Kamikazes

No, completely unacceptable. By claiming that the suicide bombers have some kind of historical analogue, you suggest that they are not, in fact, the greatest threat to human life and liberty in the history of the solar system, and that 9/11 did not, in fact, Change Everything.

And we can’t have that.

The French sure do call them ‘kamikazes’, I heard it many times; but that’s just a word, I don’t think they imply any significant connection with 1945 Japanese pilots.

Hey, I know who Guy Faulkes was – I watched V for Vengeance. But I got the impression that he was some kind of hero.

The reason civilians are targetted by suicide bombers is also wholly rational: it’s easier to attack civilians than military installations.

That rationality only gets you so far – it works if your goal is simply to perform the attack, but not if there is an ‘in order to’ implicitly following.

Brendan, human waves in Vietnam and Iran-Iraq war, Japanese pilots, Crusades and so on – they all represent organized military campaigns.

Not so much the 9/11 incident, where, if I understand correctly, it was just pretty much this guy Atta who got seriously pissed off – as an individual – and organized the whole thing with a bunch of friends. More or less a private affair. Same it true, as I understand, for most Palestinian bombers, they are seeking personal revenge most of the time.

I think there must be a difference between brainwashed Soviet soldier sent to blow up himself under a German tank – he is a part of the system – and a freelancer like Atta.

“The Kamikaze were warriors. The September 11 killers were vicious madmen.”

All them old-fashioned rules and morals and conventions of war have been overturned by Executive Orders and the signing statements of the Decider. Tho only I guess for the Good Guys.

Suicide bombers? Homicide bombers?

In Finland, I’m told, they’re called suomicide bombers . .. .

While you may feel free to call the 9/11 participants madmen that is not the relevent question.

The relevent question is what they thought of themselves and while I do not know, I suspect they thought of themselves as warriors.

“While you may feel free to call the 9/11 participants madmen that is not the relevent question.”

I do consider it a relevant question, and I do think it is important to distinguish between military and civilian targets, and to appreciate the absolute and irreplacable value of the conventions and treaties that established a minimal level of int’l human rights.

Unfortunately, the present administration and those that grant them support have either nullified such distinctions or are in admitted violation of them, creating an amoral equality to Bush and Mohammed Atta. The rest of us can re-establish our imperiled civilization not by re-asserting the conventions of war when it is convenient, that is after Bushco has left office with retroactive immunity; but by paying the very heavy price for our outlaw years by insisting on accountability for those individuals, and ensuring our memebership in the community of nations by insisting that Bushco be tried in an objective court without American participation.

The price will be heavy indeed, likely involving the death of many Americans. But without that sacrifice, any future lip-service given to the rule of law will justly be seen as hypocritical and provisional, and should be ignored and disregarded by both our friends and enemies.

Iran and NK should not talk to America. We can’t be tructed.

Lot of emotional responses here. As long as we simply dismiss them in such a visceral way, we will never understand why people do things like this. And no, I’m not excusing them. I shouldn’t have even had to write that last sentence, goddammit.

I hate to break it to those who speak of “warriors”, but even many warriors will admit that war turns them into “vicious madmen”.

abb1 writes: “I agree with ‘madmen’, as in ‘criminally insane’, not capable of distinguishing right from wrong.”

Oh, they could distinguish right from wrong, they just held different definitions of them than we do.

The fact of the matter is that there are myriad moral compasses. On some, “gay marriage” is in the “wrong” direction. On some, “gay marriage” is in the “right” direction. On some, “torture” is in the “wrong” direction. On some, “torture” is in the “right” direction.

I’m guessing many Iraqis think Bush doesn’t know right from wrong, otherwise he wouldn’t have done that to their country. Bush, on the other hand, is certain he knows what’s right and what is wrong.

Just last week an important and respected American, William Perry, advocated a pre-emptive attack on North Korea. Considering the record of the last few years, and that no American Government is likely to be able to accept the South Korean and Japanese casualties that a full war with North Korea would entail, I think North Korea’s best response if they have a nuke, is to use it immediately against an American city. Certainly any kind of mutual non-aggression pact would be a joke. Ask Saddam. The same logic applies for Iran. The only way Iran can keep from being attacked is a pre-emption.

Those who launch pre-emptive illegal wars will reap what they have sown.

Bob McManus- I am a little confused as to what line you’re pushing here. Do you mean North Korea’s best response to a pre-emptive attack on the US would be to nuke a US city if possible? In that circumstance I’m pretty sure any American government would accept whatever casualties that would be necessary to demilitarize North Korea. The idea of pre-emption is that it prevents a counter-attack.

I can appreciate anger/frustration w/ the Bush admin and maybe I should be reading this as an attempt to criticize Perry’s plan. If you’re trying to convince this audience that recent US policy has negative consequences, well, sure, I agree. And part of that is that it makes it more difficult for any party to engage the US in good faith. But arguing that nuclear pre-emption is logical for Iran or N. Korea… it sounds like trolling to me.

Lot of emotional responses here. As long as we simply dismiss them in such a visceral way, we will never understand why people do things like this.

I don’t think it’s particularly interesting at all to ask why people do things like this. In fact, I take it for granted that huge numbers of people–pretty much all the military, police or firefighting personnel on the planet, for instance–demonstrate every day their willingness to sacrifice themselves, if necessary, for the sake of what they regard as a noble cause. The psychology involved here is as interesting as any other kind of normal psychology, I suppose, but it doesn’t serve as a meaningful link between the 9/11 hijackers and Japanese Kamikazes, any more than does the fact that they both almost certainly had strong preferences for certain types of food over certain other types.

On the other hand, the morality of the 9/11 hijackers and kamikaze pilots makes for a far more interesting comparison. The moral behavior of kamikaze pilots was, even by today’s standards, not all that abnormal. They were targeting uniformed military personnel in wartime, and while the regime for which they fought was monstrous, it is hardly uncommon for people to fight for their country in wartime, even under the command of a morally reprehensible government. The 9/11 hijackers, on the other hand, slaughtered thousands of innocent civilians–something that is, by today’s standards, far from normal even in places with morally less-than-unblemished governments.

Those who insist on giving primacy of place to these killers’ internal mental states, rather than the morality of their actions, are implicitly minimizing the moral significance of those actions, and thus demonstrating a shocking degree of moral callousness. One is reminded of Stockhausen’s analysis of 9/11 as an “artwork”–one can, of course, analyze it that way, but only by implicitly belittling the enormity of its atrocity. Likewise, one can consider 9/11 as a study in terrorist psychology–but only by ignoring, and thus implicitly dismissing, its moral dimension.

(By the way, what’s wrong with comparing Osama bin Laden with Che Guevara? Both were totalitarians who glorified mass violence in the name of a martially messianist creed. We can only hope that bin Laden meets the same ignominious fate.)

Is this a new or controversial thing? I have heard the term “kamikaze” used any number of times to describe 9/11. Google seems to confirm this. Not to make a historical analogy per se, but that’s just what I thought it was called when you suicidally use a plane as a missile.

Dan wrote

“The 9/11 hijackers, on the other hand, slaughtered thousands of innocent civilians—something that is, by today’s standards, far from normal even in places with morally less-than-unblemished governments.”

Explicit goals apart, I see no more consideration for innocent civilians from the Bush administration than was shown by the hijackers. The civilians who continue to die don’t really generate a lot of outrage on their behalf, other than the odd Haditha. So whose standards are we talking about?

I can’t see at all where Dyson is “giving primacy of place to these killers’ internal mental states, rather than the morality of their actions.

You can’t? The entirety of your quote from Dyson dwelt on the killers’ internal mental states, and scarcely a word of it dealt with the morality of their actions.

He seems to me, rather, to be asking the question: once you have expressed the appropriate moral condemnation, what do you do about it?

Actually, most people don’t have a lot of trouble answering that question in the abstract (although opinions might well differ on the specifics). Normally, “once you have expressed the appropriate moral condemnation” of an act of horrific monstrosity, you proceed to punishment of the offender and deterrence of other potential offenders. How to accomplish that is merely a matter of tactics. (Psychological study, for example, may or may not be a useful tool to that end.)

Only if one had decided in advance to dismiss the moral dimension of the issue, and treat it instead as a purely psychological matter, would one look first to the internal psychological states of the killers for the answer to the question of how to stop them.

john h (comment currently showing as #23) writes, “Natalie, were the Japanese soldiers who slaughtered and raped civilians in Nanking (and the rest of Asia) “warriors” or”vicious madmen”?

War criminals. I gather the atrocities were carried out over weeks at many different locations and by Japanese soldiers of all ranks, so it seems odd to refer to madness. The general climate of savagery in the Japanese army might be a mitigating circumstance when considering the guilt of individuals.

I don’t want to get hung up on whether warriors cease to be warriors when they become war criminals.

In contrast the kamikaze attacks were not a crime at all, although the cause that launched them was bad. Jus in bello but not jus ad bellam.

Did you think I wished to defend Japanese conduct in their wars of the nineteen-thirties and forties?

On the questions of madness raised by Steven Poole, abb1 and others, there is a great deal here to discuss. I don’t think the discussion would split down ideological lines either. To some extent I was echoing the original wording of the post when I called them madmen. I don’t want to get too hung up on that either – my opinions are much firmer on the “vicious” part. Some of them may well have been certifiably mad in the way that a psychiatrist could diagnose but in general their madness was the madness of a cult. Were those who committed mass suicide at Jonestown in Guyana mad? I’d say yes, but in a particular way associated with tight-knit groups.

And, as several other commenters have said, that is a very different dynamic from the one operating in Imperial Japan.

My main interest in this is morality, not madness.

Assuming that Kamikaze pilots are not ‘guilty of anything’ may be true in that the relevant framework of international law had not been clearly set out by the time they committed their acts. But if something similar happened now, it would certainly be a crime. The problem is not the act, the problem is the context. Germany and Japan both, with no provocation, attacked other sovereign states that posed no threat to them. ‘ Soldiers, as well as heads of state, (are) liable for “crimes against peace” (planning, preparing, initiating or waging a war of aggression or conspiring to do so), war crimes (violating “the laws or customs” of war) and crimes against humanity. A key phrase (of the Geneva convention) reads: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relive him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”‘

Your defence of the Kamikaze pilots only holds to the ones who were, in fact, coerced or threatened with death or serious sanction if they did not ‘sing up’. The rest of the Japanese army were guilty as well.

In terms of the ‘mad’ question, if one wants to say Mohammed Atta was ‘mad’ in the same sense Hitler or Stalin were ‘mad’ then fair enough. But I got the impression that some people were arguing that if a trained psychiatrist had interviewed Atta (and the others) before 9/11 they would genuinely have been diagnosed as suffering from psychiatric illnesses. They wouldn’t have been.

Dan, I’m not sure you seriously mean what imply. How do you evaluate the morality of acts without taking mental states into account? Otherwise, it’s the same to kill someone in a car accident as it is to kill them by intent. The 9/11 bombers killed some 3,000 people. Without taking their intentions into account – a wholly mental property – their acts are less morally objectionable than those of a company that sells a lots of cigarettes or beer and thereby kills far more people.

As for Aki Nawaz and G-had, have you considered the theory that his music is part of a brilliant MI6 plot to turn Osama ben Laden into a figure of no more significance than Che Guevara? There’s nothing that will kill an ideological force better than to be adopted by a bunch of poseurs and wannabes. Where’s Che now? When was the last time that Latin American revolutionary socialism blew anything up? Does anyone really worry that Cuba might get the bomb? No. Yet, Che is celebrated in song and t-shirt. Perhaps if Al Qaeda’s cause were adopted by some comparably useless bunch of middle class fakes, it might go the same way.

How do you evaluate the morality of acts without taking mental states into account?

Obviously, you don’t. However, one doesn’t need to delve into psychology in order to assess goals and intentions–jurors, for example, do it all the time, with no technical help from psychologists.

Again, to reduce the issue of, say, a 9/11 hijacker’s intentions to psychology, treating him solely as the product of various psychological and/or social influences and processes, is to ignore the moral dimension of the act, by implicitly denying his moral agency. Perhaps just as important, it also thereby insultingly downplays the moral agency of the rest of us, who chose not to commit the same evil act.

It’s surely far less barbaric than dan simon’s “deterrence” – ie collective punishment as currently practiced in the occupied territories.

I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. I certainly don’t endorse collective punishment, I’m not at all certain it’s an effective deterrent, and I don’t know of any instance of it currently, or even recently, being employed in the occupied territories.

Then and now, what really motivated the hatred was not religion itself (though then and now it was often expressed in those terms) but imperialism.

Hey, this is a fun game–let me try! “What really motivates your anti-Israel statements is not anti-imperialism (though it’s often expressed in those terms) but anti-Semitism”.

Or is there something inherently worse about attributing evil motives to someone, when the evidence strongly suggests otherwise, compared with attributing benign motives to someone, when the evidence strongly suggests otherwise?

Brendan wrote:

“The idea that civilians (including women
and children) are fair game for bombers
was of course developed by the Allies
in World War 2.”

Brendan, OF COURSE, you are wrong :-}

Your “knowledge” is showing it’s typical
large gaps.

W/R/T WWII, do some research on the Nazi
terror bombing of the dutch city Rotterdam.

Or, if you have the time for a longer history, check out a copy of “Air Power” by Stephen
Budiansky.

It it you will find, for example , that the
Germans used Zeppelins in WWI to bomb London.

You wanna try again on who developed that
idea?

But like collective punishment (also, of course, tried by the British) it didn’t work – it just added to resentment and hence terrorist recruitment.

Make sense. People snap because of grief and humiliation, so more humiliation is hardly a solution.

‘“The idea that civilians (including women and children) are fair game for bombers was of course developed by the Allies in World War 2.’

Gee thanks guys, give me the benefit of the doubt why don’t you. OF COURSE I know that the allies didn’t ORIGINATE that kind of tactic or I would have said so (civilians have always been killed in wars, although not, of course, always by aerial bombardment). And yes the Germans began it. But the Allies developed it way beyond anything the Axis powers had imagined. It was not New York and Los Angeles that were anninhilated by the Japanese: it was Tokyo Nagasaki and Hiroshima that were anninhilated by the Allies. Likewise: the Blitz was bad, but it wasn’t anything near as bad as the wholesale destruction of, Dresden or Hamburg.

A quick internet search shows that ‘developed’ means ‘being changed over time so as to be e.g. stronger or more complete or more useful’ (or more effective in this case). Which is true. Aerial bombardment of civilians was originated by the Axis but ‘improved’ by the Allies. It was later developed further in Vietnam and (especially) Laos.

I hate all those new or pc names, most of them less accurate than the original suicide-bomber.

Of them, though, my favorite is drawn from how similar crimes are reported in the states: the “Murder-Suicide Bomber”. Then there’s the “Attempted Murder-Suicide Bomber”. And, “An Attempted Murder-Suicide Bomber succeded in killing only himself. He did , however, manage to injur serval bystanders”.

Dan, I think you’re putting forward an excessively simplistic notion of morality. Courts and juries do delve into psychology and mental state in assessing goals and actions. That’s part of their legal responsibility. Killing a guy in a barfight is an action whose moral quality follows directly from the mental states of the participants. Did the killer pick the fight, or did it happen because of a dispute that, had people been less drunk, would probably not have led to violence? Juries assess very different punishments, and assess very different levels of moral failure, depending on exactly those psychological circumstances.

Very few people set out to willingly do evil. They have their own justifications, and their circumstances play a determining role in their choices of action. Moral judgments, especially in courts, are judgments of the relative acceptability of those justifications. To judge a person and their actions is necessarily to judge the person’s psychology and social circumstances, because people simply do not exist apart from the conditions of their existence or the content of their brains. Moral judgment is not some independent assessment of the nature of some act.

Why should political violence be judged differently? We can’t condemn the 9/11 bombers simply because their goal and intent was to kill a lot of people, otherwise we’d have to bring the same judgment to bear on USAF bomber pilots.

No, I think this idea that everyone who writes about the 9/11 bombers or other terrorists must focus first and principally on its condemnation as evil – I think that’s basically wrong. The point is not to deny them moral agency. The 9/11 bombers almost certainly believed that they had moral agency and that what they were doing was right. To judge them is most certainly to judge their reasons for taking the actions they took, and those are very much a matter of psychology and circumstance.

abb1: JERUSALEM —Burying Palestinian suicide bombers with pig skin or pig blood could deter potential attackers, an Israeli official says.

Not sure what is more barbaric here – crime or punishment.

(heavily sarcastic Eric Cartman voice) Yes, it’s a real puzzle. Which could be marginally more barbaric than the other? Dismembering civilians on a bus – breaking local burial customs. Dismembering civilians – breaking burial customs. Hmm.

Seems pretty well 50-50 to me, right enough…

‘brendan- in your #7 you seem to be arguing that killing innocent civilians in suicide attacks cannot be criticised from western point of view because that would involve double standards ( allies bombing ) but what about criticising it from a point of view that is critical of allied bombing . A.C. Grayling who thinks that allies were guilty of crimes against humanity ( Dresden ) ?’

That is absolutely my point. Make no mistake I am not apologising for or excusing the 9/11 atrocities.

Incidentally, the idea that the aim of the 9/11 attacks was to ‘kill as many people as possible’ might have a certain amount of truth in it as far as the Twin Towers attack goes, but of course, the other two targets were the Pentagon and Congress….if you perceive that you are at war with the United States, both of those are conceivably, ‘legitimate targets’ (i.e. from Bin Laden’s point of view….I ain’t defending or explaining anything, to repeat). According to this site the CIA had a major office in 7 World Trade Centre, although of course whether Bin Laden knew that is a whole other ball game.

Dismembering civilians on a bus – breaking local burial customs.

Ajay, if you insist on calling it breaking local burial customs, then why not re-phrase your “dismembering civilians on a bus” as, say, ‘breaking public transportation rules’ or something?

And if this is just “breaking local burial customs”, then why bother breaking these customs anyway?

Oh great. Another thread where zdenek accuses everybody of “moral relativism” and tries to turn it into a Sokal-lite denunciation of the Post-Modernist Left. It might save everyone a lot of time, zdenek, if you were to continue this particular argument with the little Jacques Derrida in your head and stop attributing positions to people which they manifestly have not taken.

One neglected point:

“Aki Nawaz has made a bit more of a stretch to show his respect, producing an album in which, according to the Guardian, Osama bin Laden is compared to Che Guevara”

seems reasonably apt to me. Che may have been a bit better than Osama (he was certainly better looking), but they’re in the same ballpark, at least.

Steve

engels- I am able and willing to justify views I attribute to people can you ?

Zdenek – You do try to justify your misattributions. But they are still misattributions. You just seem to have a fixed idea that people with left of centre views must be “moral relativists” even though they don’t say this and have in most cases explicitly denied it. Not many people around here do hold to the “Postmodern Left” position that you have been trying, on successive threads, to critique.

So, Zdenek, you are a pacifist then?

“Ajay, if you insist on calling it breaking local burial customs, then why not re-phrase your “dismembering civilians on a bus” as, say, ‘breaking public transportation rules’ or something?

And if this is just “breaking local burial customs”, then why bother breaking these customs anyway?”

Oh, you’re trolling. Right, sorry. Being a bit slow this morning. I won’t say anything else.

brendan writes (57) that “the Allies developed [bombing of civilian targets] way beyond anything the Axis powers had imagined”. This seems an oversimplification. It was the Germans that invented and used the first cruise missile (V-1) and the first ballistic missile (V-2), both of which were too inaccurate to hit military targets. That did not deter them from firing them at London as fast as they could manufacture them. They also worked hard at producing a nuclear bomb. Does anyone think that Hitler would have hesitated to drop one on London if his scientists had managed to build one before V-E Day? No doubt the Allies succeeded in killing more civilians by aerial bombing than the Axis did. That was not because the Axis had any aversion to bombing civilians. They tried to kill more, and came up with new ways to do so (V-1 and V-2), but they failed in this goal, just as they failed to win the war.

Whatever. I’m not superstitious but I find the idea unseemly. Yes, unseemly in general, and if this was done to my friend or relative, no matter what his crimes are, I imagine I would’ve been seriously pissed off.

Okay, Zdenek, but what you may be perceiving here is a reaction to a logic that labels something like 9/11 as incomprehensibly evil for no reason other than to justify refusing to use one’s judgment or moral sense when responding to it, and to silence criticism of that response by labeling it as a form of moral laxity.

I’m not sure that postmodernism or Marxism are especially marked by moral skepticism. Marxists tended to be skeptical of the moral claims of their opponents, but that is commonplace. As for postmodernism, I suppose it does tend to be skeptical of the idea that people’s moral judgments can ever be totally neutral or free from self-serving rationalization. But its principal figures have not generally hesitated from making moral judgments even when they acknowledge a lack of personal neutrality. But then, that kind of skepticism is not unique to postmodernism either. Upton Sinclair said that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

I think that the attempt to distinguish between civilian and military targets for purposes of differentiating the japanese kamikazes from the men who flew into the WTC and the Pentagon ultimately has to founder on geography. Was there any major civilian target within range of the japanese bombers whose destruction could be accomplished by a few planes and would make a larger difference to the course of the war than the destruction of a battleship, carrier, cruiser or even destroyer?

But Zdenek, you ignore a rather extensive literature on the implicit absolutist moral theory of Marxism. Marx is quite clear on the wrongness of exploitation, even if he never advances a moral theory in its support. That is undoubtedly a moral judgment and not one easily explained by Marx’s class. Marxists have often accused non-Marxists of having moral judgments that are little more than rationalizations of class interest, but it would be hard to argue that most Marxists saw their own moral principles as having no more justification outside of their own class interests.

As for postmodernists, I’m not entirely sure who you have in mind. Of the people I can think of who are usually labeled as postmodernists, some are not trying to advance a theory of morality and the others certainly do not hesitate to advance moral judgments. To criticize other people’s moral judgments as self-serving is certainly an argument against them, and a line of argument that is in no way unique to postmodernism.

To argue that one’s own vantage is superior and to argue against someone else’s on that basis is the diametric opposite of moral relativism. Would you say that you have no superior moral vantage point from which to argue against terrorism?

Large populations, quite possibly the majority of humanity, believes that it is worse to humiliate and desecrate than it is to kill. There are a number of quite logical arguments in support of that conclusion. Once a person is killed, they are merely dead. Humiliation damages a person for the rest of their life, and may damage other people around them. Desecration of a corpse causes a loss of dignity that can be passed on to survivors, causing misery that can persist long after the pain of grieving.

I’m not one to shout “moral relativism” at the drop of a hat, but I can’t imagine a purer example of it. If the severity of a misdeed is judged by the subjective feelings of “humiliation” suffered by the victim, irrespective of any independent moral criteria, then enormous privilege is granted to the thin-skinned, who see “humiliation” in all sorts of otherwise innocuous acts.

And what do we do if–as, it turns out, is often the case–there is no course of action which does not cause extreme humiliation to some person or group? Supremacists of various kinds, for example, feel intensely humiliated whenever those to whom they feel innately superior do not, for their part, feel intensely humiliated. How, then, do you decide who gets relieved of their humiliation, assuaged, and who has to suck it up and endure theirs, without reference to a moral standard that does not take into account the subjective sense of dignity and humiliation of either side?

So Dan, let’s test your claim that we should reject subjective feelings in considering the effects of our measures. Do you think, therefore, that sexual harassment laws should be repealed? After all, they criminalize acts whose only effect is subjective. Do you think that if someone rapes a women, but causes her no physical injury nor gets her pregnant or gives her an STD, she has no claim to have been violated? After all, her problems are purely mental and emotional and why should her feelings come into it?

If it’s moral relativism to think that rape is a more serious crime than assault, then I’m a moral relativist.

Or let’s try one a little closer to the mark, although it bends Godwin’s law. Let’s imagine that Hamas offered Israel a deal: It would lay down all its arms and never harm another soul. but in return Israel must, in perpetuity, change its national flag to the swastika and fly it on every flagpole. Would Israel be justified in rejecting the agreement?

As for your first point:

People’s decisions may be influenced in complex ways by their circumstances. But their moral choices are their own, and they are accountable for them.

Yes, but you seem to imagine that there is tiny homunculus inside people that makes their moral judgments for them without regard to their circumstances. Do you imagine that a person can be separated from their circumstances and judged separately? That we can judge people as moral beings and then later as actual physical persons? People are responsible for their actions, and people are nothing more than their physical form and the physical environment in which they exist. What do you imagine moral agency is if you think that people’s moral choices occur independently of their circumstances?

Let me use another example.

1 – A gangster kills a policeman who is investigating his capo. He belongs to a social institution and is acting in its defense and out of loyalty to it. He has a reasonable expectation that his actions will advance his goal of protecting the institution that that provides him with a comfortable income and security. He is later arrested for the murder, tried, and gets the gas chamber.

2 – A volunteer soldier in the service an unpleasant Middle Eastern dictatorship kills an American soldier invading his country in a war of liberation. The soldier is a citizen of the state and is acting in its defense and out of loyalty to it. He has a reasonable expectation that his actions will advance the goal of protecting the state that provides him with a comfortable income and security. He is later captured, held in a POW camp where he’s decently fed and housed and treated reasonably, and then released without punishment at the end of the war.

Now, you might argue that both men deserved the same punishment, but if you don’t, how do you account for their acts having different moral content? Both voluntarily and loyally served unjust organizations, both killed people who intended to end those unjust institutions. Their intents are identical. But most people judge one to be a far wronger act than the other because of the circumstances in which they occur.

both dismembering people on buses and burial in pigskins (which was never practiced even when he abominable gideon esra was still a minister in israel) are far from barbaric, they are highly civilized acts, using knowledge of the opponents’ culture to demoralize and humiliate. the real effect and intent of dismembering civilians on buses, during the passover meal in a large hotel, in a nightclub on a weekend night or in a watering hole/jazz venue are, apart from wounding the victims’ relatives, wholly dependent on media and public response. they are meant to demoralize and scare people. surely in response to the occupation having previously caused destitution and despair in palestine (etc. and ad nauseam). but the effect depends on knowledge of how your opponent will react.

besides, the term ‘barbaric’ is meaningless to the moral discussion, if it denotes nothing but ‘uncivilized’. and if it has other meanings, better use those meanings explicitely then rather than a vague term.

as an aside, of course, the intent of attacking the pentagon and the wtc seems to have been symbolic (ie cultural), and its purpose demoralization, rather than just ‘killing lots of people’.

comparing and contrasting with historical precedents is quite an interesting sport. morality, though, does not flow from historical precedent or explanation, but rather from morality. does being similar to or different from kamikazes make suicide bombers more moral? less moral? does it make us understand reality more? and to what end – for justifying things as they are? for finding a way to alter them? to engage in name calling and “they started” arguments?

Do you think, therefore, that sexual harassment laws should be repealed? After all, they criminalize acts whose only effect is subjective.

I’m certainly against “hostile environment” sexual harassment laws, because, among other reasons, I believe them to be ridiculously subjective. (As I recall, at some point, the standard for determining sexual harassment was changed from the “reasonable person” standard to the “reasonable woman” standard–effectively codifying its subjectivity into law.)

“Quid pro quo” sexual harassment, on the other hand, is more objectively identifiable, and I believe it’s legitimate grounds for legal intervention.

Do you think that if someone rapes a women, but causes her no physical injury nor gets her pregnant or gives her an STD, she has no claim to have been violated? After all, her problems are purely mental and emotional and why should her feelings come into it?

There are many strong reasons for considering rape an extremely serious criminal offense, but the emotional effect on the victim is far from the most important. On the contrary, the emotional harm to the victim is not only highly variable, but may well be assumed by outsiders to be greater in the case of women of previously chaste behavior than in the case of sexually promiscuous or provocative women. And we know where that assumption leads….

Let’s imagine that Hamas offered Israel a deal: It would lay down all its arms and never harm another soul. but in return Israel must, in perpetuity, change its national flag to the swastika and fly it on every flagpole. Would Israel be justified in rejecting the agreement?

Assuming that the offer was credible, and applied to the Palestinian population in general, rather than just Hamas, then Israel would be totally unjustified in rejecting it. A “humiliating” symbol on a flag is a mere nuisance compared to war and terrorism, and enduring the former would be a price well worth paying to eliminate the latter.

Of course, no such offer would ever be remotely credible in real life….

People are responsible for their actions, and people are nothing more than their physical form and the physical environment in which they exist. What do you imagine moral agency is if you think that people’s moral choices occur independently of their circumstances?

What do you imagine moral agency is if you think that people are nothing more than their physical form and the physical environment in which they exist? What moral agency does a probability wave function have, after all?

My answer to this sort of argument from determinism is simple: people may well be nothing more than deterministic (or random) solutions to physics equations. But people treat themselves and others as having free will and moral agency anyway, and hold them accountable for their actions. And if you complain that we shouldn’t, because people are merely slaves to physical determinism (or quantum randomness), then I’ll reply that you have no right to complain, since being mere automata, we obviously have no choice but to behave that way.

Their intents are identical. But most people judge one to be a far wronger act than the other because of the circumstances in which they occur.

Of course, people take into account the circumstances in which acts occur–but not because those circumstances may have influenced the perpetrator’s moral judgments, but rather because they influence our moral judgments regarding the actions. Someone raised as a pacifist who kills in self-defense is, to the rest of us, far less culpable than someone raised by murderers who commits a murder–even if the respective circumstances that influenced them make the first killing seem more wrong (to them) than the second. It’s the circumstances that influence our judgment that count.

…beliefs or feelings of those being punished…

‘Assuming that the offer was credible, and applied to the Palestinian population in general, rather than just Hamas, then Israel would be totally unjustified in rejecting it. A “humiliating” symbol on a flag is a mere nuisance compared to war and terrorism, and enduring the former would be a price well worth paying to eliminate the latter.’

Please tell me that you don’t really believe this. If you do believe it (and really if you do, the point of this whole thread becomes somewhat moot) why not try going over to Northern Ireland, where people have actually died over symbols such as the name of the police force of the area and other symbols which are, apparently, a mere ‘nuisance’.

All this talk about moral agency, personal responsibility and punishment reminds me of the 2004 incident when Paul Johnson, Lockheed Martin specialist in Apache helicopter systems got himself beheaded by an “al Qaeda cell” in Saudi Arabia.

The executioners issued a statement and the US media published this quote:

…the infidel got his fair treatment. Let him taste something of what Muslims have long tasted from Apache helicopter fire and missiles.

It appears that these Saudi folks might’ve been Dan Simon’s soulmates.

Oh, and Zdenek

what is your evidence that Dan Simon’s meta ethical position is some sort of non cognitivism / scepticism ? Do you even understand what moral non cognitivist believes ?

I can only suggest that you read my last several posts, if that’s not too taxing. And when you have finished, perhaps you can give us your version of moral scepticism, and explain why Steven Poole is implicated in it when he compares suicide bombers to kamikazes but Dan Simon is not when he says that there is no fact of the matter about whether a punishment is degrading and humiliating.

Unfortunately, assuming that there was a course called “Philosophy 101” at your institution, Zdenek, I have yet to see much evidence that you passed it, or that you even took it.

engels — at # 30 D. Simon says ” those who insist on giving primacy … to internal states rather than on morality of their actions” which is a criticism of subjectivism not an endorsment of it.
at # 98 D.Simon says ” if the severity of a misdeed is judged by subjective feelings…” there would be unaceptable consequences . This is a criticism of subjectivism not an endorsment of it and his point is that purely subjective criteria of rightness/wrongness has consequences that show that subjectivism is false ( in other words Simon is offering a reductio of subjectivism ).

at #107 he says ” I argue with you because I believe that there are moral facts ” again this is consistent with his criticism of subjectivism and goes futher and suggests that Simon is a moral realist.

Conclusion you have not read D.Simon comments or you cannot follow an argument. This hunch is futher confirmed by what you say in # 110 which confuses use and mention : D.Simon is not holding the view just because it appears in his comments ; he is mentioning the view for purposes of criticism.

Zdenek, I still fail to see how I have advanced any kind of moral relativism. I realize that whenever I suggest that magic is a poor basis for moral judgments, I am accused of moral relativism. I assert that moral judgments, like all human activities, have a physical basis. Dan appears to believe differently, but that does not seem to be the reason he alleges that I am a moral relativist.

Dan agrees that intent has some bearing on moral judgments, but claims that the intent to cause subjective harm, or to act knowing that subjective harm is likely to come of it, has no moral significance. I beg differ. I see nothing morally relative in claiming that knowingly causing subjective damage is morally relevant in the same way that knowingly causing physical damage is. I have not suggested that sometimes or in some cultures subjective damage matters and in others it doesn’t. That would indeed be a relativist claim, but I haven’t made it.

Instead, I suggest that by Dan’s logic, there is no moral dimension to creating an environment hostile to Jews; that there is no moral burden in anti-Semitism so long as its effect on people remains subjective; that one can deprive Jews collectively of their dignity without having committed any moral offense at all.

I disagree with that conclusion, and in part for that reason I disagree with Dan’s position on subjective harms. If Dan however agrees that there is no moral offense in depriving Jews as group of their dignity, then I suppose his position is coherent, although it still would not make my position in any way a form of moral relativism.

It would, of course, make Dan objectively anti-Semitic, but even anti-Semites can have coherent arguments for their positions.

It appears that these Saudi folks might’ve been Dan Simon’s soulmates.

Abb1, my friend, you’re going soft. In the old days, you’d have gone whole hog, so to speak, and compared me with Goebbels, or some other Nazi. Shouting, “Nazi” at least has the virtue of wholeheartedness–shouting, “Saudi theocrat”, on the other hand, is just lame.

If you’re going to be a jerk, be a complete jerk, I say. Half-measures are for wimps.

As far as I can tell, you’re a moral authoritarian: Acts are right or wrong depending entirely on whether they violate some unstated code to which you have special access.

I prefer to think of myself as a sort of moral positivist–I believe that there is an absolute morality, independent of subjective impressions, although I concede that my ability to characterize it precisely is far from perfect. I therefore assume that there will be vigorous rational debate about the proper methods for discerning the properties of “objective morality”, and about the results of applying those methods. What I can’t countenance is relativism–the claim that objective morality does not exist, and that morality instead depends completely on people’s subjective impressions.

You argue that what makes rape wrong is not the loss dignity or any subjective effect on the victim. Then what exactly does it make it wrong?

One can argue for the immorality of rape from many angles: the philosophical importance of personal and sexual autonomy, the social importance of sexual consent, the practical importance of protecting against unwanted pregnancy and disease, and so on. But consider this: romantic rejection is in many cases at least as emotionally devastating as rape–think, for instance, of the number of suicides that result from it. Yet we do not (thank goodness) even consider locking people up for turning down or breaking up with a romantic partner. That’s because there’s far more to morality than how an action makes somebody else feel.

You’ve argued that there’s no moral failure in creating “hostile environments” for women. You claim that “quid pro quo” sexual harassment is wrong, although you haven’t explained how it’s different. The effect of being pressured to trade sex for favors is just as subjective as a “hostile environment”.

Would accept by the same argument that there is nothing wrong with creating an anti-Semitic environment since its effects are just as subjective? You seem to reject the very idea that oppression is even possible.

You misunderstand me. I oppose workplace discrimination against both women and Jews, and support laws that ban it. What I reject is measuring “discrimination” by the perceived feelings of unease or “humiliation” felt by members of the group allegedly being discriminated against.

To give a concrete example, I suspect that most Jews would feel profoundly uneasy about regular Christian (or, for that matter, Muslim) prayer meetings in the workplace. Such open displays of religiosity by members of a mass proselytising religion highlight Jews’ status as a vulnerable, non-proselytising, sometimes unwelcome minority.

Nevertheless, I do not believe that such prayer meetings should be considered discriminatory towards Jews. On the contrary, I consider it a matter of basic religious tolerance for Jews to accept such displays of religiosity–just as I would hope that Christians and Muslims would accept displays of Jewish religiosity, however uncomfortable it might make them feel.

British rapper Aki Nawaz has made a bit more of a stretch to show his respect, producing an album in which, according to the Guardian, Osama bin Laden is compared to Che Guevara.

Without wanting to get too bogged down in details, I don’s see why that’s a stretch at all. You don’t have to be a fan or follower of bin Laden to recognize that in many ways he’s an exemplary revolutionary leader. He’s risked his own skin, he’s pulled off imaginative and successful feats of organization, he’s got an ideology that purports to be universal, and he’s managed to elude a foe that’s orders of magnitude more powerful than he. If those aren’t elements of charismatic, even inspiring leadership, I’d like to know what is. And it’s precisely why catching him is so important.

Brendan,
The Blitz killed 10,000 more than died in Dresden. Also, if the bombing of Dresden did indeed keep the Dresden train yards (the train yards received the most attention from the bombers) from being used as marshalling center to stop the Russians who were very close, then it might be fair to say the bombing shortened the war by something near a month. That means the bombing of Dresden saved 315,000 Russian civilians, 100,000 Jews, and 36,000 German civilians (for a net gain of 11,000 Axis civilians). Also note that Dresden had a Jewish population of 6,000 before the war and 0 after the war, and those 6,000 didn’t die in the bombing. The bastards sent their Jews to the camps.

If you apply that logic to Japan, you get even more incredible ratios of lives saved, since the Rape of Nanking all by itself just about matches the total number of Japanese civilian deaths.

You don’t have to be a fan or follower of bin Laden to recognize that in many ways he’s an exemplary revolutionary leader.

I don’t think we (the general public, I mean) know much about this guy; it’s impossible to separate disinformation from the facts.

For example, on the most important matter that made him a celebrity, the wiki article says:

The evidence presented to NATO was never made available to the public [14], and no evidence that could be cited in a court of law, has ever been produced to back up the claim of the American government that Osama orchestrated the 9/11 attacks.

The American FBI has Osama listed as one of their ‘most wanted’ persons in connection with the embassy murders in various countries. However, the FBI does not list 9/11 as one of the crimes Osama is wanted for. It only lists the embassy murders. In June 2006 a reporter asked the FBI why that is. A representative of the FBI responded that the FBI has “no hard evidence” that Bin Ladin was involved with 9/11.

Jet
this indicates the problem of ‘consequentialist’ thinking, the idea that (even roughly) we can work out what ‘would have happened’ if something else ‘did happen’. In the very broadest sense possibly perhaps this is true, but that idea that this might be quantifiable: that we can actually work out (to the nearest hundred, say) how many people would have lived or died if ‘we’ did something else is a fantasy. And it’s not helped by your partial version of statistics. I’ve no doubt the ‘Dresden’ statistic is true. But that was one night .The Blitz went on for years. And Dresden, despite its infamy, wasn’t even a particularly bad night for the Axis in terms of fatalities. Other raids (for example in Tokyo, not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki) killed many more. (i’m well aware of the most recent scholarship to which you are alluding, incidentally, which demonstrates that Dresden really was a military target, despite German claims after the war. However, there were many other cities bombed that were not conceivably important to the German or Japanese war effort, for example, Pforzheim, which, despite Allied ‘spin’ was probably mainly selected because ‘it was easy for the bombers to find’. (Pforzheim wikipedia entry).)

Your argument also leaves bombing raids at the end of the war in a rather exposed position, including the ones that took place on the last day or the last hours of the war. They didn’t shorten the war at all. (My understanding is that the last raid on Japan actually took place after the war was over, but due to communication failures this news did not reach their base until just as they were returning home). The bombing raids on Germany got heavier towards the end of the war: in the last few months they were essentially bombing rubble, and bombing a country that was clearly beaten for no clearly articulated military reason.

In any case, there is another counter-factual which you don’t examine which is the relative merits of ‘precision bombing’ and ‘carpet bombing’ . Bomber Harris, of course, was very much in favour of the latter, but many of his staff disagreed and thought that actually aiming for factories, military objectives and other such targets would have been much more effective than simply bombing cities flat more or less at random. According to the Wikipedia, Bomber Harris was simply flatly wrong about the importance of ‘precision bombing’ as he had insufficient security clearance to find out how much the German high command feared it: he thought that only ‘carpet bombing’ hampered the German war effort (how?).

If we are playing the counter-factual game back, then I can come back at you and argue that if Bomber Harris had been fired and the British and Americans had pursued a ‘strategic’ bombing strategy instead, perhaps even more lives would have been saved and perhaps the war would have been won even quicker. But then you could come back with another ‘ah but what if’ argument and the ‘debate’ could go on forever. The fact is, I don’t know how many lives would have been saved if the Allies (or the Axis) had chosen a different strategy, neither do you, and that’s the end of the argument.

brendan– consequentialist doent have to know with absolute certainty that some action will have such and such consequences in future. All she needs is probability based on our understanding of how things work . Once its reasonably clear that say the bombing will safe many lives you may be required to factor that knowledge into you moral assement of whether specific bombing is right .
But maybe your point is that futher into future we look the probability calculation becomes harder and harder to make and *that* has impact on the moral judgement too ; this seems right.

And since when did ‘casuistry’ become a form of intellectual corruption? Are we all living in the 18th century now?

Is this not enough for you to show that your take is wrong ?

No, Zdenek, the point is that Dan’s particular brand of wingnuttery is that of a group of people who habitually yell and stamp their feet about “moral standards” while remaining confused about basic moral principles which most people in society share. They are moral sceptics of a kind, even though they deny it.

Dan does not at any rate think that (1) is false

No, that’s wrong. Dan Simon does appear to be saying that he does not believe there is a prohibition, absolute or otherwise, on humiliating and degrading treatment of prisoners, and this is consistent, to give just one example, with what he has said in the past on the subject of torture.

Dan Hardie: What kind of torture does a responsible fellow like you advocate? Electric shocks? Partial asphyxiation? Denial of medical treatment? Dogs? Torture to death? Torture of women?

Dan Simon: I’m far from an expert on this topic. It’s my vague understanding that the most effective means of extracting information do not involve the application of severe pain, but rather what might be described as “persistent, extreme discomfort”—sleep deprivation, meager food and drink rations, uncomfortable physical positions, sensory extremes (loud noise or silence, bright lights or darkness), and so on. Until fairly recently, none of these techniques would have been characterized as torture—they’d more likely have been described as “vigorous interrogation”.

I think that this justifies me in calling him “a kind of moral sceptic” even if there are other putative moral truths (“all leftwingers are evil”?) which he does endorse.

If you, Zdenek, think that these substantive views are not important to the question of whether or not someone is sceptical of a large part of morality, then it is you who are engaging in sophistry.

All you are left with is your argument that it is only correct to call someone a moral sceptic if they doubt all moral principles. But apart from being a silly quibble about the use of a technical term, scepticism can be partial and the word is often used in this way.

As for your insults, accusations of deliberate dishonesty and appeals to your “authority” as a moral philosopher, you ought to realise that they don’t help your argument: they just make you look like a dick.

Dan – Your position on moral issues – torture, human rights, justice, etc – in so far as I am aware of it, is rather like the view of the physical world of someone who claims that nothing in the universe exists outside of the state of Delaware. Although such a person does not have exactly the same position as the classic Cartesian sceptic, he is clearly in the same ball park. Likewise, although your scepticism about morality is not global, it is very, very extensive, and for that reason I think it is fair to call you a “kind of moral sceptic”.

engels– my ad hominem remarks were not intended as a substitute for argument which can stand on its own , but I think you do need little bit of your own medicine since it is practically a norm here to dish out abuse and you are as guilty of it as anyone else .

But secondly you must be prepared to to get some stick if you are going to pose as some sort of Chris Bertram enforcer or thought policeman ( see your # 72 and # 99 )trying to tell people what , how and when to criticise ( clearly you have not earned that right if one ever can earn such a thing ).

Oh, please: when have I tried to “enforce” my views over yours, Zdenek? When has Chris Bertram ever done so? And when was wasting one’s time arguing with internet cranks like yourself a “right” that had to be “earned”?

Or is being a member of the “thought police”, like “moral relativism”, just something that us lefties are born into?

In the course of this thread, your “arguments” have ranged from
(i) accusing Steven Poole of “covering up” the truth
(ii) accusing Scott of “moral nihilism”
(iii) accusing me of “intellectual corruption”, dishonesty and being unqualified to enter a discussion with you, Zdenek, about philosophical ethics. Since you have now made this last claim several times, perhaps you ought to tell everyone here what your qualifications in this field actually are. Publications? A PhD? High school diploma?

In my first comment on this thread I expressed annoyance that another potentially interesting discussion was being hijacked by your paranoid and unpleasant ad hominem smears. Judging from the way you have conducted yourself since, this sentiment was entirely justified. You, Zdenek, are indeed a troll, and you are a dishonest and unpleasant person to argue with.