The Moral High Ground

[tashiro]

Part of a reply I made in an earlier journal entry involved the Monkey Sphere -- the human inability to consider more than a limited number of people as individuals and important.  The less important someone is, the less they're considered an individual, and the more they become an archetype or character than an actual person.  They're not

Comments

[mikepictor]

2 thoughts

on police - A lot of them do work very hard on just this very thing. I can be a challenge, but I have also witnessed first hand officers expressing a high amount of empathy with the people they interact with, and it surprised me at the time that they had the resources to do this day after day after day. I grant, that probably doesn't apply to all police, but I think many work hard at keeping that perspective.

on military - I agree in principle, but it simply won't happen as perfectly as we may like. The fact is, in a true wartime situation, empathy for the enemy translates directly into casualties for your side. THis is different from the case of police, in that police shouldn't really consider the people they deal with as an enemy, even the people they are arresting. Military on the other hand, must view people this way. The real danger is letting that bleed into civilians. Even if you must reduce the enemy soldier into a target, the civilians affected by the way are not targets, and I think the military has to try very hard to remember them as individuals.

[brother_dour]

And I would like to add that it is a LOT better today than it was in past conflicts. In WWII, the Allies did not hesitate to carpet bomb German cities, civilians be damned, just as the Germans blitzed England. Part of this was due to the wildly inaccurate bombing sights of the day, but still...the consideration that the modern U.S. military among others gives to preventing collateral damage is leaps and bounds ahead.

And I'm not even going to mention Vietnam....

[ajeya]

As Mike above said "empathy for the enemy translates directly into casualties for your side". The British and the Americans knew that 1943's version of 'precision daylight bombing' was anything but and despite that individual crews by and large (according to Brian O'Niell's Half a Wing*) did their best to put bombs on the actual target (particularly over occupied territory). But over Germany they were a lot less picky and most of the large cities suffered destruction on a massive scale. They knew that civilians were suffering and each had their own feelings about that, but the necessary goal was to destroy Germany's ability to wage war.

Tashiro feels that is murder... maybe even "mass murder" since it happened on a scale that makes Apache gun camera footage seem a pale comparison. That sickens me, because it puts the actions of those 8th Air Force airmen on a moral balance scale with the massively depraved actions of the Nazi regime, who unquestionably committed mass murder. In my mind there's simply no comparison.

* Brian D. O'Neill - Half a Wing, Three Engines, and a Prayer - http://www.amazon.com/Half-Wing-Three-Engines-Prayer/dp/0071341455

[tashiro]

Tashiro feels that is murder... maybe even "mass murder" since it happened on a scale that makes Apache gun camera footage seem a pale comparison. That sickens me, because it puts the actions of those 8th Air Force airmen on a moral balance scale with the massively depraved actions of the Nazi regime, who unquestionably committed mass murder. In my mind there's simply no comparison.

I consider taking a life to be murder. Even if it is self defence, you're taking a life. I can accept understanding it had to be done or justified considering the conditions of the time. The thing is, I want people to accept it as murder, and to feel the weight of their actions. I can accept that wars happen, and I can understand that at times innocent lives will be lost. However, I can not accept that people are able to shrug off, ignore, diminish, or otherwise cast aside the understanding that they are taking lives, or destroying families.