President Obama: Do you really love America?

[DeistPaladin]

That is an impracticable theory.

Intent is not such a key to any practical moral analysis because 1. intent is subject to interested interpretation as well as outright dissemination, and 2. The difference between objective outcome and supposed intent can not be trivially dismissed.

How does this work? One man accidentally kills someone. Another man commits pre-meditated murder. Are they morally equivalent since the objective outcome is the same (someone is dead)?

Let's say the first man was driving while drunk when he killed someone accidentally. In that case, he has moral responsibility for his actions but would you still say he's a moral equivalent to a pre-meditated murderer since the objective outcome is the same? Is negligent manslaughter the same morally in your mind as pre-meditated murder?

In my often cited example in morality discussions, Dr. Miles Benet Dyson is working on a breakthrough in AI. He has no idea his invention will be used to create an army of killer robots that will start a nuclear war. The objective outcome would be the same as if he worked on the AI project intending to create an army of killer robots, no? So are you still insisting that intent is not so key to moral analysis?

Intent is key to discussion of the morality of actions.

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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?

Deliberate pre-meditated murder is not morally equivalent to manslaughter, even if the manslaughter was done under extreme negligence.

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?

More information please. Is the terrorist armed with a nuclear weapon intent on causing many more deaths and this may be our only opportunity to kill him?

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Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich - Peter Ustinov

Bull.

Setting out to murder is not the same thing morally as accidentally killing an innocent bystander. A police officer that is apprehending a violent killer that accidentally shoots a nearby citizen by mistake is not the equivalent morally to the violent killer.

Note the nice euphemism: Collateral damage. Note that it dehumanizes the victims, which in itself is intent.

Not necessarily. It underscores that there was no intention to kill the innocent civilians. Unintended civilian casualties in war are not morally equivalent to setting out to murder civilians.

It's made so that the public won't be tempted to give them a face or a name. Note that - regardless of intent - civilian casualties aren't collaterals for their loved ones and it's a natural urge to hate those inflicting the damage. It was so with the carpet bombings and it's the same with Drone strikes. If you kill granny, your intent is secondary. Someone will care and not in a good way for the ones having dropped the bomb.

Are we discussing the practicality of a policy or the morality of it? In my police officer analogy, I'm sure the loved ones of the mistakenly shot bystander will be very angry about it. They may file charges of "negligence". They may feel more could have been done to avoid the tragic loss. For the sake of argument, we could even say there WAS negligence involved in the mistaken shooting. This makes the police officer morally equivalent to the serial killer in what way?