Liberating
Jonathan Freedland on common tactics and making judgements:
Still, Britons and Americans have no cause for self-righteousness. The scale of the Israeli offensive is shocking, and yet the killing is not of a greater order than that of the two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which our very own British troops are taking part. I spoke yesterday with one foreign diplomat based in Jerusalem who recalled how, during an earlier posting in Afghanistan, he had seen the remains of an entire village razed to the ground by American fighter jets in pursuit of a couple of Taliban commanders. “All that was left was rubble and body parts,” he says now. Seen in the context of the last seven years, the grim truth is that Israelis are not guilty of a unique crime in Gaza.
The Afghan massacre described above is clearly acceptable on some level, not least because it was our coalition partners who fired the missiles. It’s the double effect doctrine in action. The Israeli army’s action is more of a moral grey area (as Gordon Brown and his UN diplomats can tell you). We need a moral philosopher of the calibre of David Miliband to decipher this for us.
Posted on January 7th, 2009 at 10:53am under T.W.A.T.
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• 3 Comments |
Whoa! This double-effect doctrine is truly twisted, for 2 reaons. First, it undermines the tenet of moral responsibility, that one is responsible for the consequences of one’s actions, by claiming that we are not responsible for bad outcomes if our intentions were good, and if a good outcome came about as well.
The other reason is that it overtly suggests that pain can be outweighed by happiness, almost as if they’re on a continuous scale that allows us to treat degrees of pain as negative degrees of pleasure. This is morally untenable – you cannot outweigh one man’s torment with another man’s pleasure.
you cannot outweigh one man’s torment with another man’s pleasure.
Come off it. If it made 100 Afghans happy to see you kicked in the balls, are you seriously claiming that wouldn’t be the right thing to do?
There are good reasons why double-effect is dodgy, but rejecting the entire basis of consequentialist philosophy in a single sentence is pretty fucking weak.
Hi Justin, would you consider aiding in googlebombing Gordon Brown over his failure to condemn the Gazan genocide? Your help would be most appreciated.
http://punkscientist.blogspot.com/2009/01/googlebomb-gordon-brown.html
Word.