. Consider division by zero. If this were possible when x is not 0 and we took x ÷ 0 to constitute some well-defined quantity Q, then we would have x ÷ 0 = Q so that x = 0 x Q so that since 0 x (anything) = 0 we would have x = 0, contrary to assumption. The supposition that x ÷ 0 qualifies as a well-defined quantity is thereby refuted.

This stuff still makes my hair hurt.

Adam

As indicated above, this sort of proof of a thesis by reductio argumentation that derives a contradiction from its negation is characterized as an indirect proof in mathematics. (On the historical background see T. L. Heath, A History of Greek Mathematics [Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1921].)

The use of such reductio argumentation was common in Greek mathematics and was also used by philosophers in antiquity and beyond. Aristotle employed it in the Prior Analytics to demonstrate the so-called imperfect syllogisms when it had already been used in dialectical contexts by Plato (see Republic I, 338C-343A; Parmenides 128d). Immanuel Kant's entire discussion of the antinomies in his Critique of Pure Reason was based on reductio argumentation.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

You'd think that a principle which allows people to blame the deaths of all innocents on the initiators of force in any conflict would also apply to domestic initiators of force. Shouldn't ARIan spokesmen be advocating the carpet bombing of American neighborhoods which are infested with violent crime? After all, it could be argued that fewer innocent lives would be lost in the long run, and bombing neighborhoods would be much safer for the police since it wouldn't put them in danger, and, of course, it would be the criminals' fault that the police had to blow up innocent people in order to wipe out crime. Shouldn't ARIans be arguing that if one police officer dies in the name of justice, it's one too many, and if citizens aren't rising up against the criminals in their neighborhoods, well, then they've made their choice and they deserve what they get -- they're either with us or against us?

Jonathan,

Of everything I have ever read, this takes first place in showing the absurdity of preaching a philosophy for living on earth by elevating indifference to the death of innocent people to a moral ideal.

That was one great piece of thinking...

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

I am not against using nukes if needed, but only as a last resort. And only with great sadness in my heart. Certainly not indifference.

The second case has not been promoted as heavily as the first, but it is still around. I find it hard to believe that educated people could possibly believe that poor uneducated people are responsible for the regime that oppresses them, but there it is. Some educated people do believe this and many of those are Objectivists.

Michael

If you want to win a war, strike with your strongest weapon first and knock the enemy out. Starting light and building up gives the enemy a chance to become stronger.

As to hurting civilians on the other side, consider the question: do you want to win or not? If you do, do whatever will achieve that end. In a war, the end justifies the means. The enemy civilians are in, effect, munitions and instruments of war for the leadership on the other side. Since you would not hesitate a minute to blow up his ships and planes, do not hesitate to blow up the workers in his munitions factories or the people who transport his goods. Follow the example of Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris. He had the right idea. Ditto follow the example of Curtis LeMay. He burned Japan to the ground in the Pacific War.

A war, is an emergency situation. I recall a certain novelist with a thick Russian accent teaching us that in an emergency, all bets are off and all rules suspended.

Victory first, morality later, if at all.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Bob,

There is no such thing as one kind of war. There are contexts and there are contexts.

The atom bomb on Japan worked in WWII and it was a last resort. I don't celebrate that, though. It was a horrible decision to have to make. I certainly see no reason to have done that immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack.

The Japanese are good people. Look what they have produced for mankind ever since. Why slaughter them before running out of options?

Anyway, when you involve millions of people, you have to go slower at the beginning. At the very least, you have to make sure all those people are acting to kill you, or want to, before you start slaughtering them indiscriminately.

Also, as a "nicety, it would be a good idea for our government to actually declare war before hauling out nukes...

(btw - Just for the record, if Israel gets pushed much harder by Iran, I am in favor of responding with nukes, or at least the threat of them.)

Michael

[Michelle]

I am not against using nukes if needed, but only as a last resort. And only with great sadness in my heart. Certainly not indifference.

The second case has not been promoted as heavily as the first, but it is still around. I find it hard to believe that educated people could possibly believe that poor uneducated people are responsible for the regime that oppresses them, but there it is. Some educated people do believe this and many of those are Objectivists.

Michael

If you want to win a war, strike with your strongest weapon first and knock the enemy out. Starting light and building up gives the enemy a chance to become stronger.

As to hurting civilians on the other side, consider the question: do you want to win or not? If you do, do whatever will achieve that end. In a war, the end justifies the means. The enemy civilians are in, effect, munitions and instruments of war for the leadership on the other side. Since you would not hesitate a minute to blow up his ships and planes, do not hesitate to blow up the workers in his munitions factories or the people who transport his goods. Follow the example of Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris. He had the right idea. Ditto follow the example of Curtis LeMay. He burned Japan to the ground in the Pacific War.

A war, is an emergency situation. I recall a certain novelist with a thick Russian accent teaching us that in an emergency, all bets are off and all rules suspended.

Victory first, morality later, if at all.

Ba'al Chatzaf

This kind of thinking you see in Sharia law, where your hand is chopped off when you're found stealing something.

Would you blow a kid's brains out for throwing a rock through your window?

Following this logic, every country on Earth would probably have ended up a glass crater right now.

The idea that you reply to any act of war with the strongest possible response, regardless of context, is idiotic and downright murderous. It is also fundamentally unjust.

Moreover, I'll say this: morality shouldn't be breaking down when things don't go your way. A morality that doesn't work when things get rough is a morality which ought to be abandoned. Emergency situations change the rule of the degree of the response. It doesn't throw all moral rules out of the window, however, and say: all is fair. If your country is at a fair risk of being annihilated, you should strike with your strongest weapons, given situational context (nuking the Soviets would have been rather suicidal).

[Michelle]

As to the Iranians: The UN Partition Plan started this whole mess in the first place. This is just another result of international meddling leading to the creation of problems in the world now.

Sadly, the ultimate solution is going to be wiping out Iran. There's just no other way, bar Israel getting destroyed, that I can possibly see this being resolved.

[Brant Gaede]

I am not against using nukes if needed, but only as a last resort. And only with great sadness in my heart. Certainly not indifference.

The second case has not been promoted as heavily as the first, but it is still around. I find it hard to believe that educated people could possibly believe that poor uneducated people are responsible for the regime that oppresses them, but there it is. Some educated people do believe this and many of those are Objectivists.

Michael

If you want to win a war, strike with your strongest weapon first and knock the enemy out. Starting light and building up gives the enemy a chance to become stronger.

As to hurting civilians on the other side, consider the question: do you want to win or not? If you do, do whatever will achieve that end. In a war, the end justifies the means. The enemy civilians are in, effect, munitions and instruments of war for the leadership on the other side. Since you would not hesitate a minute to blow up his ships and planes, do not hesitate to blow up the workers in his munitions factories or the people who transport his goods. Follow the example of Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris. He had the right idea. Ditto follow the example of Curtis LeMay. He burned Japan to the ground in the Pacific War.

A war, is an emergency situation. I recall a certain novelist with a thick Russian accent teaching us that in an emergency, all bets are off and all rules suspended.

Victory first, morality later, if at all.

Ba'al Chatzaf

What you are advocating is what the Japanese tried to do with all their might in WWII. It blew up in their faces from day one (Pearl Harbor) when we got terribly and horribly pissed off.

If we had tried that right after Pearl Harbor, we'd have lost all our aircraft carriers.

You are mixing up tactical with strategic and essentially don't know what you are talking about.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Michelle,

Don't be too upset with Bob. You should have read his stuff before. He's a lot better than he used to be. (Really...)

Michael