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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29676 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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The idea that it's ok to kill thousands of innocent people so long as you were indifferent to killing them instead of wanting to kill them, is exactly why everyone needs to get the fuck away from virtue ethics before it does any more harm.

This is bog-standard international law that's been around for ages. One cannot intentionally kill civilians but attacks that incidentally kill civilians are permissible so long as the attack is intended to achieve a significant military goal.

Perhaps it's wrong, but if it is wrong, the problem is much deeper than virtue ethics.

Sure, but I think we were talking about morality and what we think Israel should do, morally speaking. Not what the law allows or doesn't. There are good reasons for those to be different things.

A subset of X attacks Y. Y responds in part to deter future attacks by X. Y kills some of X accidentally (including those uninvolved in the attack). Z claims “that’s collective punishment.” Y responds I am not trying to collective punish X; the only way to eliminate the capacity of X to attack Y is this attack. Otherwise, you effectively give X a deadly analog to the heckler’s veto.

Not sure why virtue ethics requires this. Seems like you can also get there using utilitarian reasoning.

That's an ok argument for why Israels actions are ok. It's just not the argument I was responding to:

The Palestinian people as a whole are not being punished as a collective, they are just collateral damage which Israel doesn't care about. It's a different thing.

I think that’s the exact argument.

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