I was a pacifist in my teens. I got over it. There is always evil in the world, the question is, is it sometimes necessary to embrace the lesser evil, in order to avoid the greater? Is a brutal dictatorship with expansionist aspirations, genocidal tendencies, and an interest in improving delivery methods for various WMDs, while, at a minimum, the means to restart production is maintained worth overthrowing? Yes........ Message 20254191
You are not getting it. The lesser evil occurs whenever warfare is necessary to solve conflict. Fighting the Nazis was a lesser evil, in preference to letting them prevail. Message 20254286
Firstly, fighting the Nazis was common sense, no fancy theories were required for justification. Secondly, I hope that your conversion from pacifism was not too painful, sometimes those kinds of things can leave terrible scars. Germane to a consideration of lesser evil, is how far a country will trample it’s own treasured ideals when it comes to defeating the enemy. Implicit in this is the making of tough choices, and how best to go about making them. Herein lies the key moral difference between Germany and Iraq. My contention is that your formulation offers no choice at all, and thus does not address the reality of the issue to which you presume to speak. Saddam was a war of choice, whereas fighting the Nazi’s wasn’t. I am satisfied that on this much there is consensus.Why do you so conflate the two, do you think that consistency alone is enough to illustrate your point, even if it doesn’t make sense. Your example has almost nothing to do with the problem of lesser evil as it is normatively known. The great difficulty of what to do about lesser evil arises when there is more of a choice as opposed to when there is less of a choice. Since you make out like there is no choice, I have to say that imo, your moral equivalence knows no bounds.
A premise like, there is always evil in the world, is sometimes very very difficult for me to get past. This was one of those times. Feel free to ignore the rest of this rant, but for starters, what exactly do you mean by this. Do you mean like evil and more and more evil forever and ever, like infinite never-ever-ever ending evil. Like, would you like to like, like try to like, to like, prove this premise.
Neocon you are pointing to what is known as nominal truth, reifying it, and calling it a belief, which is all fine and dandy, since it’s true that these things can be useful for making a seemingly coherent argument, just not in your case. It is one thing to call someone evil, and I have witnessed what I would consider evil acts, but as for agreeing with what you said, I cannot see a proper description of reality in this, and I am not a pacifist, yet. We seem to be going in different directions and all I can see is that your assumption gets you to where you wanted to go in the first place, which is all fine and dandy too, if that’s all you want.
I hate to be the one to break the news to you, but since you brought it up, you should know that the only condition required for the existence of the lesser evil you cite, is the existence of the evil that you already put into your assumption. If this is not so, there would be no evil to begin with, which is certainly not what you meant. So when you say The lesser evil occurs whenever warfare is necessary to solve conflict, this is necessarily bogus because according to your premise you would not need a war for it to occur, since it would already be there.
You then proceed to lecture GST on how he’s not getting it, but you are the one with a premise that makes it’s occurrence out to be inevitable, when in reality it isn’t. I don’t mean to turn this into some sort of metaphysical speculation so if you could at least just say what school of logic this is, it would suffice. The truth of the matter is more plainly clear, by phrasing it such “Whenever warfare is necessary to solve conflict, the lesser evil occurs.”. This makes warfare dependent upon a whole set of conditions, not just upon the existence of evil, which is what you posit. The spaciousness of, and choices we face in reality are more accurately reflected this way. By way of assertion, using a real life example, even though I don’t think that this is what lesser evil is really all about, my formulation more accurately describes the Nazi analogy which you tried to use.
My position properly reflects the requirement for some measure of practicality in foreign policy, for if it didn’t, and you were right, to follow your argument to it’s logical conclusion, we’d be fighting every evil person out there, which clearly we aren’t, because it is just impossible. Whether you like it or not, at some point, the limits of force, are a very practical consideration, no matter how much evil there is. If it gets to the point when these considerations can truly be set aside, then it can be deduced that we are facing the kind of evil you are talking about, in which case considerations of the limits of military power or of the lesser evil are not high on the list of priorities in any case so why bring it up as an issue in the first place. In all other cases, it would be considered prudent to apply some practical considerations. This involves the individual ability to simultaneously hold contradictory opinions, so that they can be weighed, but you don’t offer this choice. If evil is always around, and this by definition must necessarily mean that it can’t be defeated, doesn’t this make an absolute dogs breakfast of your assertions regarding Germany, never mind Iraq.
What you said probably sounded true to you and to others, and this is the point at which your navigational deficiencies become dangerous. From the outset, you say that there is always evil, this is an extraordinarily strong assertion, so much so that later saying that The lesser evil occurs whenever warfare is necessary to solve conflictbecomes of little import. If evil is always there, what happens to it before or after the war, where does it go. I will not climb aboard your train of thought as I am not assured by your method. As I’m sure you’re well aware, and as GST has pointed out far more succinctly than me, that kind of faulty ideation is particularly dangerous since it can easily be used to justify an ends at any cost formulation. It’s the kind of thing an Islamic terrorist might say about killing innocent Muslims which is just too damn bad because you see, it’s jihad and we have no choice but to fight the evil. This does not assure me that you care much about how to get to where you’re going, as long as you get there and if that’s the case, I’d rather walk thanks. Sorry, but your driving skills and your sense of direction bother me.
My contention is that your conversion from Pacifism implies the following logic. Since there is evil, there will be war, and since there is war there will be lesser evil. This is a fine example of rhetoric because within it there is no real search for truth. There are no choices or options to be weighed in this method and at best all it will do is herald the arrival of foregone conclusions which is not a good way to evaluate things, especially big things like war. You ignore the primal condition that Iraq was a war of choice, so your conception is quite simply invalidated in the light of the facts on the ground. You bring up the issue of lesser evil, ignoring that the true difficulty wrt lesser evil arises from the choices that must be made when you have more options, rather than fewer. You fired a bullet, but missed the target by a mile..
People like having options especially when it comes to things like wars and your presentation tricks people into thinking they have been given a choice when they haven’t. This is accomplished by your use of the word whenever in your second post, which sounds like you’re offering a choice but you aren’t, given your premise. Are you sure you’ve never done government work because this technique is well known in those circles where it is used to lead people down the garden path. Yes, it’s true that what you call the lesser evil occurs in wartime, which is probably all you meant anyway, but such a refutation would do nothing more than point to which definition of the word occur you were using, it would not disprove my argument. The fact is that lesser evil can only be a condition of this thing you call evil, not of this thing you call war, unless you are using those words interchangeably, which is what I think you are doing. This would turn your premise into, there is always war in the world, and the truth of my contention is proven by the fact, that as you say, you are no longer a pacifist. You are ascribing a causative power that is inherent in evil, and if you want this to be taken as true, then prove it. On a much less complicated scale, if you can conflate the words evil and war thus, it’s no surprise that you have no difficulty when it comes to Germany and Iraq.
Anyhow, you seem to be of a some sort of philosophical bent and the question is this, after you’ve used your assumption to get to where you wanted to be in the first place, don’t you need to keep going to find the ultimate truth, so that you don’t have to place your reality in what turns out to be faith, or in a belief as you called it. If not, if there is no need to go on, what do you do, just sit down haul out a fat cigar a good book a good glass of wine kiss the family goodnight call it a day and rollover. If on the other hand you haven’t stopped searching for the truth, you will prove your premise to be true..
Is a brutal dictatorship with expansionist aspirations, genocidal tendencies, and an interest in improving delivery methods for various WMDs, while, at a minimum, the means to restart production is maintained worth overthrowing? Yes........
To begin with your claim that at a minimum the means to restart production were retained, is bogus too, because it’s not as if he could be up and running tomorrow, which is how you make it sound. The apparent condition of near imminence was never satisfied because if it was no one would be arguing over it. Moreover, if one were to just assume that your conclusion was correct, never mind true, which is what you have done, the thing is, it doesn’t follow from your reasoning, which can be scraped off the floor above. In playing this game, whats normally acceptable is that one starts out with a premise that one uses to suggest appropriate causation, and then one follows it through using logic and reason, to see if it is true. Instead what you’ve done is to start out with a premise you imply is true and then rationalized the above justifications to “prove” this. Logic and reason are good tools, but they have to be used properly. There is a world of difference between use and abuse, and if one insists on using them backwards, Win Smith is never going to shut up about it and basically they just won’t work in the way they were intended. This is akin to the example of firing a gun, where instead of defeating the opposition you shoot yourself in the foot.
Your primary mistake is compounded by what you cite as reasons in the above quote. These rely almost completely on dispositional analysis and thus is made the classic form of the error of attribution. It is also why Ken Pollack can’t work out what went wrong in his head, but in his case it’s from the other direction. Pollack is probably well versed in situational analysis and having previously concluded that mirroring did not work and was therefore not needed, he failed, despite Tekboys warning, to take into account the ideological disposition of the chickenhawk neocons regarding Iraq. Again, mirroring is just a tool, and it’s method of application, is what will what determine it’s usefulness. The problem with an abstract tool, as you’ve amply demonstrated, is to know whether one is using it properly or not, so I understand his decision to discard it, and this, and of course this is just speculation, plus being unaware of the effects on his thinking, of his own level of general optimism as a person, combined with the manoeuvres required to formulate a successful political career are imho, the operative conditions comprising his dilemma.
Anyway back to the case at hand. If your logic isn’t working properly, and I think I’ve proved that it isn’t, probably what’s happening is that you’re running on emotion, which in this case looks like fear, which is a common place phenomenon, albeit a particularly powerful one since it can be used to justify anything, even conversions from pacifism. This reverts to the boundless nature of the danger in your formulation, that I pointed out before. Getting back to practical foreign policy, just because you think you have a valid reason to act, does not mean that you have to act, or that your actions are prescribed in any way, which is the way your way of thinking makes it out to be. This is where the blinders of ideology are so effective. Whether you act or not , there are consequences to every decision, and these must be properly weighed. This can be very difficult to do, insofar as things are always uncertain, which is why so far, we have not invaded NKorea, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan or anyone else, despite the fact that these countries have already supplied the weapons used to attack us, or might, or could. Don’t you remember Wolfowitz saying that WMD were a bureaucratic argument the one issue everyone could agree on, what happened, didn’t you get the memo.
The aspirations and tendencies you talk of are dispositional factors that can easily apply to other political actors, perhaps in different combination or emphasis, but these are not enough to automatically provide the reasons for invasion, which in the regular course of things would normally have to be based on sound principles. If, as you apparently do, you want to show the efficacy or consistency of your principles, or at the least illustrate their consistent application, you are going to have to do much much better than this. This war was a massive gamble, why not call a spade a spade, instead of making out like it was preordained which is something that is mostly found in the practice of the occult, as compared to the practice of war, unless of course one is crazy. You must be a true believer.
It is my belief that ideology cannot rationalize indefinitely, so that for the mass of people who are not mentally ill, reality will force change. Message 20251449
I can’t believe you managed to write that without putting in a grinnie |
