The shooting down of planes

[Mark]

In the wake of the recent 9/11 testimony surrounding the order to attempt to shoot down the planes, I was wondering if that prospect made anyone else feel a little bit more than uncomfortable.

I honestly don't know what the legal justification for willfully killing civilians could be. And by that I mean that I know of no examples, analogies or corrolaries in U.S. jurisprudence that seems to condone that act. Does anyone else know of any, and can you link to it, or discussions of it, etc? It seems to me like the decision to destroy some lives in order to save others is oftentimes an impossible calculus, one which the people have probably, rightly, never granted to governments. I shudder to think what some might consider worthy of killing in order that the rest be saved.

Anyway, I was troubled by all this and looking for some other input from people who may be more familiar with the law or, simply, the moral dimension of this problem.

[johnb]

I don't think it matters.

If tomorrow another group of Islamofascist jihadists hijack a plane or group of planes here is the result:

1-US warplanes shoot them down. Democrats scream that Bush is a murderer for ordering the execution of all the people on the hijacked plane(s).

2-US warplanes don't shoot them down. Democrats scream that Bush is a murderer for allowing the planes to crash into their targets and kill the passengers and the people in the targetted building.

Whether either case is more or less ethical or on sound legal ground is irrelevant.

You and the rest of the extreme left will never allow Bush to be anything but a murderer, a terrorist, and morally equivalent to Hitler in your rhetoric.

What is the point of the exercise Mark?

[Wuptdo]

Mark,

Were you raised in Europe? The questions you asked are very typical for "coffee" house chats found in Europe. Either you had some very good professors at Emory that actually taught you how to think, or your parents had very interesting dinner conversation. Hopefully, we here at CP, are also providing you with interesting cognative information.

You made some very interesting points above, however, mentally my mind is fired due to "other" events and school. So I won't be able to help you in your quest for knowledge and understanding (enlighenment). Though I found that most of lives moral questions about good/evil, right & wrong, etc., can be found watching Star Trek (any type). For instance, the "Prime Directive." I have found that life's real hard questions can be found hidden away in science fiction. A good example is found in "Ringworld Engineers:" the Lewis Wu has a two choices A) let Ringworld be destroyed at a cost of 200 billion lives (humanoid) or B) fix Ringworld at a cost of 30 billon lives. " The needs of the many outweight the needs of the few."


Wuptdo B-)

Rishathra Rules!

[Brent]

I honestly don't know what the legal justification for willfully killing civilians could be.

Neither do I. Nor the religious justification for same. And yet 19 Islam extremists killed 3,000+ civilians on September 11, 2001. I am willing to take drastic measures to make sure they never do anything like that again.

Yep, even if I'm on the plane.

What's your solution, Mark?

[Brent]

I shudder to think what some might consider worthy of killing in order that the rest be saved.

I generally try to avoid this topic entirely, and I honestly have no stake in this debate, but given your statement that I've cited, how might you relate this to abortion?

Wuptdo talked about Star Trek. What about "The good of the many outweighs the good of the few"?

What do YOU think is justifiable? Or is this just dissing Bush, like JohnB suggests?

[dhyatt]

[snip]I shudder to think what some might consider worthy of killing in order that the rest be saved.[snip]

Mark,
You've asked two very different though related questions here. One is easy to answer and one is not. We'll take the easy one first: Who should live and who should die is pretty simple to answer (though I'm sure some of you are shocked at this) if you simply look at and honestly answer the question of the 'value' of your own life compared to others.

If you believe your own life to be more valuable and you are faced with a life or death situation, the other person must die. That's pretty straight forward and the converse is also true. If you believe another life is more valuable than yours, than you should willingly give up your own. For instance, most parents I know would willingly give up their own life to save one of their children.

If you believe everyones life is of equal value (the moral though not necessarily intellectual choice) then whether or not to shoot down a hijacked airplane is simply a mathematical excercise.

Now for the much harder question; who should you trust to make such decisions for you? If you were on the plane, who would you want deciding whether or not it must be shot down? Would you want that decision made by a deeply religious man, one who values human life and is fighting extremists that behead Americans for kicks or would you want that decision made by someone who accepts blow jobs from an underage intern while on the phone with foreigh leaders and then lies to our face about it???

Sorry - I was mistaken. The second question is far easier to answer...

[Mark]

Brent, I'm not in any way linking this to Bush at all. Bush had nothing to do with 9/11. I don't blame him or his administration for 9/11 happening on their watch. It is impossible, though important to try, to prevent every act of every person that seeks do harm. That's just a fact. So, yeah, maybe the administration could, or should, have been a little more proactive. Maybe they should have paid a bit more attention to some warning signs. But does that amount to blame, or even to culpability? No, not in my book anyway.

So, more to the point of my initial question. I really was fishing for any information people might have about legal precedents for the act in question. Your abortion example, if applied in cases to save a mother (the closest to the plane situation) does bring up some interesting questions, though I think the situations are too dissimilar to provide a useful analog. There is first the understanding that a plane full of rational adults has concrete legal rights and moral standing, a fetus, despite what anyone may personally think about it, does not yet have a body of concrete legal rights or moral standing. Also there is a very real moral difference concerning the nature of the threat. One the one hand is an external coercive actor, a terrorist, intending to harm a set of people A, on the other hand is an internal physical ailment, be it what it may, that doesn't in any real sense intend to harm anyone, it simply is - and is an accepted fact of human existence.

So, let me suggest, since you asked, that "the good of the many outweighs the good of the few" has never been a principle that western democracy has explicitly followed, nor should it. As a guiding principle it suffers from far too many ambiguities to effectively govern action. It allows no consideration of what "good" is. Or, to put it another way, to whoms good it refers. Or, to put it another way, of whether good is actually just, or equitable, or fair, or right, or... well, any number of terms that we may subsitute and then commence arguing over. Also, our law is explicitly written to protect minority rights, and to encourage minority viewpoints to be heard. Surely at some point in the history of the U.S., perhaps even now, the greatest number really feel that is their good for all foreigners, especially the dreaded dark ones, to return whence they came. And, to limit females from voting, or owning property for that matter. And, to ensure that a Christian God be the properly recognized and true God of the United States.

In each of those cases then, and arguably now, the majority opinion - taken to be acting according to their good - lost out. Now, granted, that might be a technical problem with voting and referrenda (our legislators may be more progressive than the public at large) but it nevertheless remains.

So, to suggest another track rather than the utilitarian concept that Wup proposed, perhaps the focus should be on rights. And this is something that I think most people here (because I think most of you have a libertarian streak) would agree on. Governments need to be explicitly charged by founding documents or by consent of those governed to act in the ways that it does. No charge, no justifiable action. I do not think that the U.S. constitution, or any known laws, affords the kind of power to an absurdly small subset of the government to dispense capital punishment with no deliberation. True the nearly all states are charged with acting for the common defense of its citizens. But, I cannot see how assuring that many of them will be killed to prevent the possibilty of many being killed can be read to conform to that standard. I'm not sure that any action the state takes in which it deliberately takes the life of one of its own can be justified, legally or morally. Compare abortion with capital punishment here for a fun evening of mental wrangling.

Anywho, I've been rambling. My solution to this particular problem isn't, obviously, shooting planes down. Nor is it letting them get hijacked and crashed into buildings - though, I should note, that I think this is so unlikely that the point is somewhat moot. Suspected terrorists shouldn't be getting on planes, for starters. Terrorists shouldn't be roaming freely about the country, in any fashion, either. So, perhaps some more effort should be paid to locating and detaining terrorists within the U.S. Think of what counterterrorism efforts within the U.S could do with the Iraq budget of $1.1 billion dollars a week. You could spend $1,000,000 on each of 1000 suspected terrorists a week. I doubt anyone could survive under that kind of scrutiny for long. Also, we would do well to cease engaging in actions likely to make people want to kill us. But that much is obvious.

And, finally, for Wup. That was some kind of compliment, I guess, so, thank you. But, no, I was not raised in Europe but rather Eastern Pennsylvania. When I was young my parents, so far as I can tell, had dreadfully pedestrian and boring dinner table conversation. My father would likely have been making some remark, positive mind you, about a something or other Robert Bork had said, which no one would register let alone contest, while my mother somewhat detachedly commented at the six o'clock news. If education can teach us how to think, we require the outside world to refine where we think, that is, about what we channel our talents into.

[Wuptdo]

Socrates would be pleased!

Wuptdo (aka the "Gadfly" of NCSC) B-)

[Cathy]

Mark wrote:

So, let me suggest, since you asked, that "the good of the many outweighs the good of the few" has never been a principle that western democracy has explicitly followed, nor should it.

In this, Mark, you are absolutely correct.
The Founders of this country, after much debate, chose to follow a form of government called a Republic, charged with protecting the naturally endowed rights of Life, Liberty, and Property of it's citizens. ALL of the citizens. A Republic was chosen over a Democracy, in order to protect the rights of minorities from the tyranny of majority opinion.

Cathy