That’s irrelevant. Of course you can always cherry-pick people whom some event made worse off. The question was whether the war made the country better as a whole, not whether any individuals suffered.
Actually, what you consider and what you don’t in this sort of calculation is an interesting question.
Was a particular country better off? Did it work out differently in different regions? How about the whole world?
Getting back to the US, was there a cost to the belief that war is good for the economy? Was there a cost to smugness from winning the Civil War and being on the winning side in WWI and WWII?
You’re getting into much deeper water here. “What does it mean that some scenario is good/better/best?” is the ultimate, fundamental value judgment.
Giving a thorough answer to that question goes a long way towards explaining/understanding yourself, and it’s an exercise everybody should do as soon and as often as possible, even though it is by no means easy or quick.
There’s no way I’m putting it down in a comment, unfortunately—if I do go through the effort of writing down my moral system in a linear form that is understandable to other people, it’ll be a several-pages-long essay (possibly a LW post, though). Step zero, for what it’s worth, starts with asking “why do I want X?”, and recursing that question until you hit an answer you can neither question (without questioning reality itself) nor alter.
That’s irrelevant. Of course you can always cherry-pick people whom some event made worse off. The question was whether the war made the country better as a whole, not whether any individuals suffered.
Actually, what you consider and what you don’t in this sort of calculation is an interesting question.
Was a particular country better off? Did it work out differently in different regions? How about the whole world?
Getting back to the US, was there a cost to the belief that war is good for the economy? Was there a cost to smugness from winning the Civil War and being on the winning side in WWI and WWII?
You’re getting into much deeper water here. “What does it mean that some scenario is good/better/best?” is the ultimate, fundamental value judgment.
Giving a thorough answer to that question goes a long way towards explaining/understanding yourself, and it’s an exercise everybody should do as soon and as often as possible, even though it is by no means easy or quick.
This sounds as though you’ve worked with that question yourself. What have you learned from it?
There’s no way I’m putting it down in a comment, unfortunately—if I do go through the effort of writing down my moral system in a linear form that is understandable to other people, it’ll be a several-pages-long essay (possibly a LW post, though). Step zero, for what it’s worth, starts with asking “why do I want X?”, and recursing that question until you hit an answer you can neither question (without questioning reality itself) nor alter.