--- Dan Minette <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I think you alluded to what isn't black or white in > both cases. I agree, > it doesn't matter that some people think the actions > in Rwanda and the > actions by the North Korean government are justified > and moral. They > aren't, they were and are evil. What isn't black > and white is the response > to that evil. One moral reason for not intervening > immediately in North > Korea is that it would probably result hundreds of > thousands of South > Korean casualties.
> Dan M. Sure. I mean, I _don't know_ what to do about North Korea. I'm perfectly willing to admit this. Anyone who claims that they do know what to do about North Korea and are so certainly right that everyone who disagrees with them is ignorant or stupid has, well, a different view of the world than I do. There are lots of hard questions in politics. What there are much fewer of is hard _moral_ questions. Let me use an example that came up in a class I was auditing three years ago. Some Republicans - I don't remember whom - were declaring that missile defense was a moral issue - it was moral or immoral to support missile defense (they argued that it was immoral to oppose missile defense). Most of the class agreed that it was a moral issue (although not necessarily on the same side as the Republicans). I didn't, and don't. It's _not_ a moral issue. It's a practical issue. Is this a good idea or not? Suppose you oppose missile defense, it's implemented over your opposition, and that system successfully intercepts a North Korean ICBM. Does that make you immoral for opposing it? Or, suppose you oppose it, you successfully defeat it, and a North Korean missile destroys LA, unhindered by any defense system? What's your moral position then? Casting that argument in a moral light is, I felt then and felt today, fundamentally unproductive. But that doesn't mean that there _are_ no black and white issues. If, on September 11th at 12:00pm, you weren't saying that the attack was evil in every particular and the people who launched it needed to be stopped, you aren't engaging in sophisticated, moral thinking. You were just engaging in moral masturbation, refraining from "judgment" for any of a variety of reasons, all of them bad. If you can't say that North Korea's government (or Saddam Hussein) is evil, and destroying them would be a good thing, black and white, simple as that, then that's not sophistication, it's sophistry. We can argue about means, and whether it's worth the costs, and whatnot. That's fine. But arguing about ends as clear cut as those - that's a different thing entirely. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
