RE: President Obama: Do you really love America?
February 26, 2015 at 3:12 pm
(This post was last modified: February 26, 2015 at 3:22 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(February 26, 2015 at 2:53 pm)DeistPaladin Wrote:(February 26, 2015 at 1:42 pm)Chuck Wrote: 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)?
It is hard to say they are not morally equivalent when the men who supposedly accidentally killed someone both benefits from the killing, and can not but have known the killing was a highly probable result when he undertook the lethal action nominally for a different purpose.
It is implausible that in cases where a country waging war nominally attacked many military targets and incurred many civilian causalties, it could have continuously failed to predict the civilian casualties had resulted. It is not an accident when civilian casualties can be predicted.
The question then becomes can you disinterestedly believe the country's stated intention that it did not seek to benefit in any way from civilian casualties which it had incurred and which must have been predicted, when such civilians casualties can plausibly advance the country's war aims as much as, or more than, destruction of the military targets in question.
