Here's a new one for ya. Now we all know that the majority of people here believe that: The war in Iraq is about oil The war in Iraq will not make life better for most Iraqis Even if Iraq was improved, the price has been too high Now I don't want this to be a thread about debating these points all over again, but thinking about it made me wonder - what if the war in Iraq had been about liberating the Iraqi people? What if those people were going to be better off in the long run? What price, then, would be too high? Where would we draw the line? Say, for example, we knew that Saddam's regime was rock-solid. Say we knew that it was a certainty that his sons would've inherited power after his eventual demise. Say we knew that the people of Iraq were crying out for a change of government. Say the US and UK were both run by politicians who had the good of the people of the world firmly in their hearts and minds. So, in this fantasy world, would any of us consider a scenario where we invaded Iraq on humanitarian/altruistic grounds? How would we measure the price, and what price would be acceptable? Say the army was ready to defect, and we could take Iraq with hardly a shot being fired.... would those few deaths be too high a price? Where do we draw the line? Are we even qualified to draw a line? Often, when pondering the ethics of other wars where the morality is slightly more ambiguous, I wonder about this question. The conclusion that I personally came to was that the decision wasn't one that I'd ever feel qualified to make. Say for the price of one life you could save one hundred lives. Who am I to decide for that person that they should make that sacrifice? Who gave me the right to make that decision? What if that person would choose not to sacrifice their life? In our day to day reality, nobody would ever have the right to force us to sacrifice our rights for the good of the majority. Why should war be any different? Discuss!
A very good question. Unlike it is portrayed, the price of human life is very low. One Turkish soldier costed about 50 cents during the Korean war. So all they say is, spend them cents. About being qualified for determining the "acceptable" costs of a war: War is acceptable only if you're defending yourself because then you are the one who decides if the fight would worth it or not. If you reject to fight, you submit yourself. As Bernard Shaw once has said: "Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it." So if Iraqis had enough of Saddam, then it's not up to Blair or to Bush to muster young citizens and take that "acceptable" cost. Iraqi people should have revolted themselves. No pain, no gain.
But by letting the one person live you are deciding for the 100 people that they must die, therefore both choices are the same. The only difference is that 100 people dieing is in my opinion a worse outcome.
To follow that logic, a government would be justified in selecting one person, removing their internal organs, and distributing them between numerous people in need of transplants. If they don't do that, then they'll have let those people in need of transplants die.
Yes this is a very good question, and goes to the heart of Tony Blair's belief that the invasion of Iraq was morally righteous. In general I would agree that I am not qualified to make such a decision - nobody is. To make such a decision is to weigh the relative values of people's lives, and to decide that one person can be sacrificed for the good of others - this is a utilitarian perspective which seeks the greatest good for the greatest number, but it still makes you a murderer. It is no consolation to those you kill, or their families, that their deaths may help others. It is always a violation of the most fundamental of human rights, the right to life itself. When do we have the right to kill someone? Never. But real things happen in the real world and we have to make difficult decisions. I was reading the Human Rights Watch World Report 2004 the other night; this is an organisation which has actually advocated military intervention on humanitarian grounds in some cases - Bosnia and Rwanda for instance. This is what they say: [size=-1]In our view, as a threshold matter, humanitarian intervention that occurs without the consent of the relevant government can be justified only in the face of ongoing or imminent genocide, or comparable mass slaughter or loss of life. To state the obvious, war is dangerous. In theory it can be surgical, but the reality is often highly destructive, with a risk of enormous bloodshed. Only large-scale murder, we believe, can justify the death, destruction, and disorder that so often are inherent in war and its aftermath. Other forms of tyranny are deplorable and worth working intensively to end, but they do not in our view rise to the level that would justify the extraordinary response of military force. Only mass slaughter might permit the deliberate taking of life involved in using military force for humanitarian purposes.[/size] http://www.hrw.org/wr2k4/3.htm So if the killing of hundreds or thousands of people is actually happening in the moment, and military intervention is the only way it can be stopped, HRW supports the use of warfare - involving the inevitable killing of innocents - to stop a wider slaughter. While war should always be viewed as morally reprehensible and never morally good by any right-thinking person, I find this position hard to disagree with. What they are saying is that if any alternative method exists, that method should be pursued, no matter how difficult, dangerous, thankless, expensive or arduous. And in no case is military intervention ever justified other than in the immediate, emergency situation of protecting people who are being killed or are about to be killed.
The only way I could possibly answer this would be by looking at it from a subjective viewpoint. How bad would things have to have got in the UK for us to welcome a foreign invasion that would kill a great many of our friends and neighbours? Well Margaret Thatcher wouldn't have made me welcome an invading army and neither would any of the prime ministers we've had in my memory. So supposing we had been occupied by Hitler or another invading enemy? Well then possibly yes. If my friends were being dragged off to the ghettos and labour camps then maybe so, but I would want to be part of that fight, not resist it and I wouldn't want that help to come from another country whose values and beliefs were so unlike mine that I'd never be able to adapt to this new way of life that I was being promised. Or what about living in the middle ages as a peasant under the feudal laws? Even then I think I'd be uncertain about it, I'd only really trust the people I already knew, I wouldn't particularly welcome one set of lawlords being replaced by another. I might welcome a newer, more liberal way of life but I'd have to be fully sure that I could trust the liberating army, I would want to know that we weren't about to be exploited by a new regime. _____ Put it another way ... If there was an Arab superpower looking at our system, and they thought it was corrupt because our strange voting system, our royal family, our lack of morals or our seemingly lawless ways ... I doubt very much that I'd want to be liberated into their way of life. ______ I understand the question but it's so tough to answer it for a people whose lives and standards are so very different from our own. However, I wouldn't want to see anyone die at the hands of a liberating army. I would lose my trust in them instantly
