[Vision2020] Expediency vs. Morality

Thu Nov 16 11:47:37 PST 2006

Greetings:

I promised a lecture on utilitarianism and morality, but I said that I did 
not have time.  Since someone without a clue is harassing me, I'll do the 
lecture in small units.

Before I get to the issue at hand, I need to repeat an essential moral 
point about abortion.  One cannot make a moral equivalence between aborting 
a fetus and killing innocent persons unless the fetus is a person.  As I 
have repeated too many times on this list, our moral, legal, and religious 
traditions have not recognized that the fetus is a person until late in 
pregnancy.  Until our respected traditions are changed with good reasons 
and the laws are revised, abortion is the taking a human life (equivalent 
to other mammalian lives), not the murder of a human person.  For more see 
www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/abortion.htm.

As one who respects all life, I would not want any woman to request an 
abortion unless there are very good reasons to do so.  But I would respect 
her right to do so under the law, and a I certainly would not want anyone 
to condemn her for murdering a person, because the early fetus is not a 
person.  Remember that 91 percent of abortions are performed during the 
first trimester.

As to the alleged moral value of expedient acts, let me just refute it by a 
simple example.  Let's say that someone attacks me and is threatening my 
life.  Let's also say that I am armed and that I kill my attacker.  Killing 
persons violates basic morality.  I have committed a wrong and I would feel 
terribly guilty about it, and if I were a religious person I would seek 
repentance for my act. (Actually, unbelievers can also repent in their own 
ways.) The fact that the law would clear me because it was a justified 
killing in self-defense does not in any way remove the moral fact that I've 
done wrong.

Let's say that I'm watching a Vandal game with Tom Hansen in my backroom. 
Let's also say that a homicidal maniac comes to door armed with an AK-47 
and handguns.  The maniac says that he has read Tom's posts on V2020 and 
that he deserves to die.  He also says that he has good information that 
Tom is at my house.  I quickly make up a big fat lie and say that Tom is 
not at my house and was never my friend.  Somehow I convince him and the 
brute goes away.

Under a duty or rule based ethics, I again would have to say that I broke 
the rule about truth telling.  Expediency made me break that rule, but I 
broke it nonetheless.  Lying to save a friend's life is an expedient act, 
but it has no moral value.  Again, as a person with conscience, I would 
repent of my actions.

This example, I believe, shows the superiority of virtue ethics.  Honest 
people have developed a strong disposition to tell the truth.  This moral 
habit is a virtue.  The fact that this unusual situation has forced me to 
tell a lie does not make me a liar.  Far from it: after this ordeal I 
immediately return to my habit of truth telling.  Rule based ethics would 
say that I have broken a rule, but virtue ethics says that virtues are 
supreme and that moral imperatives and moral prohibitions are simply 
abstractions from the virtues and the vices respectively.

Let me now repeat my point.  The saturation bombing of Germany and Japan 
may have been an expedient act to win military victory.  But in no way was 
it a moral act.

I've known Larry Johnston, the UI physicist who designed the trigger for 
the atomic bomb, ever since I arrived in Moscow 34 years ago.  He is a good 
man and a devout Christian.  In all the public pronouncements on his part 
in the atomic bombing of Japan, I've never heard him say that he was 
sorry.  I've never had the courage ask him personally, but I hope that the 
next time he's interviewed he will finally express some remorse.

Using evil means to justify a desired end can be called "good" only if you 
are crass utilitarian who holds that as long as there is 50.0000000001 
percent more hedons (units of pleasure) than dolors (units of pain) in your 
actions, then you are acting morally.

I once saw a great utilitarian maxim in a bathroom stall on the 3rd Floor 
UI Admin. Building.  It said: "A long war is a small price to pay for 
eternal peace."  This is theological utilitarianism gone wacko, but here is 
the hedonic calculus:  eternal life for the righteous victors represents an 
infinite number of hedons and it will always trump any possible number of 
dolors committed in the name of the righteous war on earth.  So let us all 
join the fundamentalists of our choice and kill all the unbelievers because 
"a long war for God is a small price to pay for eternal peace."  Reductio 
ad absurdum.

Sorry, but I just discovered that I can't do anything in "small 
units."  This is the end of my lecture on ethics.

Nick Gier

Your life is a test.  If this were a real life, you would have been given 
proper directions.

And please don't tell me that proper directions are found in the Koran, the 
Bhagavad-gita, or the Bible!  In the Gita Krishna advised Arjuna that it 
was OK to kill his relatives on the other side, because nothing he or 
anyone does can touch the eternal soul.  Arjuna then led his troops into a 
battle that, if we believe the reports, caused the largest number of 
causalities in the history of warfare.  Onward Religious Warriors!

>Nick suggests that an expedient means of ending a war, and thus saving
>potentially tens of thousands of American lives, cannot fairly be regarded
>as a moral act.
>
>Fascinating!
>
>Have a pleasant weekend ya'all.   -T
>----- Original Message -----
>From: <nickgier at adelphia.net>
>To: <vision2020 at moscow.com>
>Sent: Wednesday, November 15, 2006 2:38 PM
>Subject: [Vision2020] Why the Nagasaki Bombin and Why So Soon After?
>
>
> > Greetings:
> >
> > There is credible evidence that the main reason for the Nagasaki bombing
> > was to test a different type of bomb.  I don't have the details or
> > references at my finger tips, but they are available.
> >
> > Furthermore, when I have time I want to lecture the list about the moral
> > failings of utilitarianism, the only "moral" theory that can conclude that
> > the ends justify the means, and theory that has been used quite a bit by
> > at least two on this list.
> >
> > I believe that the atomic bombing of Japan, just as any conventional
> > bombing of populated centers, can have no moral justification at all.  It
> > can be justified as only an expedients means to a desired end and nothing
> > more than that.
> >
> > Nick Gier
> >
> > =======================================================
> > List services made available by First Step Internet,
> > serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
> >               http://www.fsr.net
> >          mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
> > =======================================================
> >
> >
>
>
>=======================================================
>  List services made available by First Step Internet,
>  serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
>                http://www.fsr.net
>           mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
>=======================================================

"Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to human 
affairs."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings who 
represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it."
  --Mohandas Gandhi

"Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be 
discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each part 
by itself. . . .We must keep our attention fixed on the whole and on the 
interconnection between the parts. The same is true of our intellectual 
life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and 
art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts." 
--Max Planck

Nicholas F. Gier
Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho
1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843
http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm
208-882-9212/FAX 885-8950
President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO
http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20061116/cc5a5c80/attachment.html 