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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (100219)	6/4/2003 3:45:37 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<whether there are acts, judged in a vacuum free of politics, culture, mores, religion, etc., that are so inherently evil that they justify extreme measures> Let's be clear here. When you say, "extreme measures", you mean assassination, right? OK, I can answer that, very simply, with a rule that should be easy to understand: None. There are no acts that justify assassination. End of statement. No caveats, no excuses, no exceptions. By the way, this used to be U.S. law, outlawing assassination in all circumstances. But, we've now gone back to the Law of Tooth and Fang. That should be the rule, not so much on moral grounds, but on practical grounds: 1. Once you start making reasons for assassination, you are on a slippery slope, and the reasons for "morally justified killing" just keeps getting larger and larger. Nobody can be trusted with that power, it is inevitable that it will be misused, twisted to justify selfish acts. 2. the people you assassinate, may be the people that, at some point, you need to negotiate with, in order to make peace. If you have a policy of assassination, you may decrease the possible futures, to only two: total victory for you, or total defeat. You may want to keep other options available. 3. what goes around, comes around. By making political murder the norm, you make it easier for everybody to engage in, and justify, the same acts. Including your enemy. <The hypothetical you posit is rife with politics and value judgments.> The hypothetical I posited, was your own words. You posited it. All I did, was replace Their leader (Arafat) with Our leader (Bush); replace Arafat's killings with Bush's killings. I held up a mirror in front of you, yet you still don't recognize yourself. You say you are searching for objective, absolute, universal rules, rules that apply no matter what the political context. Yet, when I take your own words, and replace Them with Us, you see my statement (a rephrasing of your own statement) as "rife with politics and value judgments". But, if you are looking for acts that are so reprehensible, they merit "extreme measures" to punish them, perhaps you should start by looking at these acts: Message 18855061 Anything there seem evil to you?