At 09:00 AM 9/26/01 -0400, Nathan Newman wrote:
>But the issue is not merely justification but the accusation implicit in
>the left's causal arguments that the Sept 11 attacks were foreseeable and
>thus the US goverment has responsibility for those results and thus voters,
>including those who died, are responsible for their own deaths.
-nathan, this is just plain wrong and you know it.
How is it wrong? I said implicit - okay we can do a textual analysis on that - but if the US government had no responsibility for what happened, why does "causation" matter? If there is no responsibility by our political leaders, why so much ink defending causality?
Can you cause something while having no resposibility for its results?
I think people want to make statements of causation without following the logical path, i.e.
1) actions of the US government had a causal role in what happened on Sept 11
I thought statement (1) was the whole debate we were having.
2) where there is a causal role, there is responsibility to have taken different actions
That is also implied or explicit in a number of left critiques of past US policy in discussing Sept 11
3) The US government is elected by its citizens, so those citizens have responsibility for its policy and thus had a causal role in the events of Sept 11
Interestingly, a lot of leftists dispute this statement, but most people listening outside the Left believe this, so given (1) they will follow logic to (3)
4) The dead of Sept 11 included voters who elected those politicians
QED The dead have responsibility for their own deaths.
The logical progression is pretty obvious and even if you dispute it, you can't dispute that many people follow the progression. That is why when they hear statements by the Left (and by the Right such as Falwell) talking about such causal explanations of Sept 11, they turn so violently on the people making such statements.
It actually amazes me that anyone denies that this is exactly the logical progression of statements being heard by the public, especially when there are explicit statements by various folks making statements (1) and (2) and sectarians more honestly jumping from those to (3) and a few even stating explicitly (4). But you really don't need more that statement (1)-- for most people, the progression to (4) is clear.
To argue with that is to argue with the empirical reality of how people interpret such statements.
If the US government bombs Kabul and unleashes a wave of terrorist killings in the US, given overwhelming support for government action, will the dead then be responsible for their deaths?
At what point does causality become responsibility?
-- Nathan Newman