Poison Gas Saves Lives.


BaalChatzaf

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I agree that accidentally hitting a hostage or bystander when shooting back at an attacker is regrettable but ultimately on the hands of the attacker.

I reject this entire formulation. The ARI fundies like to use this pass-the-buck attitude to justify indifference to killing.

I hold that killing should never be a topic of indifference, and I also hold that morality has nothing to do with this situation in a trade-off manner ("I take the blame for you killing this one, but you take the blame for me killing that one." I.e., using human lives like poker chips in a casino.)

Really? Think about the simple case of individuals, not nations where they go wrong. And I'm not talking about 'take the blame' in an empty poker chip sense or the way government officials 'take the blame' for something horrific and face no consequences; taking the blame how I'm referring to it would mean 'you are a murderer and other people are justified in killing you'.

I recognize it may be possible to construct difficult, sticky situations in between where it may be a tough call. However, the cases we're talking about with war are in the easy extreme, killing 100,000 people and trying to rationalize it because a few might be guilty.

I remember an example from a big war discussion on SOLOP a couple years ago of a crazed shooter in a mall. If you shoot back at them and accidentally hit someone else, that's the situation I'm talking about. One poster (a defender of the Brook/Epstein party line) actually argued that you could just intentionally kill everyone in the mall in hopes of taking out the shooter. I think that demonstrates the difference between collateral damage and where 'fundies' go wrong in outright advocating mass murder.

For instance, I think it's wrong to justify the WWII Japanese innocent victims of the atomic bomb by saying that their deaths were the fault of the Japanese government. Our killing those innocents did not make the Japanese government any more evil than it already was. It was less bad to do that than the alternative, but that did not make it good, nor did it make it a pass-the-buck blame game. It was something regrettable that had to be done to win the war. Nothing more. And it was horrible to have to do it. It was not something good to do.

Despite adding an 'it was horrible... but' qualifier, it sounds like you ultimately agree that massive bombings targeting innocents 'had to be done' since the ends justified the means. That view seems very surprising especially being against even the individual bystander case. Am I misunderstanding what you wrote?

Aaron

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Aaron,

I am more in line with Ayn Rand's view that when no option but force against innocents is involved, morality goes out the window.

It's not a matter of ends justify the means. (If that were the case with the A-bomb, we would still be doing that all the time.)

It's a case of not justifying anything.

I reject the entire moral justification thing when killing innocents or be killed are your only options. You do what you gotta do, however your choose, and when things get back to sanity, if you are still alive, you get back to morality.

I can see a case for mental health, meaning I would not want to become a psychopath. But even in this case, health is not a standard. What kind of health can you have if you are dead?

Michael

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If I had been born a generation earlier than I was I would have fought in WWII. After Pearl Harbor and Germany's declaration of war on the U.S. it was all out war and the U.S. essentially fought the war correctly including the atomic bombings of Japan. In the context of that war air bombings were justified although a strong case can certainly be made that some bombings, such as Dresden, shouldn't have happened. You use what you have and use it to maximum effectiveness.

Absent the atomic bombings the U.S. had four choices: stop fighting and go home, invade, blockade or negotiate. The last would have been perceived by Japanese fanatics as weakness, blockade would probably have killed millions through starvation, invade would have killed far too many on both sides, stop fighting would have been capitulation by the U.S.

War is failure of previous policies. We didn't go to war with the Soviet Union post WWII because of strength and maybe luck. The communists were scared of Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command. They were right to be. Today no one is afraid of President Obama except Americans. Find a safe place to live.

--Brant

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I am more in line with Ayn Rand's view that when no option but force against innocents is involved, morality goes out the window.

...

I reject the entire moral justification thing when killing innocents or be killed are your only options. You do what you gotta do, however your choose, and when things get back to sanity, if you are still alive, you get back to morality.

I recognize a limited place where this kind of awful emergency situation exists, e.g. if you're in a concentration camp and forced by guards to make a 'Sophie's choice' or die. But trying to extend that to apply to hundreds of millions of people over five years seems more than a bit abusive of the concept - similar to how the fundies abuse the bystander/hostage concept as applying to any individual in a huge geographical area. The end result of what you're saying sounds like worldwide 'morality is out the window; anything goes'.

Given such a view, I don't see how it would be possible to view anything as wrong or evil (at least on the part of Americans) for the entirety of WWII. How about domestic policies - is 90+% taxation justified, wrong, or simply 'out the window'? Rationing and state control of production? Interment of Japanese? The draft? If you make a moral call on any of these, how?

Aaron

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If I had been born a generation earlier than I was I would have fought in WWII. After Pearl Harbor and Germany's declaration of war on the U.S. it was all out war and the U.S. essentially fought the war correctly including the atomic bombings of Japan. In the context of that war air bombings were justified although a strong case can certainly be made that some bombings, such as Dresden, shouldn't have happened. You use what you have and use it to maximum effectiveness.

Obviously I don't agree with your simple statements that targeting innocents '[was] justified'. Are you arguing that the actions were moral, such as due to collective guilt? Or that morality didn't apply and 1941-1945 was anything-goes?

Absent the atomic bombings the U.S. had four choices: stop fighting and go home, invade, blockade or negotiate. The last would have been perceived by Japanese fanatics as weakness, blockade would probably have killed millions through starvation, invade would have killed far too many on both sides, stop fighting would have been capitulation by the U.S.

I don't think you're fair to the options at hand, e.g. Japan was already attempting negotiated surrender, albeit unfortunately attempting to use USSR as the mediator without knowing the dealings at Yalta and that the USSR had no interest in brokering peace. Further, you're not being creative. Let the Russkies do more of the fighting and dying in Asia, assassinate, aid coups. Or you could take the Japanese living in America with families back in Japan - many already conveniently rounded up in camps - and start the policy of torture, rape and murder of one per day til the Japanese government surrendered. You could drop leaflets about the plan, and then photos or newsreels of each day on Japan when enacted. Certainly I find this idea antithetical to individual rights, and utterly horrific. Yet I do not see how anyone considering it moral to intentionally kill innocents (or who's discarded morality as inapplicable) could do so. What do you think?

Aaron

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Aaron,

We pay the military and the executive to make those hard decisions. We have both highly competent military commanders and soldiers and an enormous intelligence gathering and analysis system in place.

Just because the moral standards, or lack of morality, imaginable to an armchair quarterback are not used by experts on all situations, that does not mean that ALL standards are out the window. The high amount of training and huge amount of information exist for a reason.

I know I cannot match to expertise or competence of a US General in projecting what the risks from enemies are. I don't give him blind faith, but I do listen to him a bit more (nah... actually a hell of a lot more) than I do to the armchair quarterback's oversimplifications.

On the other end, I don't want to tell a person with the ability to deploy massive destructive force that killing innocents is "all on the enemy" because the enemy "initiated force." Some of those people will go hog wild.

That's one of the reasons I reject all this oversimplified moral speculation about killing innocents.

I think a good rule of thumb is if an innocent life can be spared in an ugly situation, it should be. That's the decent thing to do. But rule of thumb is as far as I will take it. There are far too many exceptional contexts to make an all-or-nothing contextless rule be anything but irresponsible and ineffective.

Michael

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If I had been born a generation earlier than I was I would have fought in WWII. After Pearl Harbor and Germany's declaration of war on the U.S. it was all out war and the U.S. essentially fought the war correctly including the atomic bombings of Japan. In the context of that war air bombings were justified although a strong case can certainly be made that some bombings, such as Dresden, shouldn't have happened. You use what you have and use it to maximum effectiveness.

Obviously I don't agree with your simple statements that targeting innocents '[was] justified'. Are you arguing that the actions were moral, such as due to collective guilt? Or that morality didn't apply and 1941-1945 was anything-goes?

Absent the atomic bombings the U.S. had four choices: stop fighting and go home, invade, blockade or negotiate. The last would have been perceived by Japanese fanatics as weakness, blockade would probably have killed millions through starvation, invade would have killed far too many on both sides, stop fighting would have been capitulation by the U.S.

I don't think you're fair to the options at hand, e.g. Japan was already attempting negotiated surrender, albeit unfortunately attempting to use USSR as the mediator without knowing the dealings at Yalta and that the USSR had no interest in brokering peace. Further, you're not being creative. Let the Russkies do more of the fighting and dying in Asia, assassinate, aid coups. Or you could take the Japanese living in America with families back in Japan - many already conveniently rounded up in camps - and start the policy of torture, rape and murder of one per day til the Japanese government surrendered. You could drop leaflets about the plan, and then photos or newsreels of each day on Japan when enacted. Certainly I find this idea antithetical to individual rights, and utterly horrific. Yet I do not see how anyone considering it moral to intentionally kill innocents (or who's discarded morality as inapplicable) could do so. What do you think?

Aaron

War is all about the slaughter of the innocents as they slaughter each other which is so terrible it cannot be refined (Sherman). The people truly not innocent, at the beginning, are the rulers--the warmongers. I cannot think of one necessary war the US has fought in including the Revolutionary. War is the failure of politics is the failure of morality itself and one reason Americans wanted to get WWII over with as quickly as possible and they did just that. In the context of that conflict Americans were the good guys, not the Japanese not the Germans. As I was dropping 81mm mortar rounds near Cambodia on unseen targets at the request of the South Vietnamese, the immoral thing would have been to have refused. That night the communists fired mortars back, off target, which meant the South Vietnamese had given me correct targeting information for they told me I would be firing on temporary mortar positions. The 21 HE rounds I sent their way in a square grid pattern must have gotten their attention.

Realizing that the war per se was a crock, at least per se because we were not fighting to win but the communists were, never mind for freedom, I left Vietnam after a year and the service too boot in late August 1967. Soldiers fight; I had had enough. A month later a man I had gone to high school with but knew only slightly, Jedh Barker, a Marine, threw himself on a grenade to save his comrades and was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. There is your slaughter of the innocent.

I remember walking through the hospital courtyard in Moc Hoa. I counted 250 South Vietnamese CIDG bodies. The corpses had been cleaned up so the relatives could come claim them. The blood had been wiped from their faces but still caked every uniform. This body had its face collapsed, that body looked like he could sit upright and say"Hi!" They had been caught in calamitous ambush out of their own laziness and incompetence and bad leadership and that of the six American advisors, all killed, cut in half by .50 cal. machinegun fire, bullets which would not be stopped by flesh and bone nor deflected killing man after man up the line.

If you want to talk about war and morality, these are the stories I will tell, like the story of the sergeant standing next to me who got a bullet between his eyes. He wasn't innocent. He was a combat vet. of the Korean War where he was awarded a Silver Star. He also brought on his own death and almost mine by ...

--Brant

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I could tell worse stories though not out of personal experience. The innocent Japanese babies suckled by their mothers as the atomic bomb fell down on them a generation earlier might have ended up in Nanking, China participating as soldiers in a slaughter so vile the numbers of dead Chinese would rival the numbers of dead Japanese atomic bombing victims. That's what evil cultures and evil rulers do with innocent people made into soldiers sent to war to conquer and kill their dehumanized inferiors. Subjective value preferences have no moral gravitas whatsoever except to the deluded.

The innocent aren't just slaughtered by being killed; war can slaughter innocence without killing too. Sometimes just being a witness is all it takes.

--Brant

Edited by Brant Gaede
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Brant, MSK-

The latest posts are orthogonal to mine, and unless I just wanted to repeat previous questions I'm not sure what else to say. I am drained by the new reminder of the widespread Oist views on war. I remember being surprised and appalled 5 years ago when seeing Yaron Brook speak when he called for (before leaving Iraq to invade Iran) picking some Iraqi city to level and kill all inhabitants as an example. I've argued against the Brook/Epstein views plenty, and struggled with finding myself so at odds and that I'm more likely to have, say, JR or GHS agree with me than other Oists. However, I've come to be secure that my views being the proper ones from Objectivist ethics, and the widespread advocacy of targeting innocents (be it by specific rationale of collective guilt, pragmatism, or considering morality inapplicable) is a big mistake and to the detriment of the modern Objectivist movement. It's still disturbing to run into such ideas, though the surprise is gone.

Aaron

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Aaron,

I do not support targeting innocents.

Never will.

That's a mischaracterization of my ideas.

Nor do I support waging war against an evil aggressor solely based on avoiding killing the wrong person. In my view, that is one consideration among many. Reflecting kinda like how reality is...

I am against oversimplifications that result in unintended disasters.

But if you are so disturbed about preaching targeting innocents, why do you claim that all innocent deaths are on the aggressor? (I'll find the quote if you like--I even disagreed with it right at the bat.) What do you think will happen with that kind of morality?

Michael

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Brant, MSK-

The latest posts are orthogonal to mine, and unless I just wanted to repeat previous questions I'm not sure what else to say. I am drained by the new reminder of the widespread Oist views on war. I remember being surprised and appalled 5 years ago when seeing Yaron Brook speak when he called for (before leaving Iraq to invade Iran) picking some Iraqi city to level and kill all inhabitants as an example. I've argued against the Brook/Epstein views plenty, and struggled with finding myself so at odds and that I'm more likely to have, say, JR or GHS agree with me than other Oists. However, I've come to be secure that my views being the proper ones from Objectivist ethics, and the widespread advocacy of targeting innocents (be it by specific rationale of collective guilt, pragmatism, or considering morality inapplicable) is a big mistake and to the detriment of the modern Objectivist movement. It's still disturbing to run into such ideas, though the surprise is gone.

Aaron

Ba'al is not an Oist.

--Brant

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Brant, MSK-

The latest posts are orthogonal to mine, and unless I just wanted to repeat previous questions I'm not sure what else to say. I am drained by the new reminder of the widespread Oist views on war. I remember being surprised and appalled 5 years ago when seeing Yaron Brook speak when he called for (before leaving Iraq to invade Iran) picking some Iraqi city to level and kill all inhabitants as an example. I've argued against the Brook/Epstein views plenty, and struggled with finding myself so at odds and that I'm more likely to have, say, JR or GHS agree with me than other Oists. However, I've come to be secure that my views being the proper ones from Objectivist ethics, and the widespread advocacy of targeting innocents (be it by specific rationale of collective guilt, pragmatism, or considering morality inapplicable) is a big mistake and to the detriment of the modern Objectivist movement. It's still disturbing to run into such ideas, though the surprise is gone.

Aaron

Aaron,

I doubt that Ayn Rand would have shared my views or Yaron Brook/ Alex Epstein's. I think Rand viewed our entry into WW2 as unnecessary both with Germany and Japan. She viewed FDR's foreign policy as altruist. I don't know what her position would have been about Just War Theory, but it's clear that she viewed the US fighting in WW2 as a waste of American lives.

Jim

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Aaron,

I doubt that Ayn Rand would have shared my views or Yaron Brook/ Alex Epstein's. I think Rand viewed our entry into WW2 as unnecessary both with Germany and Japan. She viewed FDR's foreign policy as altruist. I don't know what her position would have been about Just War Theory, but it's clear that she viewed the US fighting in WW2 as a waste of American lives.

Jim

While I believe Objectivism should meld easily with some form of "just war" theory -- though I have some reservations about "just war" theory, but from a different angle: from that of individual rights (in this vein, combatants who are violating rights are violating rights even if they are follow some rules of war or try to minimize this violation) -- I think Rand might always have the "out" of using the "ethics of emergencies." (This is, of course, one reason I'm skeptical of the ethics of emergencies: it allows one to circumvent individual rights and seems to merely push the problem back to what exactly is an emergency. Honest and reasonable people might disagree on the latter; dishonest and unreasonable people will likely see it as an invitation to mischief.)

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Dan,

Part of the problem of deriving behavior from rules is making sure you get the nature of the subject right.

Here are two negative components of human nature we all have in us: (1) The capacity to bully others, and (2) The capacity to define matters according to our own conveniences.

Any rule (like a right) that does not take those components into account might be a good rule for Martians, but not necessarily for humans.

And if it is used for humans, you get things like normal ethics and special ethics for when normal ethics don't fit, i.e. Rand's problem.

My view of her theory of ethics is that she had some wonderful penetrating insights, but since she did not take all of human nature into account for devising a fundamental code of values to guide choices when acting (which is essentially her definition of ethics), her ethics do not apply to all of the human being. It's a scope issue.

But she went about as if it did apply to all of human nature. So do others. Then reality presents itself in all its variety and glory and some of it doesn't fit. So an arbitrary system of exceptions needs to be devised. Either that, or you have to try to redefine commonly used terms to weed out the stuff that doesn't fit. Neither way works for me if the context is to be completeness and universal. (It does work for me within restrictions, though.)

I see the same scope problem with libertarians boiling everything down to NIOF.

Michael

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MSK-

I don't imply anything psychological such as getting glee from targeting innocents. But terror bombing was about that and not about targeting a bad guy and accidentally getting a bystander as a casualty - as you implied incorrectly with your phrase 'avoiding killing the wrong person'.

What I said concerning bystander deaths in an act of defense being on the aggressor was clearly in the context of aimed response at an aggressor and accidental bystander casualties. I even gave the specific individual level example of shooting back at a mall shooter. The concept is badly abused by some Oists who'd attempt to argue that turning Iran, Pakistan, Japan, USSR, etc. into glass would be/would have been OK, but that's a mockery of the idea. I find it very ironic that you're trying to associate me with that abusive view (which I've repudiated before) especially given our respective views on the acceptability of bombing population centers.

James-

Thanks for the comments. I wouldn't use her for argument from authority and I expect Rand and I would have specific disagreements on this topic, but I do think her approach on modern foreign affairs would have been closer to mine than the interventionist and 'total war' views widespread in Objectivism now.

Brant-

Ba'al makes you, MSK, Yaron Brook, etc. look like bleeding heart pacifists. I vacillate between viewing him as psychopath or troll, but I know he's not an Objectivist and am not nearly as concerned with his "kill 'em all, salt the earth" rants as with the views of other Objectivists.

Aaron

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I find it very ironic that you're trying to associate me with that abusive view (which I've repudiated before) especially given our respective views on the acceptability of bombing population centers.

Aaron,

That's probably because you haven't made a single attempt to understand what I am saying, but instead lumped it into a pot with some others and condescendingly called it "disturbing."

I personally think the entire issue of treating innocent lives as poker chips in a moral game of seven card stud played by others "quite disturbing." And I'm calling you on the intellectual root of that. You adhere to the morality of it, even if qualified with arbitrary restrictions.

I do not.

Michael

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I want to clarify my point a bit further.

Regardless of any situation, whether bombing or simply killing an innocent party because there was no other way to get the bad guy on the spot, I hold that it can never be a moral GOOD to do that. The life of an innocent party does not belong to the person who destroys it. And there's more. The person who destroys it is the one who destroys it. That's reality. Pretending anything else, or hiding it behind moral doublespeak, is faking reality big-time.

When a person says, "The guilt is on the one who was the aggressor," that person is saying that HIS moral good could conceivably include HIM taking the life of an innocent person. In other words, that innocent person's life is morally the means to HIS ends, and HE can even blame it on someone else.

This reminds me a great deal of a cop-bandit I knew in Brazil. (This is a true story.) He said that people do not kill. Only God kills. If God decides to move a piece of lead through the air at a high speed and lodge it into a person and kill him with it, He will do so regardless of what any human being wants or does. So the killer cop-bandit I knew (who I was told had killed over 40 men in cold blood on over 40 different occasions) told me that he was merely an instrument of God to move lead through the air. He was merely doing God's will.

(This dude also got drunk once in front of me and told me, crying, over and over, that he was going to hell because there was no forgiveness for some of the things he had done. What in hell was wrong with me back then, hanging out with people like that? I know now I'm lucky to be alive.)

If we have to use morality in talking about killing innocents, let's say that killing innocents (if you are one of the good guys and doing so based on wartime considerations) is a judgment call between one evil and another evil. You choose which is the less evil, and that's all you get morally. It is never a moral GOOD to kill an innocent person.

Never.

Not in bombing. Not in Aaron's trumped up case where his imagination controls the variables to suit his principle.

I say the innocent people who get killed do not belong to Aaron, (nor Yaron for that matter), nor do they belong to some kind of god who speaks through principles frozen in time and space.

And when you cannot have a moral GOOD, instead you can only have EVIL in different degrees, I say you don't really have morality operating.

You try to do the less evil because that's the decent thing to do. But when there's only evil, people's perceptions tend to get screwed up, including their moral compass, which suddenly has only one direction to point to.

I would never say to a person who killed innocents, "Bravo! That took a lot of moral courage. You are a good man for doing that. You are a man of high moral integrity." But I can say, "Given the choices, I understand why you did that. I probably would have done the same. But it was terrible. It was a damn shame. May you never have to live through evil like that again."

I just can't bring myself to call killing innocents morally good, nor blame someone else for an act I choose to commit. I can hate the person who made the situation a choice between varying degrees of evil, and I can destroy him. But I will not blame him for my acts or my choices.

If someday I ever kill an innocent person while trying to survive (or if I were a soldier in an armed force fighting a war to stop enemy attacks), I will feel guilt. I know that and that's OK. Actually, it's more than OK. By feeling guilt, I will know I am back in a world of sanity where killing innocents is not something people do.

I would never let that guilt eat me up inside--after all, there is something to be said for surviving in a horrible situation--but I will not deliver my humanity to a sterile morality that will allow me to pretend that I did something good--or that my chosen act was the responsibility of someone else--and blank out the guilt, just as I blank out the life I extinguished.

I'll leave that to those who think we derive people and reality from principles, not the contrary.

Michael

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Michael,

I agree. The onus is on the person taking the life.

However, you mention good. Anything that is not good is then evil (with varying degrees). Would you imply the same goes for varying degrees of good? And let me be clear, this is strictly a question about good and evil, not if we can have varying degrees of good to justify killing an innocent.

~ Shane

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Michael, I agree, too.

As a BTW, I believe that guilt has its 'purpose' - as the final 'fall-back warning' for those lacking rational morality. (Not that it should be stifled, ever, in those who are more highly principled.)

To go to your real-life example, have you ever considered that guilty remorse is the last refuge of a scoundrel? Not just patriotism.

What has caused rifts in O'ist circles, is just what you are raising: there is a lot of rage around the topic, mostly of the 'holier than thou' kind.

One interesting facet is the way the NIOF principle is turned in reverse. "They hit us first, they initiated force, therefore every action we take is justified."

Excuse me? Are our enemies Objectivists, or Libertarians, too?

Whatever Rand said on this, the responsibility for war, etc., and whatever the ARI has followed up with (and they could be at risk of painting themselves into a moral corner, with their 'just war theory'- not that I've read it), I will not let myself forget that Objectivism is primarily pro-life; for creation, rather than destruction.

We derive principles from people and reality.

Tony

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However, you mention good. Anything that is not good is then evil (with varying degrees). Would you imply the same goes for varying degrees of good? And let me be clear, this is strictly a question about good and evil, not if we can have varying degrees of good to justify killing an innocent.

Shane,

The way I see it, good and evil are essentially measurements on a scale. You have raw evil on one end and pure good on another. Then you have the spectrum between. There is a point on that spectrum you start calling evil, and everything to the left is an increasing degree of evil. Ditto for good on the right. There is also a neutral portion of that scale in the middle that approaches good on one side and approaches evil on the other.

Like all measurements, a standard (or even several standards) must be used. One of the main standards in Objectivism for measuring good and evil is human life. What promotes human life is good and what destroys it is evil. On a social level, this means acts by human beings. Acts that promote human life are good and acts that destroy it are evil.

Using that standard, if you destroy the life of an innocent person to preserve your own, you might be doing good for you, but you are committing evil for the innocent person being destroyed. He didn't threaten you. He was just there. In other words, the same standard of good and evil cannot be used to preserve the life (or even the right to life) of both in that situation.

So where's the morality--your own moral choice--without a standard? Blame it on a third party?

I could go through the same kind of analysis with NIOF (non-initiation of force), but it boils down to the same thing. Practicing NIOF will be good for one, but fatal for the other. So you have to blame a third party for your own moral choice.

That's what I reject. I refuse to call that morality.

I say when the need to kill innocent people is involved on pain of more innocent people dying, the standard stops becoming human life and starts becoming a "me or him" situation with only your individual life (or your side) as a standard. And that's the standard bullies and tyrants live by. They measure the very existence of other people solely according to their own lives. Other people are means to their ends and good and evil for them means how well they are served or not. I suppose that could be called morality, but it is a sorry-ass excuse for one.

So if you are in a kill-innocents-or-be-killed-by-others situation where you are forced to remove human life as a standard and only use your own life, or by extension your army/country against an enemy army/country, that does not mean that you will always kill the innocents. Your life means your life, and that means your choices. Some people (I refer to good people here) refuse to live in a world where those are the only choices. They refuse to live their own lives by the code of bullies and tyrants. Others prefer to survive and do what bullies and tyrants do (and trust that this will only be temporary). I don't blame either and I cannot find a universal morality that fits this situation where moral good is involved.

In a military situation, you have taken an oath, so you at least have that. But implicit in that oath is trust in your commander, that he or she will have grappled with this issue and will have chosen the less evil path to order you to follow. But even under those circumstances, I cannot imagine someone being court-martialed for failing to kill clearly innocent people when so ordered. I am not 100% sure, but to that extent, even the military recognizes that morality is out the window in a situation like that. It's a judgment call for the person with the finger on the trigger.

Notice that the defense of "I was just following orders" breaks down for Nazi concentration camp guards. That's because there was a clear moral issue that can be judged by human life. Their situation was kill innocents or let them live on pain of... what? Nothing really. That was just killing for the sake of killing. Not kill innocents on pain of defeat and destruction.

Now you mentioned varying degrees of good to justify killing innocents. I ask, good for whom? The dead innocents? What do you think they would say if you could ask them? Is there a "greater good" for them? Or do you mean good for you (or your side)?

There's no way to arrive at universal good and evil in this situation. There is only killing. So, in my view, you make the best of a horrible situation and try to restore human affairs to a place where good and evil mean something again--for all people.

That often means taking out the asshole who created that situation. Now killing him--that's moral. That's pure good. In addition to being the enemy, he abdicated all justification for his own life to be considered a standard under your morality (i.e., code of values) by creating a toxic situation where you could not exercise proper morality with innocent folks.

Michael

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Now you mentioned varying degrees of good to justify killing innocents. I ask, good for whom? The dead innocents? What do you think they would say if you could ask them? Is there a "greater good" for them? Or do you mean good for you (or your side)?

Michael,

First, thanks for the breakdown :)

Second, I was trying to separate my line of questioning so that it wasn't implicit to the topic of killing innocents (And let me be clear, this is strictly a question about good and evil, not if we can have varying degrees of good to justify killing an innocent). I believe that killing an innocent is evil, period. There's no way to justify such a killing along the line of good.

~ Shane

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