Karen is trying to ascertain if people who claim that terrorism is an absolute moral nono, will continue to consider it unacceptable regardless of the circumstances, no matter what pressure is brought to bear. She built an extreme scenario (our own country occupied by others) to try to force people to look at it and decide whether their belief about the evil of terrorism is so absolute that nothing can justify using it.
The point wasn't to argue how the scenario couldn't possibly exist, or to offer other alternatives, the point was to try to place yourself into an "if A, then would you do B" situation to test the absolute morality question.
Instead of dealing with the given, everyone is trying to somehow to rewrite the scenario, or say that it's unlikely, or ascribe the constuct to Karen personally, and even criticize her.
It's just a construct to try to get us to consider the possibility that our "absolute" may not be.
In some book (Is Paris Burning? sticks in my head, but I really don't remember) a similar moral dilemma was posed where a priest is told by an occupying army that if he will shoot one person, his small town will be saved. His response was that no, murder was never morally right and the whole town would just have to die. Others, of course, said that yes, to save many, one should be sacrificed. |
