> > Now you are being obtuse. Sure, the law is supposed to deter bad acts. It
> > takes intentions into account insofar as it assumes that people would
> rayer
> > not get caught, be punished, pay money, go to jail, or otherwise have bad
> > things happen to them.
>
> That was my point: intent is instrumental in shaping action, therefore
> intent should be given more weight in assigning moral or legal
> responsibility than unintended consequences. By definition, the agent has
> no conscious control over the latter. If you simply want to use ultimate
> consequences as the barometer of responsibility and completely discount
> intent, Chomsky could've plausibly said that the terrorist attacks weren't
> all that bad because they didn't inflict as many casualties as the AIDs
> virus does on a daily basis. Why should we care that the latter aren't
> agents if we don't care about what agents actually attempt to do?
>
That's a pretty weak argument against Chomsky's argument. In fact Chomsky wouldn't make that argument, since, as is clear to him even if not to his detractors, it violates the logic of his argument. He's comparing, say, WTC to Sudan, or Indonesian Coup sponsored by the US, by virtue of the *lack* of coverage and/or horror that the latter two aroused in the US media. AIDS, on the other hand, has met with massively much more coverage, even if distorted through a host of ideological prisms that make it more difficult to solve that disaster.
Steve