Sometime I fell I've got to...

[wphightower]

I was listening to This American Life today on NPR, and it made me realize something. There was a story on about counting the civilian casualties in Iraq. The host of the segment was trying to make a moral distinction and weighing the final result of the war (theoretically a democratic Iraq) against the deaths of the civilians. It made me realize that I do not buy into moral relativism. War is a crime against humanity, period. Just because we like the result of an act does not, in any form, justify it. Am I saying that I would have preferred my grandfather to not have joined the Navy and help the fight against fascism in World War II? Absolutely not! Was the price of victory in World War II worth the sacrifice? Absolutely, but that does not absolve the world of the immorality of the war. The dropping of the bomb on Japan was absolutely wrong, but it is a separate issue of if it saved lives. The fact that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki probably saved lives on both sides by avoiding a full-out invasion of Japan does not mitigate the moral question of the dropping.

Is it better for our psyches to pretend that outcomes can mitigate means, but that is simply a rationalization to allow us to choose the path of wrong.

Next on the block...God.