Comments Elsewhere

As I mentioned in the original post, I’m more interested in the meta-ethical issue here than the political one — not because the political one isn’t important, but rather because you need to be clear on what you’re arguing over if the argument is going to make any sense. (So accusations that Jacob was indulging in “moral relativism” are misplaced, because what he was actually arguing was precisely the opposite. The actual disagreement was either (a) over the general ethical principles that he was employing, or (b) his understanding of the specific historical case to which he was applying those principles; pretending as if he were indulging in relativism, and giving up on objective ethical principles entirely, just clouds the issue in a particularly inane way.)

However, a couple of notes.

Faré: “(1) 9/11 was not a military target at all, it had no military purpose whatsoever.”

You may be forgetting that there were actually two different targets attacked on September 11th. One, the World Trade Center, was clearly not a military target. Another, the Pentagon, clearly was a military target. (Also, of course, the attacks killed a few hundred civilians on the hijacked airplanes.) Complaints against the deliberate killing of civilians in the course of striking “non-military” targets apply to the attacks on the World Trade Center, but they don’t apply to “9/11” in general. (Of course, there may be other reasons to condemn the attack on the Pentagon while not condemning the incineration of Hiroshima. But distinctions between “military” and “non-military” targets won’t cut that ice.)

Dave: “I guess what I really object to is the finger pointing school of history where various people glean the record for ‘facts’, usually taken out of context which they then use to mislead the innocent, ignorant and score points in a debate which has nothing to do with the historical subject in question. This usually takes the form of apple and oranges comparisons such as ‘Well, how can you Americans be so indignant about up about the Nazi’s taking over Poland, Ha!, the Americans took over the Indian’s land.’ You can play that game ad nauseaum. On that basis we had no moral right to oppose the Nazi’s.”

I’m not sure at all why comparing Hitler’s war of conquest, and willingness to engage in ethnic cleansing and genocide, to the American government’s repeated wars of conquest, and willingness to engage repeatedly in ethnic cleansing and genocide against several different Indian nations over a period of a century or so, is an “apples and oranges comparison”—particularly when Hitler explicitly cited the treatment of Indians in the American West as a model for his own campaign for Lebensraum. But whether the comparison is a just one or an unjust one, I must say that I’m mystified by the claim that such comparisons issue in the claim that “we had no moral right to oppose the Nazis”. According to whom? All that follows if the American government’s treatment of Cherokees, Creeks, Sioux, Apache, etc. was morally comparable to Hitler’s treatment of Jews, Poles, Czechs, Romani, etc., then you can’t excuse one and condemn the other — they have to either both be condemned or both be excused. It doesn’t follow that the American government (far less individual American citizens) didn’t have the right to condemn the Nazis, nor does it follow that they didn’t have the right to use force to oppose them. It just means that if they are going to condemn them and advocate resistence, then they ought also condemn the American government’s comparable actions, and to endorse the Indians’ right to resist then. Consistency is the key here.

Now you might object they’re not really comparable. Fine, but then you ought to give an argument for why they’re not really comparable. Knocking down a strawman position that allegedly undermines just condemnation of, or forcible resistence to, Nazism, or Islamist terrorism, or whatever it is you happen to be concerned with at the moment, is just a distraction from the real argument.

Tom: “Not all objectives are morally equal. Killing the infidel because he’s an infidel is different than — and inferior to — defeating Japan because it posed a military threat to the U.S.”

(1) Tokyo was firebombed in March, 1945 and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were incinerated in August of the same year. Do you seriously intend to claim that Japan posed a substantial military threat to the United States in March – August 1945? If so, what in the world do you think they were about to do? If not, why do you claim that the “objective” of the bombings was to defeat a military threat to the U.S.?

(2) Micha actually nowhere claimed that all objectives are morally equal. (Even if he did, that would not be moral relativism either; it would be moral nihilism. Relativists don’t claim that no objective is better than any other; what they claim is that the question of whether one objective is morally better than another always has to be answered relative to someone’s frame of reference, and that the correct judgments can differ for different people.) All he claimed is that Truman and bin Laden are in the same moral position as far as means are concerned: if noble ends could justify Truman’s means (whether or not Truman’s ends actually were noble), then noble ends could just as easily justify bin Laden’s means (whether or not bin Laden’s ends actually were noble). And if the ends couldn’t justify bin Laden’s means, then they couldn’t justify Truman’s either. The point of raising this point is that a lot of people think that no possible end, no matter how noble or ignoble, could justify bin Laden’s means. But if they want to say that, they had better be willing to say the same thing about Truman too — and accept the logical consequences that follow.