You've identified the problem - deonotology - but not the solution. Anyone who kills for a living, is violating the most basic rules of human life, that have been taught us since we rose from this Earth: life is sacred. You can't educate a dead man.
The first premise is right: life is scared. At least in our culture that's the case. We believe the natural rights of being a living human. But I argue that the 2nd is not true. The claim is too strong. If life is sacred, we ought not to kill anyone. Capital punishment must not be exercised as a result. Because people are rational animals they can make poor judgements. So we must forgive and give them a second chance, a chance to live behind the bar and be educated behind the bar. People who execute capital punishment order is violating the most basic rules of a human life, right? The prison didn't do anything to the executioner. So we should never kill Hilter even if we caught him alive. Absolutism says we must not kill anyone unless that person is doing some hostile to you (pointing a gun at you, and so you have the right to defend yourself). But if Hilter is just sitting at his desk, and you destroyed his army, will you kill him? One say he was being hostile, but that was his past. And he indeed COULD become a great man again. Who knows?
Anyone who claims to have the right to kill others - for any reason whatsoever - should be treated by greater society as anti-human - since human lives are being removed from the universe as a result of their actions.
This goes for the current Joint Chiefs of Staff as much as it does any historical figure.
> Anyone who claims to have the right to kill others - for any reason whatsoever - should be treated by greater society as anti-human
Sorry, this is rubbish. This society we know of is built and established with guns and blood. We shall not have police, army or even guns. We fought wars. Your ancestors, my ancestors all fought in war one way or another. If you think that self-defending yourself against some murderer is wrong, then what is the purpose of protecting life?
Life is precious. Why are we killing cows and chicken? I supposed you are animal rightist then. That's anti-animal as anti-human (but humans are animals!)
We do not live in a world where War is necessary. We live in a world where War is created, for some purpose.
With the tools and technologies we have available to us today, why is that purpose still to maim, murder, kill? Shouldn't the purposes have been aligned, by now, to make the trillion-dollar debt of the American people worth at least something to the rest of the human species?
We don't need another B1 bomber. We do need schools where our children can learn to respect and love each other.
If we never take hard problem to a philosophical discussion, what can come out from the discussion?
> We do not live in a world where War is necessary. We live in a world where War is created, for some purpose.
And why is war or violence created? Because we have desire, we as thinking things have thoughts and emotions. We become jealous and angry. We become depressed and sad. We harm others for these reasons.
> We don't need another B1 bomber. We do need schools where our children can learn to respect and love each other.
And we have schools. And we teach them to respect. The world you are describing does not exist. As long as there is freedom for someone to think, there is violence. Violence can be physical or verbal. You can kill someone by saying something very harsh and this person may go depressed for the rest of his life and ends up in a messy, unproductive life.
I will respect you being a pacifist, but I urge you to think about other ethics theories as well.
The argument that society was built on foo can also be used for arguing for slavery, the oppression of women, child labor, etc.
Just because we did do something in the past does not justify doing it in the future.
The right to defend yourself is not the right to kill, especially on a mass scale. The places that these drones are being used are not places that have a credible military threat to the united states. (unless you count their governments having nukes)
> The right to defend yourself is not the right to kill, especially on a mass scale.
He is not asking not to kill at a mass scale. He is against killing others, regardless of what the reason is. There will be no ground for fighting for democracy. There will be no ground for protecting my life, my lover's life, or anyone's life. There is no mechanism to defend the things I cherish when a murderer comes to my doorstep with an AK47.
We're talking about nation states here, not individuals. You have, absolutely, an individual right to defend yourself.
You do not have - unless the state grants it to you - the right to murder other human beings. States that use murder as a solution to their problems are undoubtedly going to fail - because the purpose of the State, in the first place, is to provide human beings with safety and protection from death. Death delivered, or received, is still a failure of the State to fulfill that promise.
I do not believe that anyones' interest is protected by the maiming, murder, and disfigurement of villagers' children, on the other side of the world, for the purposes given by the States that are doing it. I believe that the reason States are committing these crimes, is because the Murder Societies within these states are out of control, and no longer answer to the people who put them in power.
> because the purpose of the State, in the first place, is to provide human beings with safety and protection from death
We as an individual can do anything we really want. So if someone wants to kick another person in the head, he could. He will be held legally responsible for kicking the victim.
Ideally, at least this is what the American government is/was supposed to form -- we are the one that gives the government the power. We can totally remove a President if we want. We can dissolve this Union if we want. But that won't happen easily because many of us think about stability, we apply utilitarian views. There is nothing wrong with that.
The issue that you want to raise is the state decides who can kill or not. This is part of civilization. Everyone is supposed to have a role and we determine what people can do and what people cannot do. We want to have police officers who will patrol around with a stick and a pistol. We agree that when the police officer is being attacked he can apply an equivalent counterforce. If someone shoots back, the officer can shoot back. We give the offices the permission to kill another human being because we apply absolutism. We only harm those who harm us directly.
Not every police shooting gets away from legal and moral judgement. Some are found guilty for using excessive force or intentional murdering.
We don't protect people why just educating them. We mobilize them. We arm them, we teach them how to build a healthy body, what to do when they face danger. The world you imagine will not work in any civilization as long as there is a freedom to think. As I said before, the only reason we have desire is because we are allowed to think for ourselves and for other people. We are angry because we have emotions. We become depressed because we have expectations. To protect people who become incapable of staying peaceful and respectful by harming another person physically or mentally (e.g. verbally), we use some form of force on them. And this could be military action (to protect people from invasion) or apprehension. This is true because we value our own life, and we want to be protected.
It is true that some of the military action is morally impermissible in this modern time. We don't need to do a revenge in order to show off our power to scare off our enemies (this was necessary in ancient time), but we shouldn't say that every time we slaughter a human is morally impermissible.
The ethic approach I take is virtue ethics, which looks at the environment, rather than the action or the consequence.
You said what makes us human is that we can decide what not to do and if we allow killing we will go back to animal. I don't see why we should disregard our familiar biological facts. We are animals. Animals have emotions. They can group and hunt. They can think on their own. They may not have science or computer to use, but they are also thinking. In fact, no one can prove or disprove whether physicalism is true or false, whether dualism is true or false. We cannot. We have "the other minds problem". We can't really know what it is like to be a bat (Nagel's paper). We can only speak from our own experience: oh so this is sonic vision and this is how we can see if we had a sonic vision, but that's it.
So what is left with us? We will continue to apply survival of fitness? There was a famous case in England where two sailors were charged to kill this other young sailor boy after the shipped sunk and after they starved for months.
(1) had the boy came up with the idea first and sacrifice himself, is killing that person in the first place wrong?
(2) had the boy asked about this, and the boy agreed, is killing the boy to help the other two more healthy sailors from starvation morally wrong?
Will you be willing to give up your space shuttle ticket to your friend and sacrifice yourself in a zombie crisis? If Russia had dropped an atom bomb years ago, would you think it was okay to destroy Russia like we destroyed Germany by saving the rest of the America? Or do you actually think we can apply peaceful talk?
Are you asking me? I don't understand your question. I am arguing that if killing is absolutely not allowed at all, regardless of the cause, as he suggests, is wrong.
People consume resources. Dead don't need food and shelter logistics.
(disclaimer: I don't advocate killing people, but I do believe that those concerns were and are evaluated doing wartime, if letting someone go is not an option)
I think you intended this as a reductio ad absurdum but a lot of people take this view, quite possibly the majority of Europeans and Buddhists for example.
"the most basic rules of human life, that have been taught us since we rose from this Earth"
That is just fundamentally untrue. The notion that all life is sacred and killing for a living is wrong is a very, very modern notion.
Members of the military kill because it needs to happen. They would rather be members of a professional, trained force that means the number of total dead is minimised to the greatest extent possible. Modern wars by professional soldiers kill very few, both soldiers and non combatants, compared to the wars of conscripts and untrained masses.
>The notion that all life is sacred and killing for a living is wrong is a very, very modern notion.
Since time began, humans have been trying to stop it. So I don't think you're thinking this through ..
>Members of the military kill because it needs to happen.
Members of the military kill because they are ordered to do so, and no longer have the ability to express their own inherent free will. Nowhere in the history of war has it ever been true that 'to kill a little now means not killing more later' - if it were, the killing would have stopped.
Who? You're quoting fancy philosophical terms, so here goes:
Aristotle: the sort of war that involves hunting “those human beings who are naturally suited to be ruled but [are] unwilling…[is] by nature just”
Plato's Republic had warriors as a vital part of his ideal society.
Aquinas and Augustine gave us the Western "Just War" theory though other cultures had covered the idea earlier. Even Cardinal Wolsey's (and the Church's) thinking around perpetual peace was to allow fighting non-Christians.
Kant and Bentham are hardly since time immemorial. I'll give you Jesus (only 2000 years), but the God of the Old Testament was rather pro-conflict, and other religions have very pro-conflict tenements.
The accepted views of the majority of humanity until the late 20th century (perhaps not even now) is that different genders and races were unequal, that some were fit to rule over others, and that war was an inevitable consequence and participation in it was an honourable, noble and patriotic (once patriotism had emerged as a concept) activity.
Who is not thinking this through. Plus the killing has massively reduced - the last decade has been one of the lowest for deaths in conflict in human history.
fit2rule:"Nowhere in the history of war has it ever been true that 'to kill a little now means not killing more later' - if it were, the killing would have stopped."
Not so. You jihadis have found that, for example in Algeria, by killing off the (relatively small) leadership of centrist and non-radical muslims you can eliminate opposition to radical jihad. Once these people are eliminated, opposition to jihad plummets (people are afraid to speak up) and Taliban-like elements can take over.
So indeed _you_ and _yours_ have learned that "killing a little now means not killing more later".
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