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

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (205201)	10/5/2006 12:57:51 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Maurice, I appreciate your thoughtful post but I wonder if you couldn't have been a little more thoughtful? The main thrust of your argument is that "everyone puts a price on human life every day..." I agree. Risk is an inherent part of life and modern commerce is fueled with the lives of workers, consumers and bystanders. And the price placed on human life is, as you say, sometimes "a surprisingly low one." High risk jobs often have a "risk" premium built into them in order to entice enough "willing" workers to undertake those risks and to pay the injury and fatality costs of the endeavor. Sometimes, even when the premium for the risk is low, there will be some price when the risk seekers, the foolish or the desperate will "volunteer." I'll go even further and say that some people, some times, will PAY to take substantial risks of death or injury. Just as some people will pay a woman in high heels and leather to whip them, some of us are thrill-seeking adrenalin junkies. You and I both know firsthand what drives people like that. But that's not what I'm talking about, I'm talking about the lost lives of those we send to war. Your dollar-cost analysis of Iraqi war dead and your bean-counting computations of human lives don't provide an appropriate metric for judging the reprehensibility or justness of those deaths. The moral/philosophical differences should be apparent but you're evidently overlooking a critical distinction between the deaths of soldiers in war and other deaths. I.e., you write: "On the value of soldiers. I don't see soldiers as any different from other people in their value. They have a job, they have a value. Pretty straightforward. And actually priced! They are offered a pay rate sufficient to get them to take on the deal. It might help to simplify things by analyzing two specific deaths. One soldier joins the military and is killed in a jeep accident during peacetime. Another soldier joins the military, the American government chooses to go to war and that soldier is blown up in an RPG attack. Why is it that one death is news while the other is not? Why is it that many of us feel deeply "responsible" for one death and not the other? Why don't we just say that a death is a death, human life has a low price and they both volunteered for the service? What is it about those two deaths that distinguishes them so that we feel compelled to justify them using different metrics? I've tried to explain it to you; I'll try again. The object of war is to use deadly force to accomplish a mission. That means you send soldiers TO KILL OR BE KILLED. Death is not incidental to the endeavor; death is central to the endeavor. They're fighting for you and YOU'RE sending them knowing that many of them will be killed and maimed in particularly gruesome ways and that they'll take the lives of others. Many of us have a deep-seated belief that we owe a tremendous responsibility to each and every one of those soldiers, and their loved ones, to meet certain criteria before we send them, or leave them, in harm's way. Just as each of us would feel little or no responsibility for someone who falls off a cliff but tremendous responsibility if we shoved them off the cliff, we agonize over the death of each soldier. And we should. But some try to rationalize away those feeling of responsibility for soldier's deaths in ways that trivialize them. The common rationalizations are that, relative to other wars, there aren't a lot of deaths and, hey, human lives are lost all the time. That's what you're saying but, as I've tried to point out, the reason most people have to try to rationalize those deaths is that in a greater sense we're personally responsible for each and every one of them. We sent them to be killed. You've also used the other common rationalization; "THEY VOLUNTEERED." Let's look at that: What did they volunteer for? Did they volunteer to have their lives thrown away in an undoable mission, for a cause that's not noble enough to justify killing and death or for a cause that could have been accomplished in some way short of the lethality of war? And, even if they did, how many of them are true volunteers, the kind of volunteer that would choose to stay and fight and die, and how many of them would come home in an instant if they didn't face military justice for desertion or awol? I think if you opened the doors and allowed those who wanted to "leave now," you'd find how many "volunteers" there are in Iraq. No, Maurice, if you want to talk about the deaths of soldiers it's not enough to talk about the many ways in which they're like other kinds of deaths, you must deal with the distinctions. When you analyze those distinctions then reasonable people can disagree based on differing philosophies, moral compasses and levels of empathy, but the way we view this issue speaks volumes about us as individuals and as a society. Ed