Lame Duck Wisdom
Via Mike Tomasky, some words of wisdom from outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert:
Were a regional war to break out in the next year or two and were we to enter into a military confrontation with Syria, I have no doubt that we’d defeat them soundly. We are stronger than they. Israel is the strongest country in the Middle East. We could contend with any of our enemies or against all of our enemies combined and win. The question that I ask myself is, what happens when we win? First of all, we’d have to pay a painful price.
And after we paid the price, what would we say to them? “Let’s talk.” And what would the Syrians say to us? “Let’s talk about the Golan Heights.”
So, I ask: Why enter a war with the Syrians, full of losses and destruction, in order to achieve what might be achieved without paying such a heavy price?
Too bad we never quite seem to be able to get this kind of insight from an Israeli political leader actually in a position to do something. It’s worth noting, meanwhile, that Olmert’s basic point here is generally applicable and has nothing in particular to do with Israel and Syria. Under modern conditions, warfare is almost invariably a negative-sum enterprise whereas peacetime activities such as trade and tourism are positive-sum. Basically, there are a wide range of possible settlements — some more favorable to one party, others more favorable to the other party — that would be more favorable to both parties than would be an escalation of conflict. If you think, for example, about the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir it’s clear that the cost to both countries of the decades-worth of conflict (not only in terms of direct costs, but also things like the opportunity costs entailed by having a very poor country like Pakistan poor so much money into a nuclear arms race) is much higher than the cost of any conceivable resolution of the issue. And that’s to say nothing of the prospect that tens of millions of people will someday die in a nuclear exchange. But obsession with issues of relative gain — worry that if you settle for anything less than a maximally favorable agreement you’ll “look weak” or some such — tends to block mutually beneficial agreements.
67 Responses to “Lame Duck Wisdom”
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December 2nd, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Right, which is why having an honest broker is so critical in these situations. Acceding to a solution suggested by a neutral minimizes the vulnerability of each side to suggestions by critics that it was an insufficiently tough or smart negotiator.
December 2nd, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Um, OK. From a blogger famous for charts, I don’t really see any measuring “favorability” to any particular party. That’s probably because it’s pretty difficult, if not impossible to measure. And that is at least in part because favorability is pretty subjective, even within the subgroups of a particular party (Israeli communities living near the Golan as opposed to those living in the Negev probably have different measures of favorability). I assume that the argument implies that settlement where Israel gives up the Golan Heights in exchange for peace with Syria is much more favorable to Israel than war with Syria. That is quite possible. But it is also possible that the increase in the vulnerability of Israel’s civilian population when Syria controls positions from which it is easy to bomb said populations is less favorable than a low scale conflict with Syria. But Olmert does not have to deal with the latter scenario now that he is a lame duck so he can wax on about how nice it would be if we all got along.
December 2nd, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Apropos of this topic, there is a report from the Saban Center calling on the US to acquiesce in a nuclear Iran and begin talks with Hamas. Mr. Don Williams would have us believe that Hiam Saban is a militant hawk who believes in Israel uber alles. This report from an organization founded by the latter proves that, as I have been claiming for years, Mr. Saban is an appeaser and that Mr. Williams is full of shit.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1227702404053&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
December 2nd, 2008 at 1:38 pm
All of this misses the crucial fact that if we just have a strong enough will, we can always get whatever we want.
December 2nd, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Appeasing Apartheid Israel and its bund within the U.S. of course brought us 9/11, helped to cripple our economy, and conferred upon us internationally the leprous status that Apartheid Israel currently enjoys. Olmert’s consensus is one shared by most of the the old Shin Bet and Mossad hands and only the tinfoil moonbats like SLC and Caroline Glick are still pushing for a Zionazi extermination of the “filthy shvatz goyim” (i.e. Palestinians) as a way to insure The Jewish State’s safety and survival.
December 2nd, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Like Richard Cohen said in the NYT, Obama and Clinton have to show some tough love and force Isral to evacuate the West Bank instead of always supporting AIPAC/Likud policies.
December 2nd, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Re: Under modern conditions, warfare is almost invariably a negative-sum enterprise whereas peacetime activities such as trade and tourism are positive-sum.
Thus is perfectly summed up the decadence of the modern liberal-bourgeois civilization, which cannot envision anything mnore important than comfort, and which cannot conceive of anything for which it might be worthwhile to give one’s life for. Mr. Yglesias evidently likes the idea of a nation of shopkeepers, and can’t even understand why for hundreds of years the Spanish and French threw that term of abuse at the English. His utopia is the utopia of the soft and the flabby, those people with nothing to live or die for, who can see no value in struggle, in suffering, and in renunciation. Well, all I can say is that that isn’t paradise to me, it seems more like hell. Keep your nation of shopkeepers, Mr. Yglesias.
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Hector, what Marine battalion were you in?
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Matt is correct but a credible threat of going to war is necessary to get any kind of bargaining power. The classic game theory experiment here is the “ultimatum game.” If you have to divide $100 between yourself and someone else, but they can refuse your offer, in which case you get nothing, how much do you offer? Game theory says $1, because the recipient will be better off with $1 than $0 and will accept the deal. This is not how people actually behave. Not only that, but if you replicate a similar experiment on primates they exhibit the same behavior as humans and reject “unfair” deals. This is actually not irrational when placed in a larger context. If you (as an individual or a country) are going to be regularly placed in situations where you need to negotiate the equivalent of dividing $100 then you can’t develop the reputation of always being willing to settle for $1. If you do, everyone will screw you and take $99 for themselves every time and over time this will make you much worse off. If instead you develop a reputation for demanding nothing less than your due then you are much more likely to average out to $50 per deal, leaving you much better off. This will, however, require you to actually put your money where your mouth is from time to time and actually fight a war. Otherwise everyone will see that you’re just talk. This is the evolutionary logic for why monkeys behave this way. So long as the cost of occasionally fighting is less than the benefits of a reputation for toughness, it all works out. One could argue that the cost of modern warfare is such that this kind of calculus no longer holds, or even that it hasn’t held since we developed warfare at all, but this is why we primates, rationally or not, believe that “looking weak” is such a bad thing.
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:06 pm
“We could contend with any of our enemies or against all of our enemies combined and win. ”
Any country that gets in excess of 20 billion dollar “aid” can claim that. What has Israel achieved by itself except ethnically cleansing Palestinians since its illegal inception?
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:07 pm
This is all lovely, i.e. Matt’s comment and the comments here (well, let’s face it, some of the comments are idiotic, but whatever…), but the important thing is what Olmert said. I would like Obama to greet Ms. Lipni or whoever the next Israeli PM is, and wave that interview in their face: “This is what we expect–we expect you to speak and act like this. Not when you leave office, but right now.”
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:09 pm
But it’s not all bad for Israel. AIPAC has managed to install as many Israelis in Obama’s administration as possible.
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Hector,
Just curious: Have you been doing any personal struggling and killing and shopkeeper-eradication lately? Or are you more a fan of vicarious forms of renunciation?
Me, I’m too busy with my genocidal war of baby-extermination to maintain a shop.
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:15 pm
DCReader, you make a great point. Not that you are implying otherwise, but I’d note that international relations are more complex and nuanced than monkey experiments. But that doesn’t mean those monkey experiments don’t provide some important insight. It is precisely the behavior that leads to a reputation for toughness that has allowed Israel to make peace with Jordan and Egypt after fighting wars with them.
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Farid: Kicking your ass repeatedly, I believe.
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Hector,
You realize that Napoleon was the one to dismiss the English as a “Nation of shopkeepers”? As for the Spanish, the English had to bail their asses out against Napoleon as well!
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Ehud Olmert hates Jews.
December 2nd, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Hector is a nut. In another era, he’s be out there murdering people in the name of God so that he could feel like his life meant something. We should consider ourselves lucky that thanks to technology he restricts his efforts to annoying us.
December 2nd, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Thus is perfectly summed up the decadence of the modern liberal-bourgeois civilization, which cannot envision anything mnore important than comfort, and which cannot conceive of anything for which it might be worthwhile to give one’s life for.
Hector, you need to rent “Patton”. “There goes old ‘blood and guts’” “Yep, his guts, our blood.”
Or maybe “Gone With the Wind”. Listen to Rhett Butler. Carefully.
Or “All Quiet on the Western Front”. Or “Apocalypse Now”. Or “Platoon”.
War isn’t about glory and serving a cause bigger than yourself. It isn’t about “dying for your country”, as Scott (as Patton) observes, it’s about making the other dumb bastard die for his.
How many people have lost their lives because some politician or military commander or dictator decided that there would be glory in sending them to die.
Hector, your moral compass is seriously screwed up.
December 2nd, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Trevor,
Caroline Glick is a certified psychopath. Sure jpost has always been the hangout for racist zionist (redundent adjective?)but “Ms” Glick is definitely an interesting mental case – I am sure lots of psychologist would love to work on her to figure out how much hate, paranoia and low self esteem a human can embody.
December 2nd, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Karl Kraus:
December 2nd, 2008 at 4:12 pm
But it is also possible that the increase in the vulnerability of Israel’s civilian population when Syria controls positions from which it is easy to bomb said populations is less favorable than a low scale conflict with Syria. But Olmert does not have to deal with the latter scenario now that he is a lame duck so he can wax on about how nice it would be if we all got along.
It’s not a matter of Israel & Syria holding hands & singing Kumbaya together. Rather, it’s the benefits it would bring to Israel in the form of cutting off a crucial source of weapons for Hizbollah, eliminating a major sponsor of Hamas, & taking a key ally out of Iran’s sphere of influence.
As for the vulnerability of Israel’s civilan population to Syrian missiles, Syria already has ballistic missile capability and range that envelopes all Israel’s population centres, so whether or not Israel retains the Golan Heights is irrelevant to eliminating that threat. I will also quote Martin Van Creveld, one of Israel’s foremost military historians:
December 2nd, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Dilan Esper,
Don’t be silly. Of course war is, as a general matter, undesirable. It’s certainly not intrinsically evil, though, and it’s often necessary. I don’t have a problem with trying to find peaceful solutions if possible. I do have a problem with people denying that there’s anything noble, honorable, or glorious about taking up the sword for the cause of justice and charity. The fact is this world is a largely evil place, dominated by evil powers, and that as long as that lasts, i.e. until the end of the world, the evil will war against the good. Permanent peace is a foolish illusion.
And it’s simply foolish to say that war is a negative-sum game. Someone always loses, that’s true, and the winners always pay a heavy cost, but who are you to say the cost isn’t worth it? As if the national liberation struggles against tyranny in Vietnam, Cuba, Roumania, Greece, and other places never happened. The Vietnamese today don’t regard the Vietnam War as a tragedy, they regard it as their finest hour- their leaders have said as much.
December 2nd, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Too bad we never quite seem to be able to get this kind of insight from an Israeli political leader actually in a position to do something.
says Matt snarkily.
Buddy, you went to harvard. go back and read a history book. Try Begin and Egypt. Try Rabin and the Oslo accords. Heck, try Netanyahu and Wye.
Geez, is it just the case that “Progressives” need always blame Israel.
So i’ve got one for you. If a Palestinian leader told the same type of thing to his people — we’d be over with this conflict in a heartbeat. In. A. Heartbeat.
December 2nd, 2008 at 4:49 pm
If you think, for example, about the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir it’s clear that the cost to both countries of the decades-worth of conflict (not only in terms of direct costs, but also things like the opportunity costs entailed by having a very poor country like Pakistan poor so much money into a nuclear arms race) is much higher than the cost of any conceivable resolution of the issue.
and thus is laid bare Matt’s limited understanding of the world. Many would see the cost of peace as higher – in the trangression of their identities — than the continuing cost of war. Indeed, when you’re a jihadist and you define your life by the struggle, giving it up to open a curry shop isn’t really on the menu.
December 2nd, 2008 at 5:05 pm
As to the ostensible subject of this post, Kashmir, it should remain in Indian hands. The cost of ‘peace’, if by ‘peace’ you mean giving it up, would mean backing down in the face of Islamist aggression, would cause no end of trouble. The Pakistanis have utterly no legitimate claim to Kashmir, and they must not be allowed to pretend that they have.
December 2nd, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Re Farid
Any country that gets in excess of 20 billion dollar “aid” can claim that. What has Israel achieved by itself except ethnically cleansing Palestinians since its illegal inception
1. Mr. Farid, of course, as is the case with Israel bashers, greatly overstates the aid given to Israel which amounts to 3 billion/year. Actually, to some extent, I agree with Mr.Farid that this sum, along with the 2.2 billion/year given to Egypt, is a bribe started by James Earl Carter for the purpose of getting Israel and Egypt to behave themselves after signing a “peace treaty.”
2. Actually, Israel has achieved quite a lot. For instance, the Intel dual core chip, which is probably in Mr. Farids’ computer, was developed by an Intel laboratory in Israel. I might add that, in addition to Intel, Microsoft and several other software developers have software development facilities in Israel. In addition, the reactive armor used in the US M1 tank was developed in Israel for use in the Merkava series of tanks.
3. Mr. Farid accuses Isreal of the “ethnic cleansing” of Arabs. If so, they are piss poor at it as there are some 1 million Arabs current residing in Israel. The Arab states are much better ethnic cleansers, having ethnically cleansed some 800,000 Jews from Arab countries such as Iraq.
As an aside to Mr. Yglesias, I wonder how long he is going to allow the son of a whore Mr. Trevor to post his antisemitic comments on this blog?
December 2nd, 2008 at 5:49 pm
SLC
Your level of sophisticatio is a point of envy around here. Thanks for your well-researched, backed by evidence and facts comments.
What’s rate these days? .99 cents a post by AIPAC?
December 2nd, 2008 at 7:06 pm
And it’s simply foolish to say that war is a negative-sum game. Someone always loses, that’s true, and the winners always pay a heavy cost, but who are you to say the cost isn’t worth it? As if the national liberation struggles against tyranny in Vietnam, Cuba, Roumania, Greece, and other places never happened. The Vietnamese today don’t regard the Vietnam War as a tragedy, they regard it as their finest hour- their leaders have said as much.
This is much too reductive, Hector. Yes, sometimes war is necessary. But even necessary wars are tragedies– failures of humans to resolve problems in ways that don’t involve killing lots of people.
And as far as wars of national liberation are concerned, it depends on who you ask. I understand the perspective of, say, the Cubans who fought to overthrow Batista, or the Vietnamese who tried to throw out the French and the Americans. But when you say that the Vietnamese regard this as “their finest hour”, do you mean all Vietnamese? As I recall, there were plenty who sympathized with the South, and plenty who were tortured or killed by the Communists. And there are plenty more whose sons or brothers or fathers died in the war, and plenty more who simply were the war’s innocent victims. Have you asked all of them whether they regard this as the country’s finest hour, or do you simply believe the regime’s propaganda on the subject?
You are glorifying war. Even from a Christian perspective, it seems to me that there is a huge gap between, say, just war theory that says that war, in certain limited circumstances, is acceptable and your belief in killing for a cause bigger than yourself. Your type of thinking would have justified the Crusades.
And, of course, it goes without saying that it is a weird morality that values the lives of blastocysts and zygotes to a greater extent than the lives of teenagers sent to die and innocent villagers unfortunate to be caught in the firing line. Of course, war (at least when fought by males) upholds traditional gender roles, while legal abortion subverts them. Not that this might be influencing your thinking, of course.
December 2nd, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Is the occupation of the Golan Heights really about Israeli security? I suspect it’s about an aquifer that helps the Israelis live a European lifestyle in the desert. Israel appears to me to be a victim of its own failure to adapt. If Arabs don’t respond by leaving their homeland or dying to appease Israel it’s only because the Arabs are being reasonably fair.
December 2nd, 2008 at 7:30 pm
Re SLC fan
I have never made so much as a dime from AIPAC, an organization to which I do not belong. I would not belong to any organization that would have me as a member.
December 2nd, 2008 at 8:02 pm
So you are just a one man zionist? come on how much? it’s well documented that AIPAC has hired thugs and hooligan to bully folks online.
These people are the only reason why the phrase “shameless douchebags” has been invented.
December 2nd, 2008 at 8:30 pm
SLC Fan,
How exactly does someone bully folks online?
Considering there’s no physical contact whatsoever, how does someone intimidate someone else on an open comments section where people are free to post whatever they’d like to?
Hmmm, could it be that you’re bullied b/c you have a low IQ and you are not able to muster facts and cogent argument against your “foe”.
That must be it.
December 2nd, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Dilan Esper,
You ought to be ashamed of ourself. It takes a lot of gall to say that killing perfectly innocent unborn children is OK, but killing enemy soldiers and tyrannical leaders is not. Of course, it’s not a surprise to me that you support abortion and oppose war. It’s a curious paradox of history that those who begin by hating death end by hating life. More than one of the more unstable Gnostic leaders followed that path, and the modern people like Dilan as well. Neither war or the death penalty are forbidden by Christian teaching, while abortion most certainly is. Christianity is the faith of the knight as much as of the monk.
The finest hour of old Byzantium was on that Tuesday morning in 1453 when they looked out at Mehmed’s army and knew that not one of them would survive the night. The Emperor told his men that he was asking all of them to die for their country, their faith, and their king, and that defeat was a foregone conclusion. But they were determined to make the Turk pay a great cost for subduing them. If you cannot appreciate the courage, the self-sacrifice and the honor that led those men to give up their lives to preserve Christian Byzantium for just a few more hours, then I really pity you.
December 2nd, 2008 at 10:18 pm
“How exactly does someone bully folks online?”
Someone who stifles dialogue online and calls people name is acting like a school bully. Seriously, sue your parents for failing to teach you critical thinking skills.
Stop being an AIPAC douche nozzle too.
December 2nd, 2008 at 10:53 pm
Hector, have you ever served in the military, and have you ever deployed to a combat area? If so, what was your assignment? I know this is the internet, but please try to be honest and please don’t dodge.
December 2nd, 2008 at 11:21 pm
I wrote – “How exactly does someone bully folks online?”
SLCF wrote — Someone who stifles dialogue online and calls people name is acting like a school bully
and then proceeds to call me a douche nozzle
SLCF — a little irony here? or are you actually a Zionist plant who makes anti-Zionists look bad?
Look, moron, just have the brainpower to state some facts and figures — and some history Pre-2000. what are you 12?
Look up Begin, Rabin, Peres, Barak — they said the exact same things Olmert is saying now. To treat this as a revelation is, hmmm, how do i say — ignorant!
December 3rd, 2008 at 12:20 am
I think you guys are misunderstanding Hector, whom I don’t generally agree with.
I think he was trying to point out that Matt’s analysis about negative-sum war, and its whole frame of cost-benefit, etc., etc., is overly liberal (in the original sense) and rationalistic. It doesn’t account for either a) our general tendency as a species to murderous and despicable behavior, or what Christians call original sin; b) people and movements who, around the world, don’t think in terms of rational cost-benefit analyses (Mumbai, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Dr. Strangelove, etc., etc.); and c) that even if we are talking about actors who DO think in cost-benefit analyses, say the government of two states (India and Pakistan, e.g.), the contingencies of history are such that their analyses may be deeply flawed, partial, and misguided. The information is simply not there in many crises for a government to make a fully rational decision — I think August 1914 is pretty good proof of that.
On the other hand, I don’t really buy Hector’s valorization of irrationalism and military glory. Far better to be a decent nation of shopkeepers than a vainglorious nation of arrogant officers and crippled veterans (which is what France became after Bonaparte’s reign).
December 3rd, 2008 at 1:20 am
The problem with Olmert saying what he says NOW is that he wasn’t saying it THEN, and when he started saying anything remotely like what he’s saying NOW is WHY he’s not now in charge.
Because the Zionist freakazoids run Israel – not guys from the left who want to make peace. Not that Olmert is even middling left. Nobody who wants peace runs Israel and if they even get the LOOK like they might want to slow things down in the ethnic cleansing department, they get kicked out – like Olmert.
Jerks like SLC and Hector run Israel. Quoting Begin? The guy who blew up the King David Hotel? The TERRORIST?
War is the health of the state. Get rid of the state, you get rid of war.
Email me when this happens.
In the meantime, somebody take out Israel. That country needs to be either destroyed or taken over and renamed Palestine and handed back to Palestinians. Letting the current idiots run the place is like leaving the Nazis running Germany. It’s going to come to a bad end.
December 3rd, 2008 at 5:31 am
Re Richard Steven Hack
Jerks like SLC and Hector run Israel. Quoting Begin? The guy who blew up the King David Hotel? The TERRORIST?
Actually, mr. Begin was not implicated in the event cited by Mr. Hack. It was Yitzak Shamir.
As for Mr. Olmert, hopefully he will soon be joining Mr. Hack as a convicted felon, although his sojourn in the slammer will probably be considerably less then the 9 years Mr. Hack spent in Leavenworth. But then again, Mr. Olmert didn’t hold up a bank at gunpoint, unlike Mr. Hack.
December 3rd, 2008 at 7:35 am
Note to all: It’s not that Hector’s in favor of war, per se — he just is convinced that the basis of modern liberal society tears apart the sorts of bonds he’d prefer people to have. I.e., it’s better to dedicate oneself to the proper Anglican Christian goal and endure pain on that path than to submit to meaningless hedonism and consumption, etc., etc. That, and his Crusades fetish.
December 3rd, 2008 at 11:25 am
Whenever I see the phrase “nation of shopkeepers,” I think about the picture of the Korean guy on the roof of his store with an AK-47 during the LA riots.
Don’t diss the shopkeepers. Margaret Thatcher was a shopkeeper’s daughter.
December 3rd, 2008 at 12:08 pm
IIRC, Hector serves in Opus Dei’s Shock Post Division, Special Hairshirt Squad.
December 3rd, 2008 at 1:15 pm
You ought to be ashamed of ourself. It takes a lot of gall to say that killing perfectly innocent unborn children is OK, but killing enemy soldiers and tyrannical leaders is not.
What did the “enemy soldiers”, who are often conscripted teenagers, do to forfeit their right to life Hector? And what did all the innocent villagers, civilian noncombatants whose only false move was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, do to forfeit theirs?
Your value system is one where the only right to life that counts is the right of a life living inside of a woman’s body. As I said, it’s all about preserving traditional gender roles. The wars that you trumpet, fought by manly men, do that. The reason you think abortion is so bad is not because it kills innocents– you have no problem with killing millions of them– but that it subverts gender roles. In that sense, you are an almost perfect caricature of a modern pro-lifer.
December 3rd, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Dilan Esper,
Well, first of all, since they’ve reached the age of reason, they are as fallen as you or me. Unborn babies and children before the age of reason are the only ones who are truly _innocent_. Secondly, to knowingly intend and enact the killing of innocent civilians is generally forbidden, under the same logic that forbids abortion. The inevitable but unintended killing of civilians as a side effect is not (see “double effect”). Under the same logic, giving a woman medication for a serious medical condition that has the side effect of killing her baby, is not a form of intentional abortion and should not be considered illicit.
In some cases military necessity may make it almost inevitable, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. The bombing of Hiroshima and the massacre at My Lai were grave crimes for precisely the same reason that abortion is a grave moral crime.
A conscript does have a few choices- they’re not great choices, but one has the choice to revolt or desert, even if that will cause one’s death. For a German soldier in WWII, the only honorable choices would be to either mutiny or desert, and someone who chose not to do either is justly liable to the same death as any other German soldier. A child in the womb has no such choice.
Your arguments are so silly I can’t really credit you believe them yourself. What you support is the equivalent of carrying out two Hiroshimas every year, with the difference that while the Japanese victims, while innocent as individuals, were at least _collectively_ guilty of horrid crimes, the unborn child is guilty of nothing at all. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Dilan, but I don’t suppose you will be because you’re a perfect creature of modern liberal civilization who thinks shame is something archaic and old-fashioned.
December 3rd, 2008 at 6:52 pm
Unborn babies and children before the age of reason are the only ones who are truly _innocent_.
So my life isn’t as valuable as a zygote. Wow.
The inevitable but unintended killing of civilians as a side effect is not (see “double effect”).
The principle of “double effect” is nothing more than excuse-making for very bad acts. What it says is that you can take actions that you know will result in even mass homicide as long as you maintain the fiction that the “reason” you are doing it is for some other purpose other than the killing. It is not a serious standard of morality. You could justify the Holocaust under the Principle of Double Effect as long as the Jews were the only fuel available at the camps and the commandants needed to keep warm.
To use a less hypothetical example, you could use the principle of double effect to justify a no condoms in Africa principle that would cause 15 million Africans to die of HIV whose deaths were preventable, as long as one maintained the fiction that the purpose of the policy was to promote sexual virtue and not to infect Africans with HIV.
Any serious standard morality works the way the American / English common law tort system works– if you take an action substantially certain that the deaths will occur, that is exactly the same as intending the deaths. Implement the principle of double effect and a lot of people get killed. And it’s even worse than utilitarianism because the stated purpose doesn’t even have to outweigh the value of the lives taken.
Again, though, that really isn’t my point. My point is no matter how many times you deny it, the only lives that truly have value in your belief system are the ones inside of women. And that’s because you have a deep-seated hatred of them, and have never come to grips with the fact that Western society has rejected the ignorant teachings of 2,000 years ago on the role of women and charted a better course.
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