How far does a civilized country go before it begins to act like the barbarians it is fighting? Just asking....
RE: How far does a civilized country go before it begins to act like the barbarians it is fighting? Just asking....
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Traditional common sense morality involves three moral determinants, three factors that influence whether a specific act is morally good or bad.
1) The nature of the act itself,
2) the situation, and
2) the motive.
Or, what you do; when, where, and how you do it; and why you do it.
It is true that doing the right thing in the wrong situation, or for the wrong motive, is not good.
Making love to your wife is a good deed, but doing so when it is medically dangerous is not.
The deed is good, but not in that situation. Giving money to the poor is a good deed, but doing it just to show off is not. The deed is good, but the motive is not.
There must first be a deed before it can be qualified by subjective motives or relative situations, and that is surely a morally relevant factor too.
Furthermore, situations, though relative, are objective, not subjective. And motives, though subjective, come under moral absolutes.
They can be recognized as intrinsically and universally good or evil. The will to help is always good, the will to harm is always evil. So even situationism is an objective morality, and even motivationism or subjectivism is a universal morality.
The fact that the same principles must be applied differently to different situations presupposes the validity of those principles. Moral absolutists need not be absolutistic about applications to situations. They can be flexible. But a flexible application of the standard presupposes not just a standard, but a rigid standard.
If the standard is as flexible as the situation it is no standard at all. If the yardstick with which to measure the length of a twisting alligator is as twisting as the alligator, you cannot measure with it. Yardsticks have to be rigid.
So, in the case of Kalid Sheik Mohammad, the mastermind of the 9/11 attack....
Can the above principles not be applied in his case, given :
1) The situation we were in ( unsure if another attack was coming ).
2) The Act itself ( which although bad, is COMPRATIVELY TAME compared to what the terrorists themselves consider torture )
3) Our motive ( to save additional lives, not to do it simply for the hatred or the hack of it ).
At the point where not doing so becomes suicidal and just plain stupid. You don’t win wars by playing nice and you don’t win street fights by fighting fair. Fair fighting is for boxers not for a nation that is going to be nuked and have it’s woman used as sex slaves and it’s men and children having their heads lopped off if they don’t bow to islam. Jeez when will Americas fool wake up? I’ll tell you when.....after it’s too late.
About two feet past where the barbarians are.
Remember, we didn’t start this war. But we can damned sure make the fools who did regret the day they were born. We owe them nothing, not even humanity.