USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20010929.1028 (Crew, this is the Captain): More than a year ago, one of the very first essays I posted on my web page was a discussion of ethical cynicism. Current events inspire me to revisit that, for the arguments in favor of ethical cynicism have become even more relevant due to the ethical challenges we are about to face. To recap, an ethical cynic believes that all ethical systems are incomplete, and that there is not and can never be a complete and unchanging answer to the question "What is good?" (and its correlary "What is evil?") An ethical cynic believes that the words "good" and "evil" have meaning, but that all definitions of them are tentative and subject to change. The ethics of any act has to be judged within its specific context, and in some circumstances an act which as a general rule might be considered wrong may become ethically mandated simply because all the alternatives are worse.

"Thou shalt not kill." Well, usually. There was a case about a year ago of a couple of crazies in LA who tried to rob a bank and botched it. One of them started stalking down the middle of a street shooting at anything that moved. Ultimately he was shot and killed by the police. What he was doing was unquestionably wrong, but was it wrong for the police to kill him? I don't think so. Had they not done so he would almost certainly have killed several people himself. "Shoot to wound" only happens in movies and on television. In real life with modern weapons you don't generally have that choice. The LA police were presented with the stark choice of one death versus many, and correctly chose to kill one man to save the lives of many.

Is it wrong to execute someone convicted of a heinous crime? Some people claim that it is always wrong to do so. But suppose that we actually had our hands on bin Laden, gave him a scrupulously fair trial, and convicted him, having presented unimpeachable evidence which demonstrated beyond even the faintest shadow of a doubt his complicity in the murder of over 6000 people in NYC and several hundred in Washington DC? (Suppose we even recruited Johnnie Cochran to defend him?) What should we do with him once we've convicted him of mass murder? If we confine him to prison for life without possibility of parole, then as long as he has henchmen in the world who are as ruthless as those who committed the attacks in NYC and DC, no American anywhere will be safe. Americans overseas, in particular, will constantly be menaced with the possibility of being kidnapped, to be held and offered in exchange for the release of bin Laden. If fifty Americans are kidnapped and the US government won't deal, they'd be murdered one by one. If that didn't do it then the next kidnapping might be five hundred people. How many innocent Americans are we willing to sacrifice simply to keep bin Laden alive in our prison? If we executed him instead, that would finish that part of the story. There might be one terrorist attack in retaliation, but then it would be over. While this probably would not stop Al Qaeda from attacking Americans, it would remove that particular motivation for doing so. Whatever else you might have to say about capital punishment, the one thing everyone can agree on is that it is final and irrevocable.

Is torture wrong? Well, usually. Until two weeks ago the following scenario might have seemed like paranoid ravings, but I think people will now accept it as a real possibility: what if, at some point in the future, Al Qaeda smuggles the components of a fission weapon into the US with the intent to assemble it and destroy a US city. If one member of the group with knowledge of the details of the attack had been captured, then what do we do with him? He has the answers, and if those answers can be gotten out of him then a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions might be prevented. Forget about truth serums; that only happens in the movies. (Lots of ethically easy answers only happen in movies.) You've got 12 hours to make him talk or Philadelphia (or Miami, or Houston, or Denver) will be destroyed. What are you going to do? You torture him. There is no other answer. It's bad but all the other choices are worse, and torture works. If by torturing one man you can potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives, I consider it to be an ethical obligation to do so. I'd even take my turn, if I had any talent for it. (And then I'd hate myself for the rest of my life.)

Is it wrong to use poison gas in war? I'm torn on that one, but a lot of people think so. The main practical argument against it is the possibility of a radical escalation. Many people point to the fact that not even Hitler used poison gas in WWII, but the reason why surely had nothing to do with the Geneva Convention or any ethics on his part. Rather, he knew that the Allies were prepared to counter with their own poison gas, and that if he started it then his own troops would reap what he had sowed. It was deterrence which prevented it, not any ethics. On a moral basis, is it necessarily any worse to kill an enemy with gas than it is to shred his body with cluster bombs, or to cook him with napalm, or to blow him to bits with a fuel air explosive? Let alone simply shooting him? Death is death, and a lot of weapons maim when they don't kill. Still, there is that worry about escalation and it's very real. Let's suppose that somehow gas is truly