[Vision2020] Expediency vs. Morality

Sat Nov 18 18:51:34 PST 2006

Nick, just wanted to address the abortion question you posed the other day.  You state that "one cannot make a moral equivalence between aborting a fetus and killing innocent persons unless the fetus is a person"  Your choice of invective would suggest that you view any position other than the utter disregard of the unborn's "person"hood, to be irrational and illegitimate.  Why, Professor, can't you allow for others to disagree with you on such a profound question?  I understand that the consensus in the legal community is that a human being prior to 25 weeks gestation does not qualify as a "person" with legal rights.  Fine Nick, but surely on a forum professing to provide for enlightened and unrestrained dialog, one should have the freedom to disagree with the prevailing "wisdom"  and posit that innocent humans growing in their mothers, should not be killed.  What, pray tell professor, is so unreasonable about that?

Remember that prevailing wisdom once held that African Americans were not "persons" as well.  We as a society deny the "personhood" of those we would prefer to dispatch or enslave.  This removes the all but universal moral imperative against killing another of one's species.  It is a morally bankrupt distinction which may enable our personal convenience, but it will be regarded by history as an horrific human rights violation.  I beseech you Nick, to reconsider your support of it.

Have a cool Sunday,    -T
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Nick Gier 
  To: vision2020 at moscow.com 
  Sent: Thursday, November 16, 2006 11:47 AM
  Subject: [Vision2020] Expediency vs. Morality

  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
    >
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    > 

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  "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

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