He ordered the killing of humans because of an assumption? What the shit. Just walk over there and ask the bloke what he's doing, or investigate after they left, or throw in a flash grenade and disable, shoot the legs not the heads. Anything but kill. What are they thinking? That their chances of survival are higher if they kill the enemy combatants before they can kill them? Is this really what it boils down to? This sort of behavior is not acceptable for a human being, heck its not acceptable for an animal being or a plant. Amazing how these "soldiers" are multiple magnitudes less civilized than any insect I can think of right now.
What kind of demented questions is "can we shoot them?" anyways. Don't shoot unless shot upon. No you can never just shoot somebody.
And that he has the balls to try to justify his mass murders after the fact is way beyond me.
Edit: Deleting my sub comments because the discussion has gone completely off topic. Guys write your own top level comment and describe your view in one coherent piece. This piecemeal snowball-fight leads nowhere and nobody can be asked to get into a pitiful mud fight with 100 different people at the same time. I realize its my own mistake I should never have replied to any of them, especially the sub-thread about cats. Seriously guys?
This is war. A place of snap decisions, unfortunately. Sure, I personally would like US soldiers, or for that matter my own country's soldiers, to wage war like United Federation of Planets - diplomacy, diplomacy, and if that fails, set phasers to stun. But we don't have phasers. Nowdays, if you run at your enemy with a taser, you'll get shot to death before you're halfway there.
I'm not defending the atrocities many a soldier committed on purpose. There are many unforgivable things that happen during war. But in the current shape of warfare, you can't blame soldiers for using lethal force against a perceived lethal threat. Let's develop phasers with stun settings that are as effective as guns, and then we can go back to this conversation.
EDIT: Come on. Off-topic or not, you're breaking the conversation flow by deleting your responses. Those comments are useful for context even if some of us disagree with them.
> Did you realise how that phrase is incredibly dangerously close to this other one
It's not. Because soldiers are thrown into battle and forced to make snap decisions that determine whether they'll live or die the very next second, while the Government has both more time for deliberation and much, much wider range of possible actions to take.
> You bliss the first one and you have nothing left to contain the other one from happening
This does not follow. My point was - if they're shooting at you and you're not allowed to run, what can you do except shoot back? The problem is with those who put you in a position where you're getting shot at.
> Unless you are a believer of the capability to self-refrain of an ever expanding Government.
Of course I don't. I just feel that focusing on front-line soldiers is the wrong place to start solving this problem.
If only that was so easy. What really happens is that some of the people who don't want to go get jailed or executed, and the rest quickly change their minds. And if you somehow managed to breed a whole nation of people refusing to kill others, then your country would quickly get invaded by another one. "Why don’t we live in the utopia dreamed of by sixties pacifists and their many predecessors? Because if we did, the first renegade to pick up a rock would become a Genghis Khan."[0]
You'd have to enact a global and immediate mentality change to beat the coordination problem inherent in this situation.
Yes the State is an extortionist and if you are aware enough your moral system would lead you to explore alternatives really hard. For example preferring to personally try to be a Conscientious Objector[1] before buying the discourse of a guy with a tie that got elected in office to send you or your children to the front while having equity in the company that will get the contracts to rebuild the mess based on lies.
Dying defending your freedom is something very very different to justifying others people killing based on assumptions of threat after a preemptive war of aggression [2]
The only thing that can try to keep such an illusion consistent is Exceptionalism [3] which would magically give you self-serving moral superpowers.
Extrapolate that a little bit and you will see how Exceptionalism escalates to some form Elitist Dystopia [4]
We tried this terrible idea once. It results in our guys dying because surprise, they detonate the ied when you walk up to it.
> shoot the legs not the heads
Have you ever watched programmers on tv doing things like 3 people typing on the same keyboard? That's the equivalent of this statement.
> Don't shoot unless shot upon
They fight by planting ieds. In your world, we'd be dying by the dozens. Interdicting the guys planting IEDs is the most effective way to prevent IED attacks.
The point is, when you're a soldier on the ground, your choices are very constrained. You want the right decisions to be made? Go after people who sent those soldiers in the first place.
Replying to the edit of your edit - yes, seriously. HN is a place of discussion, not monologue. We all learn from one another. Just because you were wrong (IMO) about things (especially about cats), doesn't mean that I didn't seriously consider your arguments. I evaluated them, learned from them and decided to reply - even if to express disagreement. You should do the same. Deleting good comments (as in, civil, on-topic) is not the way to go - it hinders other readers' ability to understand the discussion and reach their own conclusions. You're of course free to not reply to comments - but please, for other people's sake, don't retroactively delete your comments.
> This sort of behavior is not acceptable for a human being, heck its not acceptable for an animal being or a plant.
Animals are ruthless killers. Cats kill for fun. Plants aren't much better. In India, a captive elephant is allowed to kill two of its handlers before they will put it down. They suspect the elephants know this and pick their targets carefully. Only man has the ability to be moral, to decide whether the killing they do is legitimate or not. Doesn't stop us from killing, but at least we can feel bad about it.
> By fun you mean exercise I assume. Cats aren't that smart I am pretty sure they don't have a concept of fun.
Being not smart might mean they have no concept of exercise, but the pleasure responses that can be fairly labelled "fun" are pretty fundamental.
(Now, the reason those propensity for those particular pleasure response or selected for in cats may well be the activity that they encourage provides exercise that useful in developing reflexes for survival skills, but that doesn't mean they do it "for exercise" in any motivational sense.)
You seem to be operating on some strange principles and are being inconsistent with your assertions. When humans kill it's abhorrent but when cats do it it's okay because it's 'exercise'? Ants fight pitched wars over territory with other ants. These battles are immensely brutal.
The ecosystem of your backyard puts our battlegrounds to shame. You don't see the warfare, but that doesn't mean it's not happening. Plants mainly fight using chemical poisons they leach into the soil and through fungal networks. What you think of as synergy is actually really awful if you were to translate what they're doing to human terms.
> Cats for instance have very sophisticated behavior in regards to killing their own kind.
It's evolved behavior on the part of felines. Other animals are perfectly fine killing each other. In fact, males of many species will specifically seek out infants of their species that they haven't fathered and kill them so as to reduce rivals.
> The ecosystem of your backyard puts our battlegrounds to shame. You don't see the warfare, but that doesn't mean it's not happening.
It reminds me of a thing I learned when I explored the possibility of joining the OpenWorm project[0]. It seems that, as fungi wage war with bacteria, one side learned to secrete enzymes that make C. elegans worms more aggressive at eating the other, thus using them as weapons.
No, cats kill for fun, or at least they do so for reasons beyond securing their next meal. If you've had a cat, especially an 'outside cat,' you will know this to be true.
Watch your cat carefully the next time it catches an insect. The cat will eat it, eventually. But not after playing with it for a good few minutes. Cats are cruel. They bring their prey to the brink of death, then release it only to catch it few moments later and repeat the process.
A cat's jaw is delicate. The prey a cat normally choses has beaks or teeth or claws that can damage that jaw, causing infection. That could easily kill a cat. One possible reason that a cat "plays" with the prey is to minimise the risk of an injury near the jaw by wearing out the prey to the point that a killing bite can be given.
> I think plants are much better. Most of them are living in amazing synergy.
And the rest of them are evil. Just like animals. Nature is a complicated thing. Some advanced animals have complex cooperation and ethics-like behaviours, but as for the rest, it's just kill or be killed, which powers the feedback loops of the ecosystem.
> How do you know? Cats for instance have very sophisticated behavior in regards to killing their own kind.
Yes, what a goofy bit of propaganda. Anyone with a shred of ethics asks something like, "What if this were a Chinese newspaper, from a guy who invaded the US and went around killing people for the horrible crime of defending their home?"
(And unlike Afghanistan, the US is the world's hyperviolent bully.)
If you were in the situation above, what choice would you make? I'm legitimately curious, as I do not know many people that seem to think in moral absolutes.
You don't fall into the false dichotomy of even entering into playing that game. Your question presents a false dichotomy that (dangerously) is pushing things into trying to institutionalise a justification of killing a fellow human being. Worst, is trying to do that a priori. Is exactly what dictatorships, genocides and Eugenicists would use.
In Nature, and even in urban life, the chances of experiencing the Trolley problem are close to nil.
Nope, you don't understand the trolley problem. It's a very precise tool designed to explore the workings of human conscience. It's a toy problem, not meant to be used with real-world situations. What it shows is that humans indeed have the intuition that, ceteris paribus, the value of lives adds up - saving two lives is more right than saving just one.
> It's a bullshit problem created to justify stupid decisions.
No. It's a toy problem designed to check for particular moral reactions in controlled conditions, for exploring the way human conscience works. It's not meant to be used as something you reduce real-world problems to.
> I don't think in moral absolutes, hell I don't even consider myself an especially moral person. I justify my actions based on their merits and everything I've read, seen and heard about offensive warfare just seems like a really stupid idea.
This is good, and that is very much in agreement with the trolley problem. Evaluating actions based on their merits, looking at principles and consequences alike.
With rest of your comment, I agree. Iraq and Afganistan wars are stupid, and are an example of a collective failure to do the right thing.
The point of the Trolley 'problem' (dilemma) as I think of it is to distinguish the moral difference between actively killing someone and letting someone get killed.
From a utilitarian standpoint, all you look at are the possible actions and the possible results.
From a moral standpoint, actively killing someone is much worse than letting someone get killed.
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> I would shoot only if shot upon, not because its moral, but because I'd feel like a coward idiot to do otherwise.
You're saying social expectations would cause you to shoot someone else?
Ignoring social expectations, your total opposition to kill is the reason I asked your response to the dilemma. It's not you who're being shot at, but your friends, family, and people and things you love. Would you be willing to let everything and everyone you love perish?
> From a utilitarian standpoint, all you look at are the possible actions and the possible results. From a moral standpoint, actively killing someone is much worse than letting someone get killed.
I disagree. What the trolley problem shows is that it's better to save many lives than just one, thus most people decide to pull the lever. As for why in real world you don't go and kill people for the greater good, is that our brains run on a corrupted hardware. "The end justifies the means" is a valid line of reasoning, but not for humans - because we predictably end up doing more bad than good when we follow it.
> Would you be willing to let everything and everyone you love perish?
If you put it that way, then killing one person to avoid this outcome is just like pulling the lever in the trolley problem.
>> I would shoot only if shot upon, not because its moral, but because I'd feel like a coward idiot to do otherwise.
This is a complex topic. I bet GP would shoot back when shot upon just because survival instinct kicks in. But barring that, social pressure is indeed a strong factor. I recall stories of Jehovah's Witnesses (die-hard pacifists) who got conscripted during First World War, back before the movement developed the idea that going to prison for your beliefs is a Right Thing; those soldiers would keep intentionally missing when shooting, in order to follow the "do not kill" commandement while avoiding getting imprisoned/executed for refusing to fight.
>He ordered the killing of humans because of an assumption? What the shit. Just walk over there and ask the bloke what he's doing, or investigate after they left, or throw in a flash grenade and disable, shoot the legs not the heads. Anything but kill. What are they thinking?
Well, what they were thinking was "if I walk over there and they're enemy combatants, they'll probably try to kill me", and "despite popular misconceptions, a shot to the leg is easily fatal", and "I don't want to die".
Welcome to the hot harsh reality of war. Let us know when you realize that sometimes people lie. Your questions about other nicer approaches have been answered literally on the bodies of tens of millions of dead. Humans are extraordinarily deadly apex animals, and they'll go through unbelievable amounts of trouble to avoid getting hurt or killed themselves.
The guys planting the bomb are doing that because they know they won't win in a gun-on-gun fight and the guys shooting the guys planting the bomb are doing that because they know guns don't win against bombs, especially ones you can't see and don't know are about to rip your truck, your buddies and you to shreds. They're all doing what they're doing because foreigners started pushing foreign agendas on them.
Only people who seek to prematurely remove themselves from the gene pool go up and ask "hey fellas, whatcha doin'?". Only people who engage in a firefight, and still want to get shot after hitting their target shoot for the legs. Dead enemies don't shoot back, and nothing is more dangerous than a wounded apex animal. It's faster to kill your enemy if you hit them in the vital organs, the head contains members of the set of vital organs.
Congratulations, your "let's lead with conversation and then if we're dissatisfied with the response, leg shots approach" just killed an entire platoon. Maybe those nice men digging holes to plant bombs in just want to be given gifts of flowers and an understanding hug?
Soldiers aren't meant to be civilized, soldiers are meant to create the environment where civilization can exist. They're the fire that burns away at the wild things and leaves behind clear space to build on.
You can't say "don't shoot unless shot upon" when you're fighting an enemy that attacks you with bombs. Don't shoot unless you've been bombed? Sorry, you're dead. You can't shoot back. Logic dictates that to survive you must shoot before you get bombed.
"Hey blokes, is that a bomb you're planting?" Then what? Of course people surreptitiously trying to plant an explosive device they built in secret after weeks of premeditated intent and are desparately trying to conceal the existence of are going to answer absolutely truthfully and cordially.
"Yes foreign invader, this is a bomb that we made that we hope maims and kills you and your compatriots that we are planting." In your imagination is this to be followed by a friendly and robust exchange of geopolitical viewpoints while sipping tea and snaking on biscuits?
Does everybody afterwards exchange phone numbers and friend each other on Facebook and promise to keep in touch only to exchange greeting cards on major holidays?
"Sorry about the bombs chaps, we'll promise not to do it again." Is that the scenario you think will unfold? That rough men, who decided to fight, and spent weeks gathering material to MacGyver a bomb together that's powerful enough to decimate an armored vehicle and everybody inside, will, in the middle of seeing their plan through, suddenly be open to meaningful conversation with the people they're trying to murder?
And that scared kids, thrust into the middle of a battlefield, after watching their friends get turned into piles of gore and ripped apart, are going to suddenly lose their fucking minds and will to live and walk up to where there's a better than chance a bomb that could turned them into giblets is being planted and engage in a question/answer dialog?
You're absolutely right that war is not acceptable for any human being. But you're absolutely wrong in how wars should be fought and have a fully delusional notion about what happens during them.
Wars should be terrible, there should be no winners, they should be such extraordinary fuck ups that us apex animals go through unbelievable amounts of effort to make sure that we never end up in one. And then when we're in one we should do anything we can to survive and see the other side of it.
But once in a while, too often, we end up in one. And they're pretty fucking awful affairs. They should be about the worst things humans can do to one another. A notion that the alternative to killing your enemies is a friendly conversation in the middle of the battlefield is the product of a line of magical thinking so dense and ignorant I'm not sure I know how to perceive it other than with the strongest patronizing feelings I can muster.
Until you're in a war, or at least something more intense than a mild disagreement over your dry cleaning bill, you should probably keep your opinions about how they should go to yourself and maybe, just maybe, try to figure out what it is about war that's so fucked up that, when it happens, and when people are suddenly in the middle of one, it suddenly makes it reasonably acceptable for people to kill each other.
War is terrible, but your ideas about war are just about as terrible.
And yet, maybe those men were actually farmers, producing an irrigation ditch to produce the food they need to feed their families.
War terrible or not, whether your side believes it is righteous or not, is an us vs. them endeavor: there is no absolute right, both parties assume they are the righteous. A moral human does not get himself in a situation where he has to make such a decision. I've never killed anyone and I suspect you haven't either.
Normal, well-adjusted adult humans may be apex animals, but they certainly aren't inherently violent. There's a subset of that population who has a cluster B personality disorder that exploits a larger subset of the population who has limited opportunity to feed their family in order to create such violence.
Any analysis of war must take in to account the us vs. them situation. Imagine reversing the scenario, imagining an Afghani soldier wandering around the United States with a weapon, deciding who to shoot and for what behavior. Would your reaction be the same? Would you still think it was the correct decision?
> And yet, maybe those men were actually farmers, producing an irrigation ditch to produce the food they need to feed their families
I doubt that farmers in Afghanistan are idiots.
They will know that because farmers almost never work in the middle of the night digging right next to the road, and that bomber planters almost always work in the middle of the night digging right next to the road, that it is very very very dangerous to dig by the side of the road in the middle of the night.
Farmers who, for some bizarre reason, have decided that they want to dig an irrigation ditch right next to the road in the middle of the night are going to make sure that the Marines in the area know the farmers will be out at that location at that time.
The war has been a major part of the farmers' lives for many years. They know how it works.
Wars aren't rain showers, they are started and proliferated by decisions and actions.
> Soldiers aren't meant to be civilized, soldiers are meant to create the environment where civilization can exist. They're the fire that burns away at the wild things and leaves behind clear space to build on.
What kind of demented questions is "can we shoot them?" anyways. Don't shoot unless shot upon. No you can never just shoot somebody.
And that he has the balls to try to justify his mass murders after the fact is way beyond me.
Edit: Deleting my sub comments because the discussion has gone completely off topic. Guys write your own top level comment and describe your view in one coherent piece. This piecemeal snowball-fight leads nowhere and nobody can be asked to get into a pitiful mud fight with 100 different people at the same time. I realize its my own mistake I should never have replied to any of them, especially the sub-thread about cats. Seriously guys?