Stardate 20021219.1436

(Captain's log): Been getting a lot of good responses from people in the last few days and I thought I'd post a few of them.

Ian Wood writes:

"It's all platitudes. It's all grand principles [...]"

Indeed. It's also morally obtuse. There's a difference between what is good and what is right. Is the total elimination of all war forever and ever a good? Certainly. But is it right to sacrifice (say) 100,000 lives for the sake of that good when military action could prevent that sacrifice at the cost of far, far fewer deaths?

These folks say that it is, because they have confused themselves about the difference between what is good (ideal) and what is right (practical). They theorize and propose solutions based on the notion that they're the same thing. They're not.

James F. Keenan, speaking from a Christian theological perspective, described the difference as it applies to individuals:

“The distinction between goodness and rightness is a simple one. Goodness describes a person who acting out of love strives to live rightly. Rightness describes behavior that promotes value in the world. Goodness asks whether a person strives to answer the call of Jesus to love God and neighbor. Rightness asks whether certain actions actually make the world a better place.”

I can handily ignore the bit about God and Jesus and focus on the bits about promoting value in the world and making it a better place. In fact, it makes even more sense if you replace "strives to answer the call of Jesus to love God and neighbor" with "strives to act according to an Ideal principle." Is it good to hate war? Absolutely. Is it good to want to lesson the burden of the poor and unfortunate? Of course. However, it is in the sacrifice of righteous action for the sake of ephemeral goodness that the contributors to the New Democracy Forum, IMO, fail morally.

Their morality, like that of a theistic believer, is deontological; that is, they believe that the rightness of an action is determined by something other than its consequences. In this case, it's not God but their Ideal, their "cause." This is opposed to the consequentialist morality that you and I seem to agree upon: the rightness of an action is determined solely by its consequences.

I find that I can usually replace any terminology referring to such Ideals or causes with "God" or "God's Law" without changing the essential logic of the argument. So many of these thinkers have broken free from the surly bonds of oppressive patriarchal Western Monotheism...only to be bound anew by similarly slavish devotion to an otherworldly Ideal.

Highly amusing!

As you pointed out, what they also seem to deny is that it is possible for someone to share the same ideas about what is good while differing radically about what is right. In their view, what is right automatically flows from their ideas about what is good. It reminds me of a very old debate among a group of Islamic philosophers about the nature of God and Justice. One side held that God only does what is Just. The other held that whatever God does is Just. I think that the NDR folks, had they been in that place at that time, would have fallen squarely into the latter camp.

I don't know that I'd go so far as to say that the moral value of an act is solely determined by its consequences, but it's true that I think that consequences are the primary determinant. (A purely utilitarian approach to ethics leads you to some horrible traps.) A different way of characterizing this is to say that this is an argument between idealism and realism. An idealist is something of a dreamer; he attempts to describe the best possible outcome and work to achieve that, and most of the time fails because what he's trying to achieve is prohibitively difficult to bring about. A realist limits the scope of alternatives to those which have a decent likelihood of actually happening, and then tries to select the one alternative amongst them which is considered least bad. That's necessary because sometimes all the outcomes which are absolutely good are also infeasible; it's often the case that all the choices have bad results. But some may be worse than others, and the realist tries to work for an outcome which will be as little bad as possible.

Kent was one of several who pointed this out:

"Greeks and Turks have hated one another since the time of Alexander the Great"

not possible, since the Turks didn't take over that area until sometime in the Middle Ages. Before that, what's known as "Turkey" was a Greco-Roman province. The wars between the Byzantines and the Arabs depopulated the region, which is why the Turks could move in.

Nelson writes:

According to a British historian, Norman Davies (who's rather partial to the Poles and wrote two histories of Poland), the Poles played a disproportionately important role as pilots in the Battle of Britain. They were also important, I think, both in North Africa and at Monte Casino. And of course, their intelligence services managed to smuggle one Enigma machine to the Brits.

As my family is Hungarian, I'm informed about Hungary's role in the war. They fought along with the Germans and Rumanians in Russia. When the Red Army began encircling the Germans and the