Here's a good read to check out that I just got today. You may have heard that the U.S. considered bombing the concentration camps in Germany during WWII after we figured out what they really were. This here is a reproduction of the actual memo that was distrubuted within the War Office suggesting that we bomb the concentration camps. It, of course, raises all kinds of ethical questions. Ponder and respond however you'd like. The most curious thing may be that we did not end up bombing the camps. Many argue that we could have stopped much of the killing or at least slowed it down if we had. Here's a link to a short note about the knowledge of the allies of the camps and the debates over whether or not to bomb them.
See here.
What do you think? Would bombing the camps have made an appreciable difference? If so, should we have done it? Why didn't we? Would the inevitable killing of the prisoners by the bombing be justified since their fate was already sealed and we'd have been trying to stop further killing (as the case is made in this memo)?
WAR REFUGEE BOARD
Interoffice memorandum
June 29, 1944
By Cable No. 4041 of June 21, from Bern, McClelland, reporting of the deportation and extermination of Hungarian Jews, states that “there is little doubt that many of these Hungarian Jews are being sent to the extermination camps of AUSCHITZ [= Auschwitz] (OSWIECIM) and BIRKENAU (RAJSKA) in Western Upper Silesia where according to recent reports, since early summer 1942 at least 1,500,000 Jews have been killed. There is evidence that already in January 1944 preparations were being made to receive and exterminate Hungarian Jews in these camps”.
In view of the preeminent part evidently played by these two extermination camps in the massacre of Jews, equipped to kill 125,000 people per month, it would seem that the destruction of their physical installations might appreciably slow down the systematic slaughter at least temporarily. The methodical German mind might require some time to rebuild the installations or to evolve elsewhere equally efficient procedures of mass slaughter and of disposing of the bodies. Some saving of lives would therefore be a most likely result of the destruction of the two extermination camps.
Though no exaggerated hopes should be entertained, this saving of lives might even be quite appreciable, since, in the present stage of the war, with German manpower and material resources gravely depleted, German authorities might not be in a position to devote themselves to the task of equipping new large-scale extermination centers.
Aside from the preventive significance of the destruction of the two camps, it would also seem correct to mark them for destruction as a matter of principle, as the most tangible – and perhaps only tangible – evidence of the indignation aroused by the existence of these charnel-houses. It will also be noted that the destruction of the extermination camps would presumably cause many deaths among their personnel – certainly among the most ruthless and despicable of the Nazis.
It is suggested that the foregoing be brought to the attention of the appropriate political and military authorities, with a view to considering the feasibility of a thorough destruction of the two camps by aerial bombardment. It may be of interest, in this connection, that the two camps are situated in the industrial region of Upper Silesia, near the important mining and manufacturing centers of Katowice and Chorzom (Oswiecim lies about 14 miles southeast of Katowice), which play an important part in the industrial armament of Germany. Therefore, the destruction of these camps could be achieved without deflecting aerial strength from an important zone of military objectives.
Presumably, a large number of Jews in these camps may be killed in the course of such bombings (though some of them may escape in the confusion). But such Jews are doomed to death anyhow. The destruction of the camps would not change their fate, but it would serve as visible retribution on their murderers and it might save the lives of future victims.
It will be noted that the inevitable fate of Jews herded in ghettoes near the industrial and railroad installations in Hungary has not caused the United Nations to stop bombing these installations. It is submitted, therefore, that refraining from bombing the extermination centers would be sheer misplaced sentimentality, far more cruel than a decision to destroy these centers.
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Monday, August 28, 2006
The tricky business of airpower
Here's a good read on Airpower and how we often hold it in too high a light. As Air Force officers are we equally swayed by the fantasy of the "easy" airpower war? Do you agree with the article's thesis?
This article appeared in The Economist just last week.
The Economist
Aug 24th 2006
Airpower: An Enduring Illusion
Israel hoped air power would avoid the need for a ground war against Hizbullah. Not the first to be beguiled by bombs
Victory is not a matter of seizing territory, Dan Halutz once explained. It is a matter of “consciousness”. And air power, continued Israel's chief of staff, affects the adversary's consciousness significantly. Indeed, the very concept of the land battle is “anachronistic”. Lieut-General Halutz, an air-force man, is said to have persuaded Israel's militarily inexperienced prime minister, Ehud Olmert, that the task of destroying Hizbullah in Lebanon was the perfect job for aircraft.
It did not quite work out that way. Yet the seductive idea that air power can provide swift victory with light casualties has been around almost as long as the aeroplane itself.
The belief that a few bombs could spare all the bloody butcher's bill of infantry fighting proved especially appealing to many of the military men—and politicians—who had witnessed the horrors of the trenches in the first world war. Even if it meant inflicting civilian casualties, the prospect of a short, decisive war waged from the safety of the skies was far preferable to the spectacle of “morons volunteering to get hung in the wire and shot in the stomach in the mud of Flanders,” argued Arthur Harris, an airman who rose to become head of British bomber command in the second world war, earning himself the name of “Bomber” Harris for his relentless obliteration of German cities.
Airmen like Harris argued in the 1920s that armies could fight only other armies, whereas aircraft could strike right to the heart of the enemy's territory, crippling its ability and, more important, its will to wage war. Success, it was claimed, would come mostly through influencing the psychology of the enemy. The first chief of Britain's Royal Air Force, Hugh Trenchard, repeatedly asserted that the “moral effect” of bombing “stands in a proportion of 20 to one” to any physical destruction it might cause. Trenchard once even said that not bombing a town could be as effective as bombing it: “The anxiety as to whether an attack is likely to take place is probably just as demoralising as the attack itself.”
Although it was the potential of air power in large wars that galvanised such thinking, airmen were also quick to argue that aircraft could be equally potent in small wars against irregular or guerrilla forces. An early opportunity to put this to the test presented itself in 1919 when the Emir of Afghanistan declared jihad against Britain's forces in the North-West Frontier Province. The RAF shipped a single Handley Page biplane bomber to Karachi. It flew over Kabul and dropped four 112lb bombs and 16 20-pounders. The emir sued for peace shortly thereafter.
The political capital and prestige which the RAF reaped from the incident were enormous. Basil Liddell Hart, a military writer, declared that “Napoleon's presence was said to be worth an army corps, but this aeroplane seems to have achieved more than 60,000 men did.”
The RAF repeated its triumph to much éclat the next year. This time the target was Mohammed bin Abdullah Hassan, the “Mad Mullah” of Somaliland. The mullah, a precocious Muslim fanatic, had been a thorn in the side of the British for decades. He had adopted a particularly puritanical form of Islam after a pilgrimage to Mecca, which inspired him on his return home in 1895 to emulate the Mahdi who had defied the British in Sudan. The British army then sent four expeditions to Somaliland to try to deal with the mullah, the last one involving 15,000 troops. Each time the mullah regrouped. In 1909 his men, waging a jihad against local tribesmen who had accepted British rule, slaughtered a third of the territory's inhabitants.
When the War Office balked at repeating the effort yet again, the war minister, Winston Churchill, proposed to have the RAF do it. Six small aircraft were ferried to East Africa on warships, the mullah's fort was bombed for two days, and a month later it was all over. Churchill crowed in Parliament that the previous land expedition had cost the Treasury £6m—about £120m ($220m) in today's money; the RAF had done the job for £77,000.
But there were hints even amid the glee that the truth was murkier. The mullah was never captured. He and 700 riflemen slipped out of the country only after being pursued by ground forces, whose commander dismissed the airmen's claims of victory as “something of a hoax”. The bombing, he said, had actually made his work harder by dispersing the enemy.
Something approaching a mystique, though, soon began to surround the claims of the airmen. When, in 1922, the RAF was given the job of maintaining British authority in Iraq by similar means—by then the formal name had become air control or air policing—the airmen insisted that only they were qualified to judge just when and where to strike to achieve the exact psychological effect required to bring insurgents to heel. The local British army commander sarcastically described the RAF “appearing from God knows where, dropping their bombs on God knows what, and going off again God knows where.” He had a point. Although the RAF claimed it could hit the house of a particular sheikh in a particular village, the airmen often failed to get even half their bombs to land within the village at all.
But the saving in money and lives of troops swept aside most criticism. To the objection that little logic seemed to lie behind their choice of targets, the air commanders merely insisted that their real target was a concept—enemy morale and will—rather than any particular physical object. That proved to be a remarkably resilient theme over the decades. “Bomber” Harris, more honest than many of the Allied air commanders of the second world war when it came to acknowledging the imprecision of the bombing technology of the day, conceded that it was not possible accurately to destroy from the air any targets smaller than a few square miles. For that reason, he argued, the right targets to hit were the only things that were bigger—ie, entire cities. This, he insisted, would win the war.
The possibility that air power would make a ground invasion of France unnecessary tantalised some American politicians right up to the Normandy landings. Harris, too, continued to press his case, even during the final planning for D-day. “Harris told us how well he might have won the war had it not been for the handicap imposed by the existence of the other two services,” commented General Alan Brooke, an army compatriot, after one pre-invasion conference of top commanders.
Similarly, 20 years on, when some of Lyndon Johnson's advisers objected that bombing North Vietnam's factories and rail lines would not do much harm to an agrarian country in which industry accounted for only 12% of its minuscule GNP, America's air-force chiefs argued that since its industrial sector was so small, the country was that much more dependent on it, and would suffer all the more if it were destroyed. In fact, the North Vietnamese responded to the bombing of their oil tanks and railways by dispersing fuel across the country in small drums and hauling supplies around on bicycles. But zapping railways, factories and oil tanks was something the air force knew how to do.
By that time bombing, whether effective or not, seemed much more attractive than sending in more troops. As America's ground forces in Vietnam found themselves increasingly impotent against an elusive and resourceful foe, the military commanders proposed endless variations on the same bombing strategy that had so far failed. Johnson one day dressed down the army chief of staff in front of his underlings: “Bomb, bomb, bomb, that's all you know. Well, I want to know why there's nothing else. You're not giving me any ideas for this damn little pissant country. Now, I don't need ten generals to come in here ten times and tell me to bomb.”
The coming of age of precision guidance did sharply change conventional warfare involving conventional armies, as the two Gulf wars showed: aircraft were able to destroy hundreds of armoured vehicles and paralyse Saddam Hussein's ground forces well before they could engage American or British ground troops. And as NATO's air campaign against Serbia showed in 1999, precision weapons can nowadays destroy selected targets, even in the heart of cities, without causing a thousandth of the civilian casualties that were routine in the second world war.
But when it comes to rooting out guerrillas and insurgents, wishful thinking still tends to outweigh technological capabilities. A study of the use of air power in small wars over the past century by James Corum and Wray Johnson, two former professors at the American air force's School of Advanced Airpower Studies, concluded that insurgents and terrorists “rarely present lucrative targets for aerial attack”. Air power has been used to greatest effect in such campaigns only indirectly: to gather intelligence, move troops or maintain communication.
And as others besides the Israelis have found, trying to wage an air campaign against irregular forces is especially vulnerable to the backlash that invariably arises as civilian casualties mount. Since terrorists and guerrillas blend into the civilian population, fight in small units and rely on surprise and mobility, accurate and timely intelligence is crucial, and bad intelligence always results in civilian casualties, sometimes lots of them. Moreover, dropping a bomb in an urban area, even when the intelligence is correct, and even when the bomb is precision-guided, is likely to kill innocent neighbours.
Israel's excellent intelligence in the occupied territories has enabled it to carry out lethally successful precision air strikes against the leaders of Hamas and other outfits there. But even these attacks have often resulted in casualties to bystanders. In Lebanon the Israeli air force found itself in the worst of both worlds, killing civilians without achieving military objectives. No crucial Hizbullah leaders were killed and almost none of their mobile rocket-launchers were destroyed. Only the fixed launchers for their longer-range missiles north of the Litani river appear to have been much damaged.
Not by bombs alone
Israel was hoping, through its use of air power in Lebanon, not just to hammer an irregular guerrilla force; it was also seeking to put pressure on the Lebanese government and others to disarm Hizbullah and secure its southern border. In this General Halutz was said to have been strongly influenced by NATO's war of psychological pressure against Slobodan Milosevic, which aimed to force the Serb dictator to take a specific action—pull out of Kosovo and halt his ethnic cleansing—through an air campaign that kept ratcheting up the costs by destroying power plants, bridges, factories and other bits of infrastructure.
But, in the end, Israel found that even in a war that hinged on psychology and “consciousness”, air power had inherent limitations. In the 48 hours before the ceasefire went into effect, Israel sent a surge of ground troops into southern Lebanon to engage in the “anachronistic” pursuit of seizing territory—precisely in order to create the conscious perception of tangible military victory that air power alone had failed to deliver. The truly smart bomb remains as elusive as the silver bullet.
This article appeared in The Economist just last week.
The Economist
Aug 24th 2006
Airpower: An Enduring Illusion
Israel hoped air power would avoid the need for a ground war against Hizbullah. Not the first to be beguiled by bombs
Victory is not a matter of seizing territory, Dan Halutz once explained. It is a matter of “consciousness”. And air power, continued Israel's chief of staff, affects the adversary's consciousness significantly. Indeed, the very concept of the land battle is “anachronistic”. Lieut-General Halutz, an air-force man, is said to have persuaded Israel's militarily inexperienced prime minister, Ehud Olmert, that the task of destroying Hizbullah in Lebanon was the perfect job for aircraft.
It did not quite work out that way. Yet the seductive idea that air power can provide swift victory with light casualties has been around almost as long as the aeroplane itself.
The belief that a few bombs could spare all the bloody butcher's bill of infantry fighting proved especially appealing to many of the military men—and politicians—who had witnessed the horrors of the trenches in the first world war. Even if it meant inflicting civilian casualties, the prospect of a short, decisive war waged from the safety of the skies was far preferable to the spectacle of “morons volunteering to get hung in the wire and shot in the stomach in the mud of Flanders,” argued Arthur Harris, an airman who rose to become head of British bomber command in the second world war, earning himself the name of “Bomber” Harris for his relentless obliteration of German cities.
Airmen like Harris argued in the 1920s that armies could fight only other armies, whereas aircraft could strike right to the heart of the enemy's territory, crippling its ability and, more important, its will to wage war. Success, it was claimed, would come mostly through influencing the psychology of the enemy. The first chief of Britain's Royal Air Force, Hugh Trenchard, repeatedly asserted that the “moral effect” of bombing “stands in a proportion of 20 to one” to any physical destruction it might cause. Trenchard once even said that not bombing a town could be as effective as bombing it: “The anxiety as to whether an attack is likely to take place is probably just as demoralising as the attack itself.”
Although it was the potential of air power in large wars that galvanised such thinking, airmen were also quick to argue that aircraft could be equally potent in small wars against irregular or guerrilla forces. An early opportunity to put this to the test presented itself in 1919 when the Emir of Afghanistan declared jihad against Britain's forces in the North-West Frontier Province. The RAF shipped a single Handley Page biplane bomber to Karachi. It flew over Kabul and dropped four 112lb bombs and 16 20-pounders. The emir sued for peace shortly thereafter.
The political capital and prestige which the RAF reaped from the incident were enormous. Basil Liddell Hart, a military writer, declared that “Napoleon's presence was said to be worth an army corps, but this aeroplane seems to have achieved more than 60,000 men did.”
The RAF repeated its triumph to much éclat the next year. This time the target was Mohammed bin Abdullah Hassan, the “Mad Mullah” of Somaliland. The mullah, a precocious Muslim fanatic, had been a thorn in the side of the British for decades. He had adopted a particularly puritanical form of Islam after a pilgrimage to Mecca, which inspired him on his return home in 1895 to emulate the Mahdi who had defied the British in Sudan. The British army then sent four expeditions to Somaliland to try to deal with the mullah, the last one involving 15,000 troops. Each time the mullah regrouped. In 1909 his men, waging a jihad against local tribesmen who had accepted British rule, slaughtered a third of the territory's inhabitants.
When the War Office balked at repeating the effort yet again, the war minister, Winston Churchill, proposed to have the RAF do it. Six small aircraft were ferried to East Africa on warships, the mullah's fort was bombed for two days, and a month later it was all over. Churchill crowed in Parliament that the previous land expedition had cost the Treasury £6m—about £120m ($220m) in today's money; the RAF had done the job for £77,000.
But there were hints even amid the glee that the truth was murkier. The mullah was never captured. He and 700 riflemen slipped out of the country only after being pursued by ground forces, whose commander dismissed the airmen's claims of victory as “something of a hoax”. The bombing, he said, had actually made his work harder by dispersing the enemy.
Something approaching a mystique, though, soon began to surround the claims of the airmen. When, in 1922, the RAF was given the job of maintaining British authority in Iraq by similar means—by then the formal name had become air control or air policing—the airmen insisted that only they were qualified to judge just when and where to strike to achieve the exact psychological effect required to bring insurgents to heel. The local British army commander sarcastically described the RAF “appearing from God knows where, dropping their bombs on God knows what, and going off again God knows where.” He had a point. Although the RAF claimed it could hit the house of a particular sheikh in a particular village, the airmen often failed to get even half their bombs to land within the village at all.
But the saving in money and lives of troops swept aside most criticism. To the objection that little logic seemed to lie behind their choice of targets, the air commanders merely insisted that their real target was a concept—enemy morale and will—rather than any particular physical object. That proved to be a remarkably resilient theme over the decades. “Bomber” Harris, more honest than many of the Allied air commanders of the second world war when it came to acknowledging the imprecision of the bombing technology of the day, conceded that it was not possible accurately to destroy from the air any targets smaller than a few square miles. For that reason, he argued, the right targets to hit were the only things that were bigger—ie, entire cities. This, he insisted, would win the war.
The possibility that air power would make a ground invasion of France unnecessary tantalised some American politicians right up to the Normandy landings. Harris, too, continued to press his case, even during the final planning for D-day. “Harris told us how well he might have won the war had it not been for the handicap imposed by the existence of the other two services,” commented General Alan Brooke, an army compatriot, after one pre-invasion conference of top commanders.
Similarly, 20 years on, when some of Lyndon Johnson's advisers objected that bombing North Vietnam's factories and rail lines would not do much harm to an agrarian country in which industry accounted for only 12% of its minuscule GNP, America's air-force chiefs argued that since its industrial sector was so small, the country was that much more dependent on it, and would suffer all the more if it were destroyed. In fact, the North Vietnamese responded to the bombing of their oil tanks and railways by dispersing fuel across the country in small drums and hauling supplies around on bicycles. But zapping railways, factories and oil tanks was something the air force knew how to do.
By that time bombing, whether effective or not, seemed much more attractive than sending in more troops. As America's ground forces in Vietnam found themselves increasingly impotent against an elusive and resourceful foe, the military commanders proposed endless variations on the same bombing strategy that had so far failed. Johnson one day dressed down the army chief of staff in front of his underlings: “Bomb, bomb, bomb, that's all you know. Well, I want to know why there's nothing else. You're not giving me any ideas for this damn little pissant country. Now, I don't need ten generals to come in here ten times and tell me to bomb.”
The coming of age of precision guidance did sharply change conventional warfare involving conventional armies, as the two Gulf wars showed: aircraft were able to destroy hundreds of armoured vehicles and paralyse Saddam Hussein's ground forces well before they could engage American or British ground troops. And as NATO's air campaign against Serbia showed in 1999, precision weapons can nowadays destroy selected targets, even in the heart of cities, without causing a thousandth of the civilian casualties that were routine in the second world war.
But when it comes to rooting out guerrillas and insurgents, wishful thinking still tends to outweigh technological capabilities. A study of the use of air power in small wars over the past century by James Corum and Wray Johnson, two former professors at the American air force's School of Advanced Airpower Studies, concluded that insurgents and terrorists “rarely present lucrative targets for aerial attack”. Air power has been used to greatest effect in such campaigns only indirectly: to gather intelligence, move troops or maintain communication.
And as others besides the Israelis have found, trying to wage an air campaign against irregular forces is especially vulnerable to the backlash that invariably arises as civilian casualties mount. Since terrorists and guerrillas blend into the civilian population, fight in small units and rely on surprise and mobility, accurate and timely intelligence is crucial, and bad intelligence always results in civilian casualties, sometimes lots of them. Moreover, dropping a bomb in an urban area, even when the intelligence is correct, and even when the bomb is precision-guided, is likely to kill innocent neighbours.
Israel's excellent intelligence in the occupied territories has enabled it to carry out lethally successful precision air strikes against the leaders of Hamas and other outfits there. But even these attacks have often resulted in casualties to bystanders. In Lebanon the Israeli air force found itself in the worst of both worlds, killing civilians without achieving military objectives. No crucial Hizbullah leaders were killed and almost none of their mobile rocket-launchers were destroyed. Only the fixed launchers for their longer-range missiles north of the Litani river appear to have been much damaged.
Not by bombs alone
Israel was hoping, through its use of air power in Lebanon, not just to hammer an irregular guerrilla force; it was also seeking to put pressure on the Lebanese government and others to disarm Hizbullah and secure its southern border. In this General Halutz was said to have been strongly influenced by NATO's war of psychological pressure against Slobodan Milosevic, which aimed to force the Serb dictator to take a specific action—pull out of Kosovo and halt his ethnic cleansing—through an air campaign that kept ratcheting up the costs by destroying power plants, bridges, factories and other bits of infrastructure.
But, in the end, Israel found that even in a war that hinged on psychology and “consciousness”, air power had inherent limitations. In the 48 hours before the ceasefire went into effect, Israel sent a surge of ground troops into southern Lebanon to engage in the “anachronistic” pursuit of seizing territory—precisely in order to create the conscious perception of tangible military victory that air power alone had failed to deliver. The truly smart bomb remains as elusive as the silver bullet.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
A stranger or your dog
In the following scenario imagine you are in some weird situation wherein you can only save one of the the two options given in each question. There is no possible way to save both, nor would sacrificing yourself help in any way towards saving them and they will both die. If you do nothing, they will both die (and, I suppose, that is an option). You know that when you save one of them, the other will most certainly die (or be destroyed). Assume there is no other relevant information than that given for each question (i.e., in the child or adult question, assume they have the same status otherwise in all ways that may affect your decision, the only difference being that one is a child and one is an adult).
You can only rescue one of each of the following, which do you save?
a) A child or an adult
b) A stranger or your dog
c) Your entire family or the entire canine species
d) A bottle with the cure for cancer or your brother
e) Lassie or A Convicted Murderer/Rapist
f) Your spouse or a Nobel Laureate
g) A petry dish with 15 fertilized human eggs or 1 small child
h) A dog or a rat
i) A dog or a fish
j) A dog or a human being on life support who has been declared "brain dead"
k) Your spouse or the greatest artist of all time
l) A child or a 95-year old adult
m) A stranger or the greatest piece of art ever created by human hands
n) A dog or a human being on life support in a perpetual coma (with no chance of ever coming out of the coma, although they are not brain dead).
o) Lassie or Hitler
Perhaps we can give two answers to each (if they are different):
1) what do you think you would actually do and
2) what do you think should or ought to do.
Now, after you've answered a) through o) can you provide some kind of principles or basis upon which you are guiding your decision making? Are the decisions consistent with one another? Are the principles consistent?
You can only rescue one of each of the following, which do you save?
a) A child or an adult
b) A stranger or your dog
c) Your entire family or the entire canine species
d) A bottle with the cure for cancer or your brother
e) Lassie or A Convicted Murderer/Rapist
f) Your spouse or a Nobel Laureate
g) A petry dish with 15 fertilized human eggs or 1 small child
h) A dog or a rat
i) A dog or a fish
j) A dog or a human being on life support who has been declared "brain dead"
k) Your spouse or the greatest artist of all time
l) A child or a 95-year old adult
m) A stranger or the greatest piece of art ever created by human hands
n) A dog or a human being on life support in a perpetual coma (with no chance of ever coming out of the coma, although they are not brain dead).
o) Lassie or Hitler
Perhaps we can give two answers to each (if they are different):
1) what do you think you would actually do and
2) what do you think should or ought to do.
Now, after you've answered a) through o) can you provide some kind of principles or basis upon which you are guiding your decision making? Are the decisions consistent with one another? Are the principles consistent?
Friday, August 18, 2006
A thought experiment on Justice
Here's a fun thought experiment for you guys to check out. Later in the semester we'll be getting deep into issues regarding social justice and the ordering of society. This little scenario will get us thinking down that road now and "till the soil" of our minds for these issues to come. Here's the situation:
You are the judge and sheriff of a small town. A man has been sentenced to prison for armed robbery, and admits guilt for the deed. "But," he argues,"I'll never do anything of the kind again. In fact, I'll never break the law again in any way, shape, or form. I'm not insane or a danger to society. I would be happier out of jail than in. My wife depends on me for support and she and the children would be far happier if I were able to be the family breadwinner again. As to the influence on others, almost no one would ever know about it; you can keep the matter out of the newspapers and no one except you will ever know that the crime was committed. In fact, I'll move to another town and never be heard from again. I understand what I did was wrong and I am a repentent, reformed man. Therefore, you should release me."
Assume for the moment that every claim he just made above is 100% true and that somehow you have epistemic access to this truth (that is, you can somehow know that everything he just claimed is true). So, assuming he's correct, what do you do? You have the power to release him and (like he claimed) no one else would ever know about it.
If your answer is that he should go to jail anyway... WHY? What reasons could we possibly have for that consequence?
You are the judge and sheriff of a small town. A man has been sentenced to prison for armed robbery, and admits guilt for the deed. "But," he argues,"I'll never do anything of the kind again. In fact, I'll never break the law again in any way, shape, or form. I'm not insane or a danger to society. I would be happier out of jail than in. My wife depends on me for support and she and the children would be far happier if I were able to be the family breadwinner again. As to the influence on others, almost no one would ever know about it; you can keep the matter out of the newspapers and no one except you will ever know that the crime was committed. In fact, I'll move to another town and never be heard from again. I understand what I did was wrong and I am a repentent, reformed man. Therefore, you should release me."
Assume for the moment that every claim he just made above is 100% true and that somehow you have epistemic access to this truth (that is, you can somehow know that everything he just claimed is true). So, assuming he's correct, what do you do? You have the power to release him and (like he claimed) no one else would ever know about it.
If your answer is that he should go to jail anyway... WHY? What reasons could we possibly have for that consequence?
Thursday, August 17, 2006
George Galloway
Watch this short interview by Sky News of George Galloway.
Here.
Respond however you'd like. If you agree, make a case to defend his position. If you disagree, give arguments to show why he is wrong or point out flaws in his premises or reasoning. It's tricky: someone like Galloway is effective with his rhetoric and oratory skill, so you have to dig through his words to see the arguments that underlie his passion. The arguments are there, you just have to find them. In fact, that would be a great response to this if someone (or a couple of you) would like to lay out his argument(s) in clear premises and conclusions.
Here.
Respond however you'd like. If you agree, make a case to defend his position. If you disagree, give arguments to show why he is wrong or point out flaws in his premises or reasoning. It's tricky: someone like Galloway is effective with his rhetoric and oratory skill, so you have to dig through his words to see the arguments that underlie his passion. The arguments are there, you just have to find them. In fact, that would be a great response to this if someone (or a couple of you) would like to lay out his argument(s) in clear premises and conclusions.
Monday, August 14, 2006
Guest Post on intellectual honesty
I’m posting this on behalf of Larry Burtoft (PhD, Ethics, USC). I’m curious to see if any cadets will rise up to respond to his challenge here. Essentially, he’s curious if any of you can even approach the issues of Just-War, pacifism, etc. with intellectual honesty given your various commitments (particularly since you juniors and above are now committed to the military). Is any pacifist position even a "live" option to any of you? Is it even possible it is the correct position? If the answer to those are questions is no... then is engaging this debate just a waste of time? Here are Dr. Burtoft’s questions. Feel free to respond to 1, or 2, or both.
Dr. Burtoft asks:
Dr. Burtoft asks:
- Can you really debate the just war/pacifism issue with integrity, given your current commitment to military service, and the fact that the goal of graduation, commissioning and a good salary is in sight? There are so many forces at work within you, as well as outside, that militate (!) against any semblance of objectivity. After all, what would you say to your parents, who have sacrificed so much to help you get where you are today? Then there are your fellow classmates and friends; what would they think? Again, what about the debt you would incur for not fulfilling your service commitment? With all of this - not to mention the problem of figuring out what you would do if you were not to become an officer - can you seriously believe that you have the courage to seriously entertain the pacifist position? It is highly doubtful.
- If you somehow could convince yourself that you could muster the courage to engage the debate with integrity, just what argument would convince you that the use of governmentally authorized lethal force is immoral? Again, it is highly doubtful, given your situation, that you can imagine such a scenario. You are simply psychologically predisposed and conditioned to think that unjust violence justifies the response of, well, justified violence. After all, can you imagine not responding as Israel is currently doing to the terrorist attacks by Hezbollah? Doesn't any and every possible pacifist argument strike you as the thinking of a "moral moron," to quote the Jewish Just War proponent, Dennis Prager? Is it really possible to seriously entertain pacifism? If not, then isn't the academic discussion mere word play and irrelevant frivolity?
Wednesday, August 9, 2006
Should we teach on torture?
So there I was...
sitting in one of our philosophy department "brown bag" meetings sometime last year at UCONN -- I believe Dr. Kupperman was presenting a talk on utilitarianism -- and an interesting conversation came up regarding the education of military members on tough ethical issues.
Needless to say, I was interested.
Basically, a small debate arose over whether or not we should even teach future military members about unethical practices such as torture. (I think the disagreement was between Dr. Gilbert and Dr. Kupperman if I recall correctly).
One side thought that if we bring something like torture into the (relatively) sterile classroom environment, then eventually the students examining it in this type of environment become de-senitized to it. The idea being that if we teach military students about torture, then it can make it seem more normal -- once you start analyzing something like torture, the more and more normal it can begin to sound. The fear being, of course, that then if those military folks are later in a situation where torture is brought up, it will be considered a more normal option -- it is now something "on the table," as it were. They've considered it, weighed it, discussed it... it's part of the conversation. So, this position went on, they would rather a military education classroom never even discuss torture -- don't even give it that normalcy. By discussing something we are opening the can on it. The folks holding this position were rather passionate about it: "The last thing you'd ever want to do is teach military members about torture!"
The opposing position, of course, was sincerely convinced that military members are precisely the folks who need to deeply analyze, debate, and converse over tough topics such as torture. The idea here being that if/when that military member is later presented with a torture situation they are better equiped to handle it and rationally deliberate on it (and hopefully be more likely to make the right decision).
Obviously,it should be clear enough where I fall on this. If I was convinced by the first position (we'll call it the "don't normalize it" position) then I certainly wouldn't be teaching future military officers about the ethics of war. But I remember thinking then and now again as I reflect on it, the argument does indeed raise some interesting questions.
A good parrallel, I think, is to be found in marriage. Many couples I know suggest and a lot of the advice you hear or read from marriage "experts" is for couples to to literally never even bring up the "D" word. The idea is that once you start talking about divorce (what it would be like, what we would do if we got divorced, how we would handle it, what is divorce's moral status, etc, etc) you've put the option on the table. By even talking about divorce a couple makes it that much more likely that the option will happen because the option slowly becomes more and more normalized and plausible as it is discussed.
So... If it's smart to never even bring up the "D" word in marriage, then perhaps it's wise to never bring up the "T" word (and others, one would presume) in the military.
I'm not convinced... but it is a curious argument. Any takers? Any defenders of the "don't normalize it" position? Any good arguments on why this position (and parallel positions, perhaps) fail?
sitting in one of our philosophy department "brown bag" meetings sometime last year at UCONN -- I believe Dr. Kupperman was presenting a talk on utilitarianism -- and an interesting conversation came up regarding the education of military members on tough ethical issues.
Needless to say, I was interested.
Basically, a small debate arose over whether or not we should even teach future military members about unethical practices such as torture. (I think the disagreement was between Dr. Gilbert and Dr. Kupperman if I recall correctly).
One side thought that if we bring something like torture into the (relatively) sterile classroom environment, then eventually the students examining it in this type of environment become de-senitized to it. The idea being that if we teach military students about torture, then it can make it seem more normal -- once you start analyzing something like torture, the more and more normal it can begin to sound. The fear being, of course, that then if those military folks are later in a situation where torture is brought up, it will be considered a more normal option -- it is now something "on the table," as it were. They've considered it, weighed it, discussed it... it's part of the conversation. So, this position went on, they would rather a military education classroom never even discuss torture -- don't even give it that normalcy. By discussing something we are opening the can on it. The folks holding this position were rather passionate about it: "The last thing you'd ever want to do is teach military members about torture!"
The opposing position, of course, was sincerely convinced that military members are precisely the folks who need to deeply analyze, debate, and converse over tough topics such as torture. The idea here being that if/when that military member is later presented with a torture situation they are better equiped to handle it and rationally deliberate on it (and hopefully be more likely to make the right decision).
Obviously,it should be clear enough where I fall on this. If I was convinced by the first position (we'll call it the "don't normalize it" position) then I certainly wouldn't be teaching future military officers about the ethics of war. But I remember thinking then and now again as I reflect on it, the argument does indeed raise some interesting questions.
A good parrallel, I think, is to be found in marriage. Many couples I know suggest and a lot of the advice you hear or read from marriage "experts" is for couples to to literally never even bring up the "D" word. The idea is that once you start talking about divorce (what it would be like, what we would do if we got divorced, how we would handle it, what is divorce's moral status, etc, etc) you've put the option on the table. By even talking about divorce a couple makes it that much more likely that the option will happen because the option slowly becomes more and more normalized and plausible as it is discussed.
So... If it's smart to never even bring up the "D" word in marriage, then perhaps it's wise to never bring up the "T" word (and others, one would presume) in the military.
I'm not convinced... but it is a curious argument. Any takers? Any defenders of the "don't normalize it" position? Any good arguments on why this position (and parallel positions, perhaps) fail?
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