You're just flip flopping. You at once criticize a Utilitarian moral calculation, and then turn around and say that's your central idea.
And this: They wouldn't have happened, if different choices had been made isn't compatible with your former statements on historical inevitability. If Hitler, or Napoleon, would have been killed, history would have been different.
Your analysis also fails to take intentionality into account. There is a moral difference between someone who intentionally shoots a person, and someone who accidentally does so. It likewise fails to take into account the possibility that killing is sometimes justified. You just boil it down to killing=bad, whether that killing is Hitler stuffing Jews and Gypsies in the ovens, or the allied soldiers killing Wehrmacht to stop such unmistakable evil from continuing in the world. In your scales, the allies would not have been justified in warring against the Axis, since the number of dead from the war and its aftermath may have been less if we did nothing. Just a bunch of dead Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, cripples and retards. But there would have been fewer bodies, so it's all good.
Derek |
