What am I supposed to say? There are differences of degree and perhaps kind between the examples that make trying to draw any sort of equivalence between them very difficult if not impossible. I do think that it's definitely possible in theory and probably occasionally in practice as well that the law forbidding the killing of civilians should not be obeyed.
> 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.
I doubt that the hacks in the military are doing it for yucks, although their "defensible purposes" may be exposed by argument as frauds.
> Oh, I mean retail terrorism. And surely they will.
Your assurance seems misplaced. I'd presume that the vast majority of Afghani peasants lack the means of a bin Laden and I know that they lack the proximity of the "retail terrorists" in Israel and the occupied territories (to Israel; not the US).
> They may already have
> done so. Obviously the so-called war war are dropping on their heads is
> wholesale terrorism of infinitely greater magnitude.
Obvious to most on this list, but not myself. I'm a reluctant dissenter to the "so-called war."
> 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.
The louder they squawk, the more likely they are to get what they want. However, your allusion to my inability to make proper inferences about the causal structure of the world is off-base. Nothing you and I say on this list is likely to have much impact on the world, which is something Carrol, Dennis, and Steve have already pointed out and I'm quite cognizant of.
> >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.
Deft rhetorical trick.
> 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 particularly unforgivable.
How about the starvation that occurred long before any intervention and was ameliorated in small part (we should've given much more foreign aid to Afghan.) by the US? That cycle certainly wasn't going to come to an end with the Taliban in power, and it probably won't with a war conducted in accordance with popular opinion. I'd like to think that the situation affords us with more than those two dismal options, but it probably doesn't. If so, rejectionism is the proper course. I've never argued counter to that proposition.
-- Luke