War & Murder
Tell me TPF, is there an equivalence here? In this scenario A and B are at war.
Scenario 1: Armed men of group A come into a residential neighborhood of group B and go from house to house shooting and using blunt force weapons such as axes against civilians. They go from house to house and butcher 100 civilians before leaving. Babies are killed in their cribs and children are smashed against walls.
Scenario 2: A pilot of group B is conducting a strike on armaments factories of group A. The flight is done at night to minimize civilian casualties. Fliers are also dropped to minimize casualties. The bombs are dropped using a precision missile yet debris from the explosion kills 100 civilians.
Is the pilot and the group of armed men morally equivalent?
Scenario 1: Armed men of group A come into a residential neighborhood of group B and go from house to house shooting and using blunt force weapons such as axes against civilians. They go from house to house and butcher 100 civilians before leaving. Babies are killed in their cribs and children are smashed against walls.
Scenario 2: A pilot of group B is conducting a strike on armaments factories of group A. The flight is done at night to minimize civilian casualties. Fliers are also dropped to minimize casualties. The bombs are dropped using a precision missile yet debris from the explosion kills 100 civilians.
Is the pilot and the group of armed men morally equivalent?
Comments (101)
Yet armament factories ought not to be in the same place where civilians live. As usually intelligence is scarce and likely wrong, naturally many "civilian" targets can be judged to be "military" targets. And many what is basically civilian infrastructure is also military target, when the enemy uses them: train stations, bridges, harbours etc. Some (not me) will argue that Hiroshima was a military target.
From the perpetrators side it's the age old question, is there a difference with the soldier that kills with a bayonet or a soldier that fires an artillery gun never knowing who it hits? Artillery kills the most in wars, still even today, but usually we don't hate the artillerymen for being murderous mass killers.
The acts of A and B are morally indistinguishable and equivalent.
The difference between shooting "innocent civilians" and soldiers in war and shooting random targets in the United States (like the 18 people just killed in Maine) is that the latter is a matter of national policy and the former is a matter of severely disordered behavior.
We have rules of engagement, international laws about conducting wars, and various ideas about the morality of war. The trouble with these various guides is that in principle "war is hell" as Union General William Tecumseh Sherman said, as he burned Atlanta and marched through Georgia.
The hell of war, as it is generally conducted and experienced, renders finicky questioning about the morality of this or that tactic moot.
Many people will identify with either A or B and assent to whatever their preferred group does. The choice of one's preferred group will be debatable. Some will call for a plague on both their houses. That approach is often a cop-out, as is dismissing both sides as crazy extremists. Quite a few people will not have been paying attention and will not have heard about it.
Can one identify with both A and B, and recognize that an equivalent tragedy is happening to both sides?
Not morally equal at all. One group (B) tries & intends to strike only or mainly military sites. It minimizes civilian deaths & injuries, as best it can.
The other group of thugs murders & slaughters civilians with abandon.
This seems like a trick question to me. You ask if the pilot and the men from group A are equivalent, not the person in group B who ordered the pilot to do the bombing, which is who I would expect to focus on. The pilot's intent is not to murder, as measures are taken to minimize casualties, whereas the armed men in group A intend to murder. In that regard they are not equivalent. So, unless the pilot mows down a few extra people, I would say she is okay morally.
However, if group B knows that a hundred civilians could die because of the bombing and they just don't care, then their intent to minimize casualties is not enough to absolve them, as they are intentionally killing some civilians. So, in terms of consequences, there is very little difference and the actions of both groups A and B pretty much equate to terrorism. B is just in a better position for arguing for their terror, as the brutality of group A will evoke horror from just about anybody.
Quoting Nicholas
How is that worse than intentionally killing an equal amount of civilians merely because you do not care if they die? Is this armament plant worth those deaths? Maybe it was a bad - perhaps even evil - decision if the intelligence was so wrong that a hundred civilians were killed?
So yes, still screw Hamas - if that's what you want to hear.
Of course not. Intentional and unintentional killing are not morally equivalent.
(I didn't understand the substance of the question until I saw the sophists arrive, claiming moral equivalence.)
That depends on their motivation and circumstances. Both actions result in indiscriminate deaths, but there are significant differences in the scenario as given.
The first action generates a great deal of terror, both to the victims before they are reached and to the neighbourhood at large, in addition to the pain and death. The second attack is unexpected and sudden. Group A chose its intended victims and systematically carried out the slaughter, while Group B behaved according to the protocols of [presumably] declared international hostilities and killed civilians by happenstance. The motivation of Group A is not specified; it may have been retaliation for a similar attack on their own homes, or a mob worked up to frenzy by an agitator: we don't know. Group B is carrying out their duty as they see it, for a purpose they are convinced is right.
War is insane, and sometimes, so is murder. People in mobs and gangs are prone to contagious violent outbreaks. In very large numbers such as nations, the madness presents every appearance of method and reason - within its own internal rules and logic.
In practice Group B are also butchering, and their actions smash children against walls too. They don't do it with their bare hands, though.
When I was a teenager it took me ages to recover from reading Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse Five' about the Allied bombing of Dresden, which had then caused me to discover in the library how Bomber Harris and the heroes of the RAF had killed thousands of Germans - in what is mostly thought of as a failed effort to sap German civilian morale.
Let's ignore all that and pretend it's just about the latest Hamas attack and one bombing run with "regrettable" collateral damage. Never mind Israel just switched of water, electricity and stopped food and medicine. I'm sure the elderly, disabled, sick and injured Palestinians got in their fine BMWs and drove to their vacation homes in Dubai just in time before their regular home was bombed. 5,000 dead and over 50% of buildings damaged. How many displaced?
There's indeed no moral equivalency. Hamas' violence is a drop in the ocean of Israeli aggression.
Do you suppose there are a lot of children hanging out at armament factories during the night?
Of course not. The oppressor (group B) is more morally reprehensible than the oppressed (group A).
Hey which is worse?
A group of armed Jews in 1944/45 who go from house to house murdering German civilians with guns and blunt weapons.
A German pilot in WWII who bombs an English armaments factory but intends to destroy only military targets.
I would tentatively say that the Jews are worse, on a personal level taking the incident isolated.
[quote=Benkei]There's indeed no moral equivalency. Hamas' violence is a drop in the ocean of Israeli aggression.[/quote]
I'm the Jew but you apparently hate Nazis more than me. :chin:
That's funny, my gut feeling is the German pilot is worse. Those German civilians (collectively) ushered in and supported the Nazi's, so screw them. Now, if the armed Jews knew they were anti-Nazi civilians, that would be different.
I condemn anyone who uses such tactics. I'd condemn a Jew who intentionally murdered German civilians in WWII. Thankfully I don't know of any historical instances of Jews resorting to those tactics. On an individual level I think higher of a theoretical "humane" Nazi bomber who strives to play by the rules than the murderous Jew.
So... not a fan of the Irgun?
:smirk:
But what group B is doing is not accidental. It is calculated, just like group A.
Both groups willfully accept that the deaths of innocents is expected and warranted in pursuit of their goals.
If civilians are all innocent and all equal, then fighters are all guilty, and all equal. The distinction between group A and group B is arbitrary and has no moral significance, unless it already has that moral significance.
Would you rather have your baby shot to death or blown into little pieces by a bomb? Looking at it from the perspective that matters, it doesn't matter much.
Would you rather have your son killed fighting for the Nazi's or fighting against them? Dead is dead, right? Except it's not really. If it is my kid's fate to die in combat, I would prefer he die fighting for a good cause. Wouldn't you?
IMO, you have to look at what the groups are fighting for. What are their goals? In WW2, both sides deliberately killed untold numbers of civilians. Does that make the Allies and Axis morally equivalent? Does the slaughter of innocents by both sides mean we just throw up our hands and say, "I guess it doesn't matter who wins. A plague on both your houses!"? Obviously not. I'm glad the Allies won. Aren't you?
You're answering my relevant question with an irrelevant question of your own. The OP is focused on civilian victims of conflict and makes no mention of military casualties fighting against Nazis etc. And unless you think babies can be Nazis then, any way you look at it, you seem to be engaged in a distraction. Anyhow, fighter pilots don't drop moralities on their victims and assassins don't shoot immoralities. The means is not what's important. The ethical point centres around the killing of innocent civilians.
For the thought experiment, it's not necessary to consider what they're fighting for because that's not the focus. Let's just imagine they are both fighting for their own interests without bringing the Nazi trope into it, which just makes the whole exercise pointless.
You can't look at two warring groups in a vacuum. Why they're fighting is as important as how they're fighting. Both the Allies and Axis did horrible things to civilians. Did that make them morally equivalent? Yes or no?
Could you just answer my question? If your kid has to die in a war, does it matter to you what the cause he was fighting for is?
No, because your question is irrelevant and is a substitute for answering my relevant question, which you ignored. That's not an appropriate way to conduct debate.
However, I will further explain that the thought experiment, if it's to be useful, relies on us presuming some equivalence so we can actually focus on the matter at hand. If we label one party "Nazis" then the thought experiment becomes useless. It's simply comes down to who we decide to label Nazis.
It's much more useful to designate party A and party B as fighting for their own interests, not one morally superior at the outset. Then we can focus solely on the morality of the methods used to kill civilians. That's the only sensible way to approach the OP.
No, it's not, because that's not how the real world works. If two groups are fighting, it is often the case that one side's goals are morally repugnant and the other side's goals aren't: Russia vs Ukraine, North vs South, Axis vs Allies.
If two sides are fighting, and both are committing atrocities, we have to look at why they're fighting. If they're both fighting over some natural resource, there may be a moral equivalence. If one side is fighting to rid the world of "subhumans" so their "master race" can have lebensraum, then there is not a moral equivalence. If one side is fighting to establish a theocracy that is hostile to women, Christians, atheists, Jews, LGBTQ, then that is morally repugnant, is it not?
How passive aggressive of you. Obviously, this is directed at me. You should have the courage to answer my questions and accuse me directly.
Every side believes its cause to be a good one.
Some sides are right and some are wrong. The North morally trumps the South in the American Civil War (the North was morally superior), agreed?
Brains in vats and evil demons aren't how the real world works either. I wonder why they should be invoked by philosophers... Obviously we can agree if one side are Nazis (or the equivalent) then all things being equal we are against them and we can agree that in many conflicts one side has the moral upper hand. But if we take that approach then the thought experiment is unnecessary because the answer is decided a priori, right? So, the only way to make the thought experiment relevant is to focus on the precise moral issue it raises. I'm not going to judge the intentions of the OP writer, but I think it's a worthwhile OP insofar as we take the point seriously.
In retrospect from a given angle. Never beforehand from inside either faction's ideology.
How we now evaluate past conflicts between people with whom we were not personally acquainted is irrelevant to the moral issue presented here. If the identity of Group A and B had been given in the OP, we might be able to apply historical perspective to their actions. But I suspect clean, correct Group B might not, in that light, so evidently have moral superiority. If their nationalities were avoided, so should the Germans, Japanese, Incas and Boers be avoided.
Really? Allied soldiers fighting the Nazi's weren't aware they were on the right side? They (and the world) only realized this after the war was over? Nonsense.
I don't know if you are one of those people. Are you? I expect it's pointless to ask because you don't seem to want to say anything here except "Nazis are bad". But we all know that...
The OP asked if there is a moral equivalence between two groups. That's impossible to determine without knowing why they're fighting, hence my point: "WHY two sides are fighting is as important as HOW two sides are fighting".
Again, you have to understand the nature of a thought experiment and that there are no two real groups, and that positing them as such and giving them a priori moral attributes makes the thought experiment useless.
Yes, the Jews were oppressed and the Nazis were genocidal oppressors, as a group. On an individual/personal level things become more complicated. I remember reading Viktor Frankl's memoirs and he remarks how there were actually some "good" Nazis and also there were morally bankrupt Jews who ended up Holocaust victims. The more memoirs I read of holocaust survivors the more complex/obscuring the picture becomes from "good Jews, bad Nazis."
Don't get me wrong, "good innocent Jews, bad evil Nazis" is the general truth but on an individual level and on a true historical level the truth is much, much more disturbing. I don't know whether you've read Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem or the memoirs of any of the Jewish police.
I did pose that as a factor in arriving at a judgment. The OP comparison was as flawed as the argument about red historical herrings.
Quoting RogueAI
Soldiers in all the armies involved were mostly conscripts. Nobody informed them of the precedents and nuances of the situation, just loaded them with a ton of propaganda field gear. They were not asked their opinion, just shot if they tried to stop killing one another.
As for what "the world" realized, it's difficult to piece together a coherent idea.
The thought experiment is unanswerable because the motivations of the warring groups are unknown. There's not enough information to make a moral judgement. Is the pilot fighting on behalf of Baal worshippers who want to install a theocracy and sacrifice every firstborn child? Then he's worse than the armed men of group B. Is the pilot an Allied fighter trying to stop the Nazi's? Then he's better than the armed men of group B.
See my point?
I don't agree that it's unanswerable. Coming up with a definitive moral judgement based on the information provided is not the point imo. The point is to abstract out the information given from any partisan context and work with it on its own terms. I find that useful. If you get nothing from it though, that's fine.
Clearly what is occurring in this thread is that some are refusing to answer for one reason or another because they do not believe that the thought experiment conforms to the reality in the Middle East. What they should do in that case is say, "Group A is worse than Group B, but I deny that Group A correlates to Hamas and Group B correlates to Israel."
Edit: When I wrote this I did not understand that @RogueAI was pro-Israel. Still, his arguments don't hold water.
Right, or they should move on to the next category. If they don't understand how to handle a hypothetical then ethics will elude them altogether. Besides, even judgments of non-hypothetical situations saddle us with the burden of limited information. Limited information is just part of the game, hypothetical or otherwise.
:up:
The OP says 'debris from the [factory] explosion kills 100 civilians'. Are you saying these civilians were 'hanging out at armament factories' rather than, say, going about their normal business, maybe living a few streets away? I don't follow.
Given that armament factories are not usually found in residential neighborhoods, I see no reason to assent to your claim that Group B's actions smash children against walls. Surely there is much less reason to believe that Group B's actions have this effect than to believe that Group A's actions have this effect. Positing some sort of equivalence on this score is not rationally justified.
Neither is killing people on an industrial scale. But we don't seem anywhere close to discontinuing the practice.
Quoting Leontiskos
Nearly all aerial attacks do that. Even by the squeaky-clean 'good guys'.
Munitions are designed to kill people. They don't care which people die, they just go where they're pointed... more or less. Where the population density is high, safe infrastructure is scarce and weapons - defensive or offensive - are made wherever they can be, more people get killed by happenstance than in wide, roomy, wealthy places.
I think in this hypothetical scenario, there actually is something a bit more bad/evil in face-to-face butchering/burning/maiming someone than doing it from bomber planes. It goes with the inverse too. Why is it that actually giving soup to the poor has some more "value" or "good" to it than simply sending money to a food bank that might end up doing the same? Just as with the good, there is a dignity and humanity you are dealing with in person, with the bad, there is a dignity and humanity you are disregarding in person, in barbaric and brutal ways of maiming, burning, cutting, etc. in person.
That is an answer with ONLY the contingencies defined in the OP. However, if you were to add other facts, I do believe @RogueAI's points should be taken into consideration. Is the person doing the butchering doing it out of "desperation" or out of planned operations in order to form fear in the enemy? After you do this butchering which will result in some response, do you care about your own people or would you rather knowingly use them as fodder by hiding under civilians?
How about if the bombers care and protect their citizens under any circumstance, whilst the butcherers disregard what happens with their citizens, and therefore don't value their lives as much as their cause?
Also, what if one side's intention is to cause mass terror and chaos, to provoke a war, and the other side is to try to get the enemy who did the butchering, maiming, burning, raping, but unfortunately, that enemy hides in hospitals and residential buildings?
These are all things to consider. You can take my first paragraph as the answer to the very limited parameters in the hypothetical scenario if you want.
If you want to make the two scenarios as equivalent as possible, here is one suggestion for scenario B:
Scenario 2: A pilot of group B is conducting a strike on [s]armaments factories[/s] a building in a residential neighborhood of group A. The flight is done at night to minimize civilian casualties. Fliers are also dropped to minimize casualties. The bombs are dropped using a precision missile yet debris from the explosion kills 100 civilians. Babies are killed in their cribs and children are smashed against walls.
Alternatively you could modify Scenario A (something like this):
Scenario 1: Armed men of group A come into a residential neighborhood of group B where the residents have supported a regime that oppresses and murders citizens of B and go from house to house shooting and using blunt force weapons such as axes against civilians. They go from house to house and butcher 100 civilians before leaving. Babies are killed in their cribs and children are smashed against walls.
There are likely even better ways to adjust the 2 scenarios to make them as equivalent as possible.
Only, I doubt equivalency was intended.
Now, if your cause is important enough to shed blood for, then it's morally wrong to torpedo it out of blood lust. The desire for vengeance itself can't be the justification.
No, but it can be a powerful motivation. It can also blind people to long-term goals or derail their original, reasoned intentions. I realize that's not a moral consideration. But, in long-lasting hostilities, where bitterness and smouldering rage are the daily diet of at least one of the participants, if not both, it is a common enough factor. The moral evaluations, justifications, rationalizations usually follow a long way behind the passions of the moment.
But I specifically said I wanted to address the morality of Group A vs. Group B not mix this up with the morality of the pilot vs the assassins. So, yes, it's easier to press a button and drop a bomb than to stab someone in the face. Easier for you. And that might make you more moral or not. But... I think there's a "trolley problem" issue with the intuition that because one group has the power of an advanced technology behind it that separates it physically from the results of its actions, those actions somehow become more humane or justified (the analogy in the trolley problem would be between pushing the fat man off the bridge onto the tracks to stop the train vs pulling a lever to open a trapdoor so he just falls on to them).
This presumption seems like a kind of moral blindness to me. It has the stink of Milgram's experiments to it. As if we just presume our nice respectable bombers are morally superior methods of killing because they represent more clearly political and scientific authority. They are more "civilised". (And yes we can add a bunch more context to get whatever result we want but I'm sticking to the view that removing context or presuming the background context to "even out" allows us to focus on our flawed intuition here.)
Scenario 1: Armed men of group A searching for a hidden route into an armaments factory of group B come into a residential neighborhood of group B and go from house to house shooting and using blunt force weapons such as axes against civilians that stand in their way. They go from house to house and butcher 100 civilians. They eventually find the route in and set the factory on fire, destroying it.
Scenario 2: A pilot of group B is conducting a strike on an armaments factory of group A. The flight is done at night to minimize civilian casualties. Fliers are also dropped to minimize casualties. And yet it is known that approximately 100 civilian casualties are still the likely outcome of the bombing. The bombs are dropped using a precision missile yet debris from the explosion does indeed kill 100 civilians.
Who is more moral? The leadership of group A who aimed and succeeded at destroying the armanents factory of group B at the cost of 100 civilian lives or the leadership of group B who did the same thing re group A but used different methods?
Yes, that's the point.
"The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose. War is merely the continuation of politics by other means."
~Carl von Clausewitz
Yes, but TPF category = Ethics. And the implications to how we think about these things are important imo (they allow advanced states to act under technological and political cover so to speak). If you just want to argue politics, we all know the thread that's being done on already.
The tactics used by groups have more to do with the technology and infrastructure available to the warring parties than their moral superiority. Sure, Israel's job would be easier if Hamas fighters all wore uniforms, grouped up under flags, had military bases far away from civilian populations, and abandoned guerrilla tactics and fought "conventionally". But would anyone logically do that if you have little to no relative war resources? No doubt the pilot zooming by at 350 knots, feels morally "cleaner" than the ground fighter looking ther victims in the eye. But again, that's more due to resource availability than moral superiority.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/848961
But... the revision (at least) is my thought experiment and I stipulate it's not conditioned by some political situation (of any relevance to the ethical question).
It takes a lot of aggression to kill a hundred people with an axe (I assume). One imagines that remotely launching a guided missile takes no aggression at all.
This is mentioned as a factor in gun violence in America. It's just fairly easy to shoot someone vs using a butcher knife, so we end up with gun shot wounds all over the place.
But I think the emotions involved work the other way as well. If you hear a heroic story about a fireman saving someone, yay! But if Bill Gates helps save millions of people by helping to fund vaccine research, nobody cares.
But then I come from a country where our Jews fought alongside Nazi Germany against Soviet Union. A country that defended itself alone against an invasion, but then was quite happy to try to gain more land when another brutal dictator attacked the previous brutal dictator that had attack us. In the end got it's ass kicked, but survived.
(A field synagogue on the front during the Continuation War in Syväri, actually very close to the German positions, who then were our brothers in arms. 4 Finnish-Jewish soldiers were given the Iron Cross, none of the accepted it.)
In fact, I had the honor of knowing one of such Finnish-Jewish war veteran, an anti-aircraft artillery reserve officer, who died at the age of 96 in 2014. He had a wonderful positive attitude towards life and was a true gentleman. I didn't believe first he had seen action on the front as nice and full of life he was (as war veterans often have emotional scars), but actually he had been wounded in combat. And he lived quite an remarkable life!
I gave context after but just sticking to the first paragraph, Im sticking to that response. I dont think the idea that dropping bombs being more scientific and civilized-seeming at all counters my response which was this:
Quoting schopenhauer1
There is a personal intimate nature to killing up close. To knife someone is more intimate than with a gun, a gun more intimate than a bomb.
However, providing just some context, if it is more than a clean kill, or if not clean, it was not just collateral damage, but you actually WANT to inflict maximum pain, horror, by maiming and raping, and bashing the civilians in a personal brutal way, versus WANTING to kill only enemy perpetrators BUT in the process impersonally killing civilians in collateral damage, that adds another dimension.
Who says either party "want" to do it more? They're soldiers and in both cases doing their jobs. Maybe the bomber gets a sadistic kick out of blowing children to bits and maybe he blows them up impersonally. Ditto with the direct killings. It's easy to argue that the more salient difference is that the bomber is taking a more cowardly route to killing. That hardly makes him morally superior, does it?
An analogy would be with eating meat. Some would say there's more honour in going out and hunting the animals ourselves. At least then we get to understand we're killing them rather than having some other party do it for us. It seems you think playing mental games with ourselves absolves us of responsibility for our actions. I don't. If you bomb civilians and kill them, you and those who directed you to do so are fully responsible for their deaths and suffering just as if you stabbed them in the face yourself. There is no magic intermediate party to take any share of that responsibility from you. It's simply a false moral intuition brought about by a lack of proximity.
I mean I think you can tease out the moral standard there. If the bomber WANTS to inflict maximum damage or his superior does its just as morally culpable. If BOTH (the up close butcher and the removed bomber and his superior) want it, I still say theres an added dimension when doing it to unarmed civilians up close. Both bad, one has an extra disregard attached to it.
If the bomber or superior truly DIDNT want collateral damage, that does make a moral difference.
Quoting Baden
I think its precisely this that would make people possibly stop eating meat, so I dont think this is some false sense of proximity. People dont eat meat because they WANT to see the horror of bambis brains splattered! Theres a difference in wanting to eat meat, not because of some horror done to the animal, but because one wants the sustenance. It might not be the case, but people want to presume some sort of standard is being met with a clean kill.
If that AND they had reason to believe their bombs would not cause collateral damage. If, on the other hand, they had reason to believe they would, no. Again there's no moral get-out-of-jail-free card in saying you don't want to do something but then choosing to do it. Their mental games with themselves can't excuse them of the known consequences of their actions. In fact, insofar as they facilitate more killing, they probably just make them worse people.
We can distill this to saying that knowingly killing civilians is an extreme moral wrong and the method by which they are killed (presuming the amount of suffering they endure to be equal) is of no consequence. The only justification for killing civilians would be to prevent an even greater moral wrong (e.g. the killing of even more civilians by your enemy). Not just the fact that there's any military target nearby or you're using an advanced technology to do so.
The original question was whether there is an aspect of killing up close that has some ethical [s]dilemma[/s] dimension to it, and I added the affirmative and have some reasoning. In the spirit of charity in intellectual discourse, can we at least acknowledge the question was answered and that we have now moved onto a different question regarding intent and consequences?
You see the relation though, right? When we achieve some physical and emotional distance from our acts of killing we can start to leverage that into an illusory mitigation of moral responsibility.
Ty for the improved re-write. Certainly bombs smash children against walls as well (or walls against children.)
Quoting Baden
True, it wouldn't matter much. As long as death is instantaneous. And bombs smash children against walls. The physical results are the same in case A and B.
So, this is wrong:
Quoting schopenhauer1
So again, I am just going back to the very original framing of butchery up close versus from a bombing. There is an extra de-humanization of doing something in person, an intimacy, all else being completely equal (involving intent, surrounding circumstances, ends, etc.).
However, if we add in context, agreed, this starts making a difference for moral culpability. If you tweak the parameters to get the case that BOTH the bomber, and butcher want to see maximum horror and death, they are about equal in regards to moral culpability.
Where we probably disagree is consequences versus intent, however. For example, if the US bombed a Nazi armaments plant in the middle of Hamburg, Germany, intending to just destroy the facility, but kills 100 civilians, that is not the same as a group of Nazis lining up 100 civilians and shooting them in the heads, shoving them in a ditch and burying the bodies.
And indeed, I anticipate the move here regarding the earlier point about intimacy and false sense of harm. Because Nazis then moved to "manufactured" forms of killing that removed more of the in person aspect of the wholesale killing. But this would then certainly be a false equivalence and actually addressing the wrong point I was making regarding the context of intent. Rather, the WHOLE POINT of what the Nazis were doing was to torture, work-to-death, and kill groups of people. The killing was an END IN ITSELF! Thus the means became even more perverse because it wasn't a case of "pursuing an enemy combatant but collateral damage then occurred" it literally was to round up as many civilians as possible and torture, work-to-death, and kill them in wholesale ways. Obviously an evil there. And the ends DOES matter. The INTENT DOES matter.
Ireland stayed neutral during WW2, because of their ongoing tensions with the British. This doesn't mean that Irish citizens didn't see the good in the defeat of the Nazis, even if it means a "win" for the British. I think any sane person can agree the Nazis defeated is not only a good thing, but an absolute necessity for the world to not be overrun by a murderous/evil regime. It may have meant, even the hated enemy "the British" may have had to make hard moral decisions during wartime in regards to how to deal with combating a regime doing harm to them and the world in general.
So then we can move the dilemma even more starkly. What if to defeat the Nazis, and to prevent them from continuing their murderous ends, you had to bombard various cities? What if this was unknown as to whether bombing the cities in round-the-clock bombings were actually working to stop the Nazi regime or not? Was it bombing targets that were legitimate? Was it really breaking the will of the people to support the Nazis? Is it effective? How far do you go in stopping a regime with murderous ends? That is a good question, and there can be arguments (like Dresden) that the Allies went too far or were simply doing it from a place of outright revenge.
If for example, there were two scenarios:
Scenario A) 100 peaceful Buddhist civilians were getting bombed and killed in Tibet, because China wanted to take out various peaceful, non-violent Tibetan Buddhist leaders who were also the recognized governing body of Tibet and were also hiding amongst their civilian population,
or
Scenario B) the Chinese killed 100 Tibetan civilians, and let's say, China wanted to take out various Tibetan Buddhist leaders who were hiding amongst their civilians, that mercilessly butchered, burned, maimed, and raped various Chinese neighboring citizens, and it was not just once, but ongoing for years, with also the added component that these Buddhist leaders were the governing body of Tibet, and were also funneling money into suicide bombers, to convince them they will reach Nirvana sooner if they blow themselves up to kill maximum amounts of Chinese...is there a possible component for justification for the Chinese response to Scenario B that is not present in Scenario A?
I think that these questions are essentially handled in this post so let's move forward from here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/849346
:up: Will come back to this tomorrow. Thanks.
This is such an important point, and it runs right through all of this to the very bottom. Incidentally, this is the moral import of killing babies: it is gratuitous evil. It is murder of the innocent taken to its most extreme form.
(NB: I have read the entire exchange between @schopenhauer1 and @Baden)
---
Quoting Baden
Quoting Baden
Your core point here is correct. For example, Aquinas says, "For what is always or frequently joined to the effect falls under the intention itself. For it is stupid to say that someone intends something but does not will that which is always or frequently joined to it" (Commentary on the Physics, II.8). The problem is that undue inferences are being drawn from this true premise.
The first thing to note is that there is a relevant moral difference between someone who is mitigating evil side effects as far as possible, and someone who is not (or who is intentionally exacerbating these evil side effects). I don't think this is controversial.
The second thing to note is that the descriptions of the OP bear on this point. For example, "The flight is done at night to minimize civilian casualties." This is different from throwing a baseball at a window without "wanting" to break it. The implication is that the moral actor deliberately chose an alternative act because it would minimize evil side effects, namely by bombing when the factory was closed rather than bombing when the factory was open. A morally inferior agent would have either ignored this deliberation, or else deliberately bombed during the day so as to maximize civilian casualties.
Now someone might say, "Well he bombed at night even though he knew civilians would die, therefore he intended to kill civilians." The cogent point here is that even if we grant this claim, the night-bomber is still morally superior to the day-bomber, because he did not intend (in the objector's sense) to kill the more numerous daytime workers. This is not splitting hairs. It is a real and important moral difference.
(Elizabeth Anscombe wrote diligently on this question of intention and "double effect" throughout her life. One instance <came up recently>.)
Good point. I dont have much to add to that except one can still try to go back to why bomb at all and I think thats where my analogy in the last post (see below) regarding Allied response to Nazi aggression and the hypothetical Chinese/Tibetan scenarios elucidate various ends and means in context:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/849346
Right - the corollary here is that morality is not an all-or-nothing affair. The pacifist can claim that all bombing is wrong, but no one is rationally justified in claiming that the night bomber and the day bomber are moral equals. Even if all bombing is wrong, it cannot be denied that some bombings are worse than others.
I should reiterate that I think @Baden's earlier points against RogueAI were decisive. There is no such thing as a moral judgment that does not work from limited information (link). We assess moral situations based on the information at hand, and if we discover new information the moral judgment may change. ...but this is a larger and more unwieldy topic.
Granted, which is why I answered to my best for that limited part of the debate and it was tacitly recognized that we were moving to a new category? whereby an enlarged context is taken into consideration regarding the moral dilemma being discussed.
They both intend to destroy designated targets. They know their weapons kill. They know that collateral civilian damage (schools, weddings, etc) invariably occurs in bombing raids. Not only are the bomber crews moral equals, the same ones do both, as decided by commanding officers. Infantry does it across a ditch with guns, or up close, with bayonets.
It seems that everyone accepts without question the moral blamelessness of killing soldiers and munitions workers (even if they don't work night shift, they're housed nearby, with or without their families.) Soldiers are just as human as civilians and civilians can be terrorists, spies or resistance fighters without uniform. Some combatants a kick out of killing; some do it as a duty; some go mad and do it out of that irrational, uncontrollable hatred some human develop for their victims. You see it among chicken-wranglers, too.
If babies get killed - well, like the helicopter pilot said, "Well it's their fault for bringing kids in to a battle," The babies don't go into the war zone; the war comes to them. There is no very high moral ground in the profession of killing.
To be frank, you should know that as a rule I am not going to respond to you, and this post exemplifies the reason why. With limited time, I am forced to limit my energies to the users that I deem more cogent. Hopefully this information is useful to you and helps adjust your expectations.
And I'm suitably grateful.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
This gives side B a reason for their actions, whereas there was no reason given for A's actions. So to make A & B equivalent either we remove that reason OR we give A a possible reason as well.
:100:
Quoting ssu
That is fascinating. I did not know that 4 Finnish Jews were offered the iron cross by Germany but rejected it. You learn something new everyday.
So, if bombers can destroy a military target from the safety of the sky, they can properly weigh their objective (the eliminatation of the target) against their personal risk of injury against the loss of their enemies' life. That is, it is proper to place one's own safety above one's enemy and it is one's duty to protect one's own people. That is what militaries do. A bomber is therefore not ethically bound to put boots on the ground and go in with an axe in order to achieve his objective even if the result would be to reduce the deaths of opposing civilians if it will (1) place the bomber-turned-axe-wielder at greater personal risk than he'd be in a plane or (2) reduce the efficancy of his campaign to protect his own citizens. I'm assuming the longer the enemy target exists, the more danger is posed.
That is, if the bomber can make his home more safe and not expose himself to great risk, he ethically should bomb and not axe folks.
Supposing one does choose to go at it with an axe, perhaps because an axe is all he has, it would be unethical to axe murder any person unnecessary to achieve their objective in eliminating a target. To the extent a civilian interferes in the axeman's objective, he might rightfully be axed, but then that interferer is hardly just a civilian, but he's now a combatant. An axe wielder in this scenario is particularly unethical if (1) he axes a civilian not in the furtherance of a military objective or (2) his axing has no reasonable way of doing anything militarily, but it is instead just an attempt to evoke terror on the part of the enemy citizenry.
What then might someone do who has only rocks and sticks against an enemy with precision missles? There's not much he can do, but that he's weak doesn't change his moral obligations. If it did, we might just say he can morally butcher, rape, and drag off old ladies as hostages.
Anything is equivalent if you have reason enough to legitimise it in your own head. Hence, the futility of adding weight to judgement from afar.
More often than not if we were in their shoes we would almost certainly behave in a similar manner. This is regardless of the comforting lie we tell ourselves about our moral superiority.
Except you a monster then you have an iota of a chance you can placate yourself to act in a less monstrous fashion when life comes to taunt, poke, prod and provoke you (which it will!).
And yet the act of humaneness is especially needed the most in a war. The killing fields is especially where you shouldn't forget basic humanity, even if you have a task to do.
(A Navy corpsman helps an Iraqi soldier wounded by American gunfire in 2003.)
It's plausible that if the worlds population was somehow reduced to just a few city blocks of seemingly similar residents, thered eventually be some form of notable inter-neighborhood hostilities.
Still, from within ourselves we, as individuals, can resist flawed yet normalized human/societal nature thus behavior.
Still, from within ourselves we, as individuals, can resist flawed yet normalized human/societal nature thus behavior. Perhaps relevant to this are the words of sociologist Stanley Milgram [of Obedience Experiments fame/infamy]: It may be that we are puppets puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation.