R U Kidding, it seems to me that you are not serious and I mostly don’t want to reply to you. However, you have said some things that look like they could lead to interesting conversation among actual commenters.
But the point of my post is that no one can calculate the ramifications of actions, or inactions. Did Hiroshima/Nagasaki cost lives, or save them? That’s one of the clearest examples of “saving by killing” I can imagine, and I mean saving Japanese lives as well as American lives. Yet many auto-condemn the bombings. And they might be right. None of us can ever know.
The biggest reason this is confusing is that when we look at consequences of our actions, we want to choose some alternative to compare against.
So to argue that we “saved lives” by nuking japan, the argument is basicly “If we hadn’t nuked japan we would have done something even more stupid and even more murderous. Compared to the only alternative, nuking japan was better.”
I say this is a stupid argument. If you choose the “only alternative” carefully you can argue that anything which has survivors has saved lives. For example, imagine we nuked the USSR in 1987 or so, destroying most of the russian nukes along with 85% of the population of the USSR. But they hit us back with 20 remaining missiles, killing 15% of the US population. The argument could be made, “The USSR was inevitably going to attack us and kill most of our population, and our second-strike capability would hit them just as hard; maybe everybody in the world would die from the radiation. So by killing hundreds of millions of people and getting 45 million americans killed, we saved lives.” We know now that the USSR didn’t attack us and nobody seems to be particularly worried that russia will do so in the foreseeable future. But if we’d made that first strike we wouldn’t know that. You could argue that the only alternative was a bigger nuclear war, and there would be no proof you were wrong.
Is there any value in such comparisons? Sometimes we’re choosing what to do. Then we need to accept our limitations, and choose the best plan we can actually choose. If there’s a better way available but we aren’t good enough people to try it, then that plan is no good. Choose the best plan you can actually carry out.
But sometimes we’re arguing about how good we did in the past. And in that context we should compare against the best plan available to us, whether we were psychologically ready to try it or not.
When we’re arguing about how good we are, it’s stupid to count up the number of people we killed against the number of people the bad guys would have killed. The bad guys kill innocent people—they’re bad guys, that’s what they do. If we go into competition with them to kill innocent people and we don’t kill as many, that means we’re bad guys too, just not as bad as they are. If we think we’re killing a lot of people to stop them from killing even more, and the result is that we kill more people than they do, now who’s the bad guys? We are. We only assumed they’d kill more.
These are all “the ends justify the means” arguments. “If we didn’t kill those innocent people the enemy would have killed even more.” Even worse, “If we didn’t do it, somebody else would.” Imagine the crimes you can justify with that argument!
Here’s my moral argument. When you do something bad, and you argue that you had to do it to keep somebody else from doing something worse, or you argue that nobody knows what the hell would have happened otherwise so there’s no way to tell how bad it was etc—when you find yourself looking for such sophistries to justify your actions—you’re doing something bad.
R U Kidding, it seems to me that you are not serious and I mostly don’t want to reply to you. However, you have said some things that look like they could lead to interesting conversation among actual commenters.
But the point of my post is that no one can calculate the ramifications of actions, or inactions. Did Hiroshima/Nagasaki cost lives, or save them? That’s one of the clearest examples of “saving by killing” I can imagine, and I mean saving Japanese lives as well as American lives. Yet many auto-condemn the bombings. And they might be right. None of us can ever know.
The biggest reason this is confusing is that when we look at consequences of our actions, we want to choose some alternative to compare against.
So to argue that we “saved lives” by nuking japan, the argument is basicly “If we hadn’t nuked japan we would have done something even more stupid and even more murderous. Compared to the only alternative, nuking japan was better.”
I say this is a stupid argument. If you choose the “only alternative” carefully you can argue that anything which has survivors has saved lives. For example, imagine we nuked the USSR in 1987 or so, destroying most of the russian nukes along with 85% of the population of the USSR. But they hit us back with 20 remaining missiles, killing 15% of the US population. The argument could be made, “The USSR was inevitably going to attack us and kill most of our population, and our second-strike capability would hit them just as hard; maybe everybody in the world would die from the radiation. So by killing hundreds of millions of people and getting 45 million americans killed, we saved lives.” We know now that the USSR didn’t attack us and nobody seems to be particularly worried that russia will do so in the foreseeable future. But if we’d made that first strike we wouldn’t know that. You could argue that the only alternative was a bigger nuclear war, and there would be no proof you were wrong.
Is there any value in such comparisons? Sometimes we’re choosing what to do. Then we need to accept our limitations, and choose the best plan we can actually choose. If there’s a better way available but we aren’t good enough people to try it, then that plan is no good. Choose the best plan you can actually carry out.
But sometimes we’re arguing about how good we did in the past. And in that context we should compare against the best plan available to us, whether we were psychologically ready to try it or not.
When we’re arguing about how good we are, it’s stupid to count up the number of people we killed against the number of people the bad guys would have killed. The bad guys kill innocent people—they’re bad guys, that’s what they do. If we go into competition with them to kill innocent people and we don’t kill as many, that means we’re bad guys too, just not as bad as they are. If we think we’re killing a lot of people to stop them from killing even more, and the result is that we kill more people than they do, now who’s the bad guys? We are. We only assumed they’d kill more.
These are all “the ends justify the means” arguments. “If we didn’t kill those innocent people the enemy would have killed even more.” Even worse, “If we didn’t do it, somebody else would.” Imagine the crimes you can justify with that argument!
Here’s my moral argument. When you do something bad, and you argue that you had to do it to keep somebody else from doing something worse, or you argue that nobody knows what the hell would have happened otherwise so there’s no way to tell how bad it was etc—when you find yourself looking for such sophistries to justify your actions—you’re doing something bad.