In the end it is up to those who
predominate in power to decide what is ethical under the circumstances. This
is the way it has always been...
This is the only part of your post I have serious disagreement with.
If you had qualified it with "ethical for them," I might agree. But maybe not. For example, the US has signed treaties which limit our ethical behaviors. For example, treaties prohibiting certain kinds of chemical weapons, the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war, etc. Suppose we decided today that we needed to use banned chemical weapons in Baghdad to save American lives -- that a ground invasion without the use of those chemical weapons would be enormously costly, but that if we, as a hypothetical, sprayed a disabling but not deadly nerve agent on the city right before invading we could, again hypothetically, save 5,000 American military lives.
It would certainly be pragmatic to do that. Would it be ethical? I think even if we decided to do it, that would not in and of itself make it ethical. And I think even if we self-admitted that it was unethical, even illegal under our treaties and international law, we might do it anyhow. |
