:up:

he desire for vengeance itself can't be the justification. — Count Timothy von Icarus

No, but it can be a powerful motivation. It can also blind people to long-term goals or derail their original, reasoned intentions. I realize that's not a moral consideration. But, in long-lasting hostilities, where bitterness and smouldering rage are the daily diet of at least one of the participants, if not both, it is a common enough factor. The moral evaluations, justifications, rationalizations usually follow a long way behind the passions of the moment.

Just as with the good, there is a dignity and humanity you are dealing with in person, with the bad, there is a dignity and humanity you are disregarding in person, in barbaric and brutal ways of maiming, burning, cutting, etc. in person. — schopenhauer1

But I specifically said I wanted to address the morality of Group A vs. Group B not mix this up with the morality of the pilot vs the assassins. So, yes, it's easier to press a button and drop a bomb than to stab someone in the face. Easier for you. And that might make you more moral or not. But... I think there's a "trolley problem" issue with the intuition that because one group has the power of an advanced technology behind it that separates it physically from the results of its actions, those actions somehow become more humane or justified (the analogy in the trolley problem would be between pushing the fat man off the bridge onto the tracks to stop the train vs pulling a lever to open a trapdoor so he just falls on to them).

This presumption seems like a kind of moral blindness to me. It has the stink of Milgram's experiments to it. As if we just presume our nice respectable bombers are morally superior methods of killing because they represent more clearly political and scientific authority. They are more "civilised". (And yes we can add a bunch more context to get whatever result we want but I'm sticking to the view that removing context or presuming the background context to "even out" allows us to focus on our flawed intuition here.)

Here's a modified version of the OP where things are "evened out" a bit more. No further context should be necessary.

Scenario 1: Armed men of group A searching for a hidden route into an armaments factory of group B come into a residential neighborhood of group B and go from house to house shooting and using blunt force weapons such as axes against civilians that stand in their way. They go from house to house and butcher 100 civilians. They eventually find the route in and set the factory on fire, destroying it.

Scenario 2: A pilot of group B is conducting a strike on an armaments factory of group A. The flight is done at night to minimize civilian casualties. Fliers are also dropped to minimize casualties. And yet it is known that approximately 100 civilian casualties are still the likely outcome of the bombing. The bombs are dropped using a precision missile yet debris from the explosion does indeed kill 100 civilians.

Who is more moral? The leadership of group A who aimed and succeeded at destroying the armanents factory of group B at the cost of 100 civilian lives or the leadership of group B who did the same thing re group A but used different methods?

Without knowing the political context of these hostilities, any answer would be merely academic.

Yes, that's the point.

Not to have to focus on politics but on an ethical intuition re methods of warfare...

Not to have to focus on politics but on an ethical intuition re methods of warfare... — Baden

"The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose. War is merely the continuation of politics by other means."
~Carl von Clausewitz

Yes, but TPF category = Ethics. And the implications to how we think about these things are important imo (they allow advanced states to act under technological and political cover so to speak). If you just want to argue politics, we all know the thread that's being done on already.

The tactics used by groups have more to do with the technology and infrastructure available to the warring parties than their moral superiority. Sure, Israel's job would be easier if Hamas fighters all wore uniforms, grouped up under flags, had military bases far away from civilian populations, and abandoned guerrilla tactics and fought "conventionally". But would anyone logically do that if you have little to no relative war resources? No doubt the pilot zooming by at 350 knots, feels morally "cleaner" than the ground fighter looking ther victims in the eye. But again, that's more due to resource availability than moral superiority.

I think it's more about identification. Most posters here are from advanced western nations so we bomb. It's the Other that has to resort to terrorism and guerilla tactics.

This particular ethical question – either the OP or your revision – is conditioned by some political situation. Thus, my initial response ..

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/848961

But... the revision (at least) is my thought experiment and I stipulate it's not conditioned by some political situation (of any relevance to the ethical question).

Who is more moral? The leadership of group A who aimed and succeeded at destroying the armanents factory of group B at the cost of 100 civilian lives or the leadership of group B who did the same thing re group A but used different methods? — Baden

It takes a lot of aggression to kill a hundred people with an axe (I assume). One imagines that remotely launching a guided missile takes no aggression at all.

This is mentioned as a factor in gun violence in America. It's just fairly easy to shoot someone vs using a butcher knife, so we end up with gun shot wounds all over the place.

But I think the emotions involved work the other way as well. If you hear a heroic story about a fireman saving someone, yay! But if Bill Gates helps save millions of people by helping to fund vaccine research, nobody cares.

We usually have this difficulty of seeing someone or especially a country as both perpetrators and victims. For many, for some reason, it is very troubling when someone points out warcrimes or other dubious actions in an otherwise justified military action. This is because those who are typically pushing their own agenda will try to diminish the justification by pointing out the negative aspects. Yet the reality is what it is.

But then I come from a country where our Jews fought alongside Nazi Germany against Soviet Union. A country that defended itself alone against an invasion, but then was quite happy to try to gain more land when another brutal dictator attacked the previous brutal dictator that had attack us. In the end got it's ass kicked, but survived.

(A field synagogue on the front during the Continuation War in Syväri, actually very close to the German positions, who then were our brothers in arms. 4 Finnish-Jewish soldiers were given the Iron Cross, none of the accepted it.)


In fact, I had the honor of knowing one of such Finnish-Jewish war veteran, an anti-aircraft artillery reserve officer, who died at the age of 96 in 2014. He had a wonderful positive attitude towards life and was a true gentleman. I didn't believe first he had seen action on the front as nice and full of life he was (as war veterans often have emotional scars), but actually he had been wounded in combat. And he lived quite an remarkable life!

This presumption seems like a kind of moral blindness to me. It has the stink of Milgram's experiments to it. As if we just presume our nice respectable bombers are morally superior methods of killing because they represent more clearly political and scientific authority. They are more "civilised". (And yes we can add a bunch more context to get whatever result we want but I'm sticking to the view that removing context or presuming the background context to "even out" allows us to focus on our flawed intuition here.) — Baden

I gave context after but just sticking to the first paragraph, I’m sticking to that response. I don’t think the idea that dropping bombs being more scientific and civilized-seeming at all counters my response which was this:

Just as with the good, there is a dignity and humanity you are dealing with in person, with the bad, there is a dignity and humanity you are disregarding in person, in barbaric and brutal ways of maiming, burning, cutting, etc. in person. — schopenhauer1

There is a personal intimate nature to killing up close. To knife someone is more intimate than with a gun, a gun more intimate than a bomb.

However, providing just some context, if it is more than a “clean kill”, or if not “clean”, it was not just collateral damage, but you actually WANT to inflict maximum pain, horror, by maiming and raping, and bashing the civilians in a personal brutal way, versus WANTING to kill only enemy perpetrators BUT in the process impersonally killing civilians in collateral damage, that adds another dimension.

Who says either party "want" to do it more? They're soldiers and in both cases doing their jobs. Maybe the bomber gets a sadistic kick out of blowing children to bits and maybe he blows them up impersonally. Ditto with the direct killings. It's easy to argue that the more salient difference is that the bomber is taking a more cowardly route to killing. That hardly makes him morally superior, does it?

An analogy would be with eating meat. Some would say there's more honour in going out and hunting the animals ourselves. At least then we get to understand we're killing them rather than having some other party do it for us. It seems you think playing mental games with ourselves absolves us of responsibility for our actions. I don't. If you bomb civilians and kill them, you and those who directed you to do so are fully responsible for their deaths and suffering just as if you stabbed them in the face yourself. There is no magic intermediate party to take any share of that responsibility from you. It's simply a false moral intuition brought about by a lack of proximity.

Ditto with the direct killings. It's easy to argue that the more salient difference is that the bomber is taking a more cowardly route to murder. That hardly makes him morally superior, does it? — Baden

I mean I think you can tease out the moral standard there. If the bomber WANTS to inflict maximum damage or his superior does it’s just as morally culpable. If BOTH (the up close butcher and the removed bomber and his superior) want it, I still say there’s an added dimension when doing it to unarmed civilians up close. Both bad, one has an extra disregard attached to it.

If the bomber or superior truly DIDN’T want collateral damage, that does make a moral difference.

Some would say there's more honour in going out and hunting the animals ourselves. At least then we get to understand we're killing them rather than having some other party do it for us. It seems you think playing mental games with ourselves absolve us of responsibility for our actions. I don't. If you bomb civilians and kill them, you and those who directed you to do so are fully responsible for their deaths and suffering just as if you stabbed them in the face yourself. There is no magic intermediate party to take that responsibility from you. It's simply a false moral intuition brought about by a lack of proximity. — Baden

I think it’s precisely this that would make people possibly stop eating meat, so I don’t think this is some false sense of proximity. People don’t eat meat because they WANT to see the horror of bambi’s brains splattered! There’s a difference in wanting to eat meat, not because of some horror done to the animal, but because one wants the sustenance. It might not be the case, but people want to presume some sort of standard is being met with a “clean kill”.

If the bomber or superior truly DIDN’T want collateral damage, that does make a moral difference. — schopenhauer1

If that AND they had reason to believe their bombs would not cause collateral damage. If, on the other hand, they had reason to believe they would, no. Again there's no moral get-out-of-jail-free card in saying you don't want to do something but then choosing to do it. Their mental games with themselves can't excuse them of the known consequences of their actions. In fact, insofar as they facilitate more killing, they probably just make them worse people.

We can distill this to saying that knowingly killing civilians is an extreme moral wrong and the method by which they are killed (presuming the amount of suffering they endure to be equal) is of no consequence. The only justification for killing civilians would be to prevent an even greater moral wrong (e.g. the killing of even more civilians by your enemy). Not just the fact that there's any military target nearby or you're using an advanced technology to do so.

If that AND they had reason to believe their bombs would not cause collateral damage. If, on the other hand, they had reason to believe they would, no. Again there's no moral get-out-of-jail-free card in saying you don't want to do something but then choosing to do it. Their mental games with themselves can't excuse them of the known consequences of their actions. In fact, insofar as they facilitate more killing, they probably just make them worse people. — Baden

The original question was whether there is an aspect of killing up close that has some ethical dilemma dimension to it, and I added the affirmative and have some reasoning. In the spirit of charity in intellectual discourse, can we at least acknowledge the question was answered and that we have now moved onto a different question regarding intent and consequences?

You see the relation though, right? When we achieve some physical and emotional distance from our acts of killing we can start to leverage that into an illusory mitigation of moral responsibility.

Ty for the improved re-write. Certainly bombs smash children against walls as well (or walls against children.)

Would you rather have your baby shot to death or blown into little pieces by a bomb? Looking at it from the perspective that matters, it doesn't matter much. — Baden

True, it wouldn't matter much. As long as death is instantaneous. And bombs smash children against walls. The physical results are the same in case A and B.

Anyhow, your reasoning on close proximity killing was faulty imo because it was based on contingencies that could theoretically apply to either party and failed to demonstrate the distinction you thought they could. Your invocation of intent seems flawed too. There's a crucial epistemological aspect to it that you seem to be substituting out. If I know I will break a window by throwing a stone through it and I choose to throw a stone through it then that's sufficient condition to establish intent and the responsibility that comes with that. That I claim I didn't "want" to break the window doesn't absolve me of any of that responsibility.

So, this is wrong:

If the bomber or superior truly DIDN’T want collateral damage, that does make a moral difference. — schopenhauer1

You see the relation though, right? When we achieve some physical and emotional distance from our acts of killing we can start to leverage that into an illusory mitigation of moral responsibility. — Baden

So again, I am just going back to the very original framing of butchery up close versus from a bombing. There is an extra de-humanization of doing something in person, an intimacy, all else being completely equal (involving intent, surrounding circumstances, ends, etc.).

However, if we add in context, agreed, this starts making a difference for moral culpability. If you tweak the parameters to get the case that BOTH the bomber, and butcher want to see maximum horror and death, they are about equal in regards to moral culpability.

Where we probably disagree is consequences versus intent, however. For example, if the US bombed a Nazi armaments plant in the middle of Hamburg, Germany, intending to just destroy the facility, but kills 100 civilians, that is not the same as a group of Nazis lining up 100 civilians and shooting them in the heads, shoving them in a ditch and burying the bodies.

And indeed, I anticipate the move here regarding the earlier point about intimacy and false sense of harm. Because Nazis then moved to "manufactured" forms of killing that removed more of the in person aspect of the wholesale killing. But this would then certainly be a false equivalence and actually addressing the wrong point I was making regarding the context of intent. Rather, the WHOLE POINT of what the Nazis were doing was to torture, work-to-death, and kill groups of people. The killing was an END IN ITSELF! Thus the means became even more perverse because it wasn't a case of "pursuing an enemy combatant but collateral damage then occurred" it literally was to round up as many civilians as possible and torture, work-to-death, and kill them in wholesale ways. Obviously an evil there. And the ends DOES matter. The INTENT DOES matter.

Ireland stayed neutral during WW2, because of their ongoing tensions with the British. This doesn't mean that Irish citizens didn't see the good in the defeat of the Nazis, even if it means a "win" for the British. I think any sane person can agree the Nazis defeated is not only a good thing, but an absolute necessity for the world to not be overrun by a murderous/evil regime. It may have meant, even the hated enemy "the British" may have had to make hard moral decisions during wartime in regards to how to deal with combating a regime doing harm to them and the world in general.

So then we can move the dilemma even more starkly. What if to defeat the Nazis, and to prevent them from continuing their murderous ends, you had to bombard various cities? What if this was unknown as to whether bombing the cities in round-the-clock bombings were actually working to stop the Nazi regime or not? Was it bombing targets that were legitimate? Was it really breaking the will of the people to support the Nazis? Is it effective? How far do you go in stopping a regime with murderous ends? That is a good question, and there can be arguments (like Dresden) that the Allies went too far or were simply doing it from a place of outright revenge.

If for example, there were two scenarios:

Scenario A) 100 peaceful Buddhist civilians were getting bombed and killed in Tibet, because China wanted to take out various peaceful, non-violent Tibetan Buddhist leaders who were also the recognized governing body of Tibet and were also hiding amongst their civilian population,

or

Scenario B) the Chinese killed 100 Tibetan civilians, and let's say, China wanted to take out various Tibetan Buddhist leaders who were hiding amongst their civilians, that mercilessly butchered, burned, maimed, and raped various Chinese neighboring citizens, and it was not just once, but ongoing for years, with also the added component that these Buddhist leaders were the governing body of Tibet, and were also funneling money into suicide bombers, to convince them they will reach Nirvana sooner if they blow themselves up to kill maximum amounts of Chinese...is there a possible component for justification for the Chinese response to Scenario B that is not present in Scenario A?

I think that these questions are essentially handled in this post so let's move forward from here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/849346

:up: Will come back to this tomorrow. Thanks.

However, providing just some context, if it is more than a “clean kill”, or if not “clean”, it was not just collateral damage, but you actually WANT to inflict maximum pain, horror, by maiming and raping, and bashing the civilians in a personal brutal way, versus WANTING to kill only enemy perpetrators BUT in the process impersonally killing civilians in collateral damage, that adds another dimension. — schopenhauer1

This is such an important point, and it runs right through all of this to the very bottom. Incidentally, this is the moral import of killing babies: it is gratuitous evil. It is murder of the innocent taken to its most extreme form.

(NB: I have read the entire exchange between @schopenhauer1 and @Baden)

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Again there's no moral get-out-of-jail-free card in saying you don't want to do something but then choosing to do it. Their mental games with themselves can't excuse them of the known consequences of their actions. — Baden

Your invocation of intent seems flawed too. There's a crucial epistemological aspect to it that you seem to be substituting out. If I know I will break a window by throwing a stone through it and I choose to throw a stone through it then that's sufficient condition to establish intent and the responsibility that comes with that. That I claim I didn't "want" to break the window doesn't absolve me of any of that responsibility. — Baden

Your core point here is correct. For example, Aquinas says, "For what is always or frequently joined to the effect falls under the intention itself. For it is stupid to say that someone intends something but does not will that which is always or frequently joined to it" (Commentary on the Physics, II.8). The problem is that undue inferences are being drawn from this true premise.

The first thing to note is that there is a relevant moral difference between someone who is mitigating evil side effects as far as possible, and someone who is not (or who is intentionally exacerbating these evil side effects). I don't think this is controversial.

The second thing to note is that the descriptions of the OP bear on this point. For example, "The flight is done at night to minimize civilian casualties." This is different from throwing a baseball at a window without "wanting" to break it. The implication is that the moral actor deliberately chose an alternative act because it would minimize evil side effects, namely by bombing when the factory was closed rather than bombing when the factory was open. A morally inferior agent would have either ignored this deliberation, or else deliberately bombed during the day so as to maximize civilian casualties.

Now someone might say, "Well he bombed at night even though he knew civilians would die, therefore he intended to kill civilians." The cogent point here is that even if we grant this claim, the night-bomber is still morally superior to the day-bomber, because he did not intend (in the objector's sense) to kill the more numerous daytime workers. This is not splitting hairs. It is a real and important moral difference.

(Elizabeth Anscombe wrote diligently on this question of intention and "double effect" throughout her life. One instance <came up recently>.)

Now someone might say, "Well he bombed at night even though he knew civilians would die, therefore he intended to kill civilians." The cogent point here is that even if we grant this claim, the night-bomber is still morally superior to the day-bomber, because he did not intend (in the objector's sense) to kill the more numerous daytime workers. This is not splitting hairs. It is a real and important moral difference. — Leontiskos

Good point. I don’t have much to add to that except one can still try to go back to why bomb at all and I think that’s where my analogy in the last post (see below) regarding Allied response to Nazi aggression and the hypothetical Chinese/Tibetan scenarios elucidate various ends and means in context:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/849346

Right - the corollary here is that morality is not an all-or-nothing affair. The pacifist can claim that all bombing is wrong, but no one is rationally justified in claiming that the night bomber and the day bomber are moral equals. Even if all bombing is wrong, it cannot be denied that some bombings are worse than others.

I should reiterate that I think @Baden's earlier points against RogueAI were decisive. There is no such thing as a moral judgment that does not work from limited information (link). We assess moral situations based on the information at hand, and if we discover new information the moral judgment may change. ...but this is a larger and more unwieldy topic.

I should reiterate that I think Baden's earlier points against RogueAI were decisive. There is no such thing as a moral judgment that does not work from limited information (link). We assess moral situations based on the information at hand, and if we discover new information the moral judgment may change. ...but this is a larger and more unwieldy topic. — Leontiskos

Granted, which is why I answered to my best for that limited part of the debate and it was tacitly recognized that we were moving to a new “category?” whereby an enlarged context is taken into consideration regarding the moral dilemma being discussed.