>
>
> > Uh, yeah, I guess I am a softy who believes in international law, which
> > prohibits the killing of civilians.
>
>International law shouldn't necessarily serve as the moral sanction
>obligating any given state towards one course of action as opposed to
>another any more than is the case with any given individual in the nation
>in
>which he happens to reside. Some laws should not be obeyed. This is clear
>enough to most.
Yeah, laws mandating segregation or discriminaton against women and so forth ought not be obeyed; civil disobedience is sometimes justified. I don't think the the international rules of law forbidding the killing of civilians is on a par with those. Do you?
>
> > I don'tthink we should be "at war" at
> > all.
>
>Who said we should be?
So what's your point? One major reason we should not be war is that we are killing innocent civilians, and to no conceivably defensible purpose.
>
> > It's an odd sort of war, basically the deployment of overwhelming force
> > against people who can't fight back except by terrorist attacks--
>
>I think you do a rather grave disservice to the innocent people who've died
>in Afghanistan by implying that they're the ones who may fight back by
>terrorist means.
Oh, I mean retail terrorism. And surely they will. They may already have done so. Obviously the so-called war war are dropping on their heads is wholesale terrorism of infinitely greater magnitude.
It's the sort of blurring of distinctions that allows some
>to think that killing these people is not only an unfortunate bit of
>collateral damage inflicted in the quest for justice, but an ingredient in
>said quest.
Ah, I see. So if I say what is true, that the slaughter we are perpetrating in Afghanistan will provoke more terrorist outrages, that's a bad, because some people, who probably would have said, "Exterminate the brutes!" anyway, will use this as an excse to say it louder. For a consequentialist, you have a very strange attitude towardws the causal structure of the world.
>And, yeah, I think it more gruesome to
> > blow people to bits than to kill them in other ways, and so do you. It's
> > also worse to burn them and bury them alive, or to kill in ways that are
>are
> > painful, disfiguring, lingering, etc.
> > Does this need to be explained? jks
> >
>
>Any such death agonies (usually) pale to the point of triviality in
>comparison to the horror of a life snuffed out before its time. Does this
>require a detailed exposition?
Yes it does. But don't give it to me. There are better and worse deaths. We shouldn't be killing people at all, but it makes it worse that we are killing them in awful ways. The starvation that will set in shortly due to the war is particularlt unforgivable.
jks
>
>-- Luke
>
>
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