| ”If I understand you correctly --- and please correct me if I'm wrong---“ |
I have been open, even eager, to be corrected when hampered by my own misunderstanding. I have always assumed you were arguing in good faith, and we would both be wise to continue to assume that of each other. Lacking that, there’s no point to discussion, and we might as well go at each other with pointed sticks (as happens on so many doomed FReeper discussions, alas!)
So I beg you pardon for any transgressions, small or large, advertent or inadvertent, and I offer you the same pardon.
Part of the problem might have been that we both jumped off into lengthy riffs without any prior declaration of our own underlying assumptions, and without even defining key terms.
For instance, it would have helped if we had made it clear from the outset that we both share the belief that “an evil thing (e.g. the slaying of an innocent person) must not be willed or chosen, neither as an end in itself, nor as a means to an end...” but that you consider that this principle simply may not apply here. Then you would have been in a good position to explain why it may not.
Similarly, we ought to have made clear from the outset how we can and ought to resort to the authority of Sacred Scripture. It is shocking to me that you thought I was trying to “invalidate” Holy Scripture (!) or that I thought the obedience of the Jews to God’s commands is a “depraved act” (!!). I can only shake my head in perplexity. It is against God’s nature to command things which are morally depraved; in fact my whole point is that He does not do so.
And on and on. We seem to be misconstruing each other at every turn. We never settle on a definition of “innocent” or “noncombatant,” and then fault each other when, midstream, we get an inkling that we have different definitions. We allude to ius ad bellum or ius in bello or Augustine or Aquinas without having previously set forth what we regard as the criteria for justice in war, and the argument for or derivation of those criteria.
You charge, “You go on to equate the murder of Abel by Cain with every act of military resistance to evil throughout the existence of humanity”--- and this charge is utterly unfounded: I am not a pacifist; I support military resistance to aggression; I specifically back lethal force against our murderous jihadi enemies (and I blessed my Marine son who was on active duty at Al-Asad base in Iraq until earlier this year); in fact I have never once made a pacifist argument in the 12 years I have been posting at FR.
Then this leads to another round of “You misinterpret!” “No, you misinterpret!”
So here we are, all knotted up in a tangled skein of argument. Let’s leave off, but in peace.
I don’t think this particular tangle-patch can be straightened out, but I should like to converse you again somewhere down the line: in good faith, and with a more satisfactory result.
God bless you.
“For instance, it would have helped if we had made it clear from the outset that we both share the belief that “an evil thing (e.g. the slaying of an innocent person) must not be willed or chosen, neither as an end in itself, nor as a means to an end...” but that you consider that this principle simply may not apply here. Then you would have been in a good position to explain why it may not.”
Knowing you are a Catholic, I assumed that you subscribe to that belief. I guess I should not have expected you to make that same assumption, and on that basis see that I was arguing that the principle did not apply. I thought that the proposition was implicit in what I advanced, but I guess I was unclear. I have had problems in the past caused by my unfortunate habit of jumping from point A to point M to point Z, and expecting others to see that points B through L and N through Z must be presumed as necessary to the argument.
“It is shocking to me that you thought I was trying to “invalidate” Holy Scripture (!) or that I thought the obedience of the Jews to God’s commands is a “depraved act”…I can only shake my head in perplexity.”
I made the comment regarding invalidation because your response to my quoting of those Scriptures was to write off their meaning as my personal interpretation, and then to move on. Later, of course, you argued that they did not mean what I thought they did because many in the Old Testament committed “depraved acts.” The people in the Scriptures I quoted were obeying God’s commands, yet you referred to those things as “depraved acts.” What is one supposed to think?
“It is against God’s nature to command things which are morally depraved; in fact my whole point is that He does not do so.”
I don’t see how that can be your point. God commanded that cities be destroyed and all their inhabitants slain, which you condemn as immoral under all circumstances. That’s what the Scriptures say, at least. That adds another dimension to the moral question. It seems to me that:
God does not command things that are morally depraved.
He commanded that cities be destroyed and the inhabitants slain.
Therefore, destroying cities and slaying the inhabitants is not *always* morally depraved.
The conclusion to be drawn is that this is one of those points upon which our understanding of morality is imperfect. God’s understanding is inerrant, of course, so where ours differs from God’s, we must be wrong.
It is my belief that God does not view temporal suffering and death the same way we do. Consider, for instance, redemptive suffering. Surely this is a positive good in God’s eyes. When a child dies, it is the greatest tragedy a parent can suffer. It is so agonizing that many of us cannot bear to contemplate it. The death even of a stranger’s child affects us deeply. And yet, that child is now with God for eternity.
Could one think that, from God’s perspective, the suffering of the parents will be used for good, and one day soon all concerned will understand and their suffering be relieved? That the death of the child, or a beloved parent, is not for Him the tragedy it is for us?
“We seem to be misconstruing each other at every turn.”
I am glad to discover that our difficulties had their source in honest error.
“We never settle on a definition of “innocent” or “noncombatant”
Well, that’s one of the things I was trying to do. It seemed as though you didn’t want to go there.
“We allude to ius ad bellum or ius in bello or Augustine or Aquinas without having previously set forth what we regard as the criteria for justice in war, and the argument for or derivation of those criteria.”
We certainly didn’t explicitly define those things prior to our exchange. However, don’t you think that we are justified in making a few assumptions based on commonality of worldview?
There have been a number of things I have come to understand much later than most people, and I’m sure there are many of which I remain unaware. I’m beginning to see that it is futile—perhaps wrong-headed—for me to expect others to make the same assumption of good faith about me that I make about them. It has been a sore spot for decades, and perhaps I should have come to grips with it long ago.
“You charge, “You go on to equate the murder of Abel by Cain with every act of military resistance to evil throughout the existence of humanity”--- and this charge is utterly unfounded”
Okay, well let me explain how I got there.
We are discussing the morality of the bombings of Hiroshima (広島) and Nagasaki (長崎). I’ve spent a lot of time reading about, thinking about, and discussing this subject, in part because I lived in Japan for 20 years.
I asserted that the Church’s teachings on war have changed recently, to which you replied that support for your position on the immorality of H and N could be found all the way back to Genesis. It seemed to me most reasonable to think that you meant the slaying of Abel by Cain, as this is so universally viewed as murder in the worst possible sense of the word.
A belligerent is morally obligated to minimize harm to civilians, even when they supported an evil regime. (Of course, they can be tried later.) But in defining the civilian casualties inflicted at H and N as “murder” you are going a step further. From that standpoint, even civilian casualties that occur as a result of unforeseen circumstances can be condemned as murder.
It is impossible for an infantryman, for instance, to know that his bullet will not pass through an enemy soldier and go on to kill a civilian. It is impossible for an aviator to know that no civilians will be killed when he bombs an armaments factory or a dam. It is impossible to know that an enemy soldier will not fall into a well, poisoning a number of civilians, or that a defeated enemy will not take disease with him when he retreats through the countryside.
Was it possible for MacArthur to know that an American victory in the Pacific would precipitate an event for which the description “morally depraved” is an understatement? Is the blood of the 50,000 civilians horribly tortured, raped, and killed by the Japanese just before they left Manila on MacArthur’s hands? http://www.battlingbastardsbataan.com/som.htm
If the civilian casualties of H and N are characterized as murder, it becomes impossible to take any military action in resistance to evil without assuming a very high risk that some accident or unforeseen circumstance will see one hung as a war criminal. And what supports this? Among other things, Genesis, and the principle illustrated by the story of Cain and Abel.
“I am not a pacifist; I support military resistance to aggression; I specifically back lethal force against our murderous jihadi enemies (and I blessed my Marine son who was on active duty at Al-Asad base in Iraq until earlier this year); in fact I have never once made a pacifist argument in the 12 years I have been posting at FR.”
Great, and I thank your son for his service. It’s good to know that there are those in the younger generation willing and able to pick up the torch.
If your son were going house to house to clear out the forces of evil, and suddenly in a dark corner there was movement and a flash of light on metal, I would fault him in no way if he instinctively shot that person more quickly than the speed of thought. Not even if it was a little girl just like mine. I would grieve for the tragedy, and for his probable difficulty in forgiving himself, but I would attribute no guilt to him whatsoever.
At the end of WWII we had these two new kinds of bomb, and we didn’t really know what was going to happen when either was detonated in an air burst. 'Fat Man' was not a gun-type bomb but used the implosion method; it had a circle of 64 detonators that would drive pieces of plutonium together into a supercritical mass. 'Little Boy' had used Uranium 235. 'Fat Man' weighed about 10,000 lbs and was 10 feet 8 inches long. It had the explosive capacity of about 20,000 tons of high explosives.
For both missions there was a primary target and a secondary target, both military in nature. Back then we had to be able to see a target to have any chance of hitting it, so if the target were obscured by overcast, missions were canceled. Here’s just a hint of the thought that went into target selection:
“Nagasaki was not America's primary target. This was Kokura. The three potential targets for a second bomb were Kokura, Kyoto and Niigata. Nagasaki was only added to a list of potential targets when Kyoto was withdrawn (it had been the secondary target for a second bomb) because of its religious associations. The third potential target was Niigata - but this was withdrawn from the list as the distance to it was considered to be too great. Therefore, the Americans were left with just two targets - Kokura and Nagasaki.”
My mother-in-law lived through the firebombing of Yokohama by the kindness, she says, of a “granny” who taught her to forage for edible plants. This business of holding up H and N as an entirely new phenomenon is nonsense. Burn to death from phosphorus, burn to death from radiation, both terrible, still dead.
“Let’s leave off, but in peace…I should like to converse you again somewhere down the line: in good faith, and with a more satisfactory result.”
I as well. Sorry to have gone on at such length. Don’t feel obliged to reply.
God bless you, too.