End and the Means

[Eilonnwy]

How was he a hijacker on flight 93 when there were no survivors???

Sorry I wasn't clear. I meant potential Hijacker. He was actually prevented by security to get into the US and be the 20th Hijacker. I found his name, it's Mohamed Al-Khatani and because he was tortured he'll probably never be prosecuted.

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Rather than use a hypothetical senario, we will use a real one. The nuclear bombing of Japan at the end of the 2nd world war killed thousands of innocent people. This could be said as morraly wrong.
However, the alternitive was far worse. A land invasion of Japan would have turned out like Okinawa (spelt wrong?) where thousands of Japanese died rather than surrender. This carnage could be mulitplied 100 times for the mainland.

We have the situation that it was either thousands of deaths or millions. In the long run, millions of lives were saved at the expense of thousands. This does not make the deaths any better or morraly right but it does justify the act. In a democracy everyone is equal hence the rights of the many must be taken over the rights of the few.

However, that being said there is certianly a grey area.

This is one of those situations where it's really hard for me to voice what I think. The best way I can verbalize it is philisophically I don't agree with war and I don't agree with killing. I always, ideally, support actions that don't involve killing or violence. So on principal, I don't support the nuclear attacks on Japan. However realistically, while not condoning the actions, I accept them as what had to happen based on the knowledge and capabilities they had at that time.

Why would I taker such a wishy-washy kind of stance? Because I believe saying that such an action is morally right makes it okay in the future. It sets a precedent. But I think the precedent that should be set is to always avoid those situations by advancing our intellect, our science, and our peacemaking abilities. We should always avoid these rock and hard place situations, so I would never consider what happened with Japan in WWII morally right. It's never okay to kill innocents, and if we make it okay then we as a society are morally bankrupt.

When I think of ends justifying a means though, I think in general to use that statement is to say the means are morally bankrupt otherwise the phrase would never need to be use. And I'm not so sure anything that is morally bankrupt is "justified".

I hope I'm clear, philosophy is always tough for me because I have a hard to verbalizing my thoughts.