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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group

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To: Maurice Winn who wrote (8236)	10/31/2001 4:21:48 AM
From: D. Long	Read Replies (1) of 281500

The problem with your approach is you are comparing a "life boat" thought problems with "everyday" ethics. If you are stranded on a desert isle with three people, with no food, and no hope of rescue anytime soon, do you eat one of your fellow castaways? Ethics is full of useless thought problems like these, better known as life boat ethics. They are useless because normal standards, normal questions of ETHICS, are suspended. You are comparing a life boat scenario against normal ethical situations. If you accept in the above example that it would be justifiable to eat your fellow, that DOES NOT mean that suddenly normal human taboos against cannibalism go out the door. Withholding a vital natural resource which can not be immediately replaceable elsewhere with the sole intent of destroying or severely harming a nation IS a life boat situation. And so the source of your dilemma. Do I propose throwing property rights and questions of human decency out the window? Not at all. But such questions are only so FRAGILE because they are VOLUNTARY CONVENTIONS which can and have been so easily breached. Calculations of power preserve those conventions. Derek

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