(February 26, 2015 at 10:05 am)Jacob(smooth) Wrote: Is it though? Why is intentional killing civilians to cause fear worse than taking an action you know will kill civilians to serve some other end?The thing is this --- if it's a terrorist that you know will kill 500 civilians if you don't kill him first then IMHO you can't just wash your hands of the deaths of the 500 because you didn't do it yourself. I believe we are responsible for our deliberate inactions as well as our actions. By threatening to kill 500 and using another 50 as human shields, it is the terrorist, not you, who prevented the situation from being resolved without civilian casualties.
Thought experiment. An enemy combatant sits in a school. I bomb the school with the intention of killing the terrorist, incidentally killing 50 innocent kids. Is that more moral than deliberately killing the kids to make the terrorist too scared to attack me?
I think, at the heart of this disagreement, is the question of how we with actions against inactions.
If I agreed with the moral premise that killing by action is wrong yet kling by inaction is A-okay (or even bad, but not at the same level as killing by action) then I would agree with the conclusion that carrying out the raid is wrong. But I don't. If you are in the position to act and know what the results of not doing so will be but choose not to act, I believe you are, if not just as responsible as if you did an action to cause such an effect, at least you are very *close* to it. So for me it is a question of -- carry out the raid and kill 50 innocent civilians - or sit it out and kill 500.
