Since You Probably Didn't Notice...

Fafblog gets it absolutely right. Yet again. Oh, and on a similar level, one of my current favorite blogs gets a different issue absolutely right. They might be bastards over there, but they're my kind of bastards. Finally, a moral conundrum. Answered in the proper way. The point is, of course, that if they don't look like us they're not human. If we can safely ignore them, they're not human. But if they fit in to our narrow definition of, "People who look like us and think like us and are our equals," then it's a tragedy if they die. That's why whenever a soldier dies in Iraq or Afghanistan we get a name, a picture, a story of a grieving mother. But whenever a civilian dies we get, "14 people were killed by such-and-such in so-and-so place." Next time someone tells you how great America is because it was "founded on Judeo-Christian values," point out the second and third links. Next time someone tells you that the Enlightenment was actually a terrible thing that brought evil moral relativism, tell them about Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Jefferson. Bentham especially, since Utilitarianism is one of the most humane philosophies we have as long as it's kept divorced from such horrid philosophies as Social Darwinism and left unmolested by the tyranny of the majority, which can be used to corrupt Utilitarianism.* The Fort Hood shootings, while tragic and beyond the pale, go to illustrate this perfectly. It's like the scene from The Dark Knight where the Joker is in Two Face's hospital room talking about "the plan." His point is that nobody panics if everything goes according to plan even if the plan itself is horrible. Let's say we took those same soldiers from Fort Hood, put them on a truck, and had that truck blown up by an IED planted an AWOL Hasan who went to Iraq or Afghanistan to fight in the insurgency. The news would be completely different. We'd get some stories of a bunch of soldiers dying in the line of duty, but since that's what soldiers are supposed to do the story would never have made the front page, or if it did it would just be a blurb right below the latest sports scores or something. If Hasan's actions were known he'd get some sort of "American Taliban"-esque nickname and it would be a story with some legs, but it wouldn't be the constant front-page news with recriminations and questions of the patriotism of all Muslims in the armed forces or questions of whether the FBI/CIA was doing their job correctly and properly monitoring all soldiers of questionable loyalty. It would be chalked up as an aberration. But soldiers died on the home front. They died senselessly as the results of the actions of a crazy person. And we ask all the wrong questions. It shouldn't be, "Why did he do this?" It should be, "Why do we care more about these soldiers dying at Fort Hood than we would have if they died in Kabul?" More importantly, "Why do we care more about Americans dying because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time than we care about Iraqis or Afghans dying because they just happened to be living in the blast radius of that Predator's missile?" People are dead. That's a bad thing. But why is it that this is more of a bad thing than if they had died in some other way? Why are some deaths more noble than others? Why are some deaths more shocking than others? Most importantly, why do some deaths matter when it seems that others just don't? --------------------------- *Basically, Utilitarianism can be reduced to, "Do what's best for as many as possible." As long as this is kept within certain parameters it's one of the better philosophies. As in the discussion on the Pharyngula thread linked above it also can be used to influence situational ethics and Kant's categorical imperative to create a quite satisfying outcome. However, it can also be corrupted to basically say, "It would be for the best for [this group of people] if [that group of people] were to disappear from the face of the earth." This is a bad use of Utilitarianism and not at all the spirit in which the philosophy was intended. But ideas rarely survive contact with reality intact, so it's an important note.