Oh, so if you didn’t or couldn’t ask your neighbor for help, that makes it unjustifiable for him to kill the thief?
No!
Where would he derive the authority to use violence, unless I asked him explicitly to be my agent?
Do you feel that all thieves should be murdered?
Was it or wasn’t it a good thing that Saddam’s regime fell?
So do you retract the following statement?
You completely ignored the specifics of the situation. This is about self-defense and defense of others. Or if someone threatens your wife with a gun, only she is entitled to kill him in self defense? If in that particular situation she didn’t ask for help (no time, fear etc.), is killing the thief in her defense unjust?
Are you saying that, in this case, the ends justified the means?
If you ask me, I don’t think America and its allies mass murdering hundreds of thousands of Iraqis was an improvement over Saddam Hussein.
But how does that matter? If you and I think it is a good thing to topple a government, does that give us the right to do it?
I never meant the US government is entitled to tax people in order to do that.
I said what I said because we were discussing whether some particular actions are moral or immoral. In that context, trying and hanging Saddam felt immoral to me, while overthrowing that regime didn’t. That’s because we were discussing those actions themselves, not the means.
Again, no. How many times do I have to repeat this?
Exactly. I don’t think I ignored anything. Can you answer this question please?
I don’t see how this is relevant at all. Who was threatening to kill Iraqis? And who is responsible for defending Iraqis?
So, the ends (toppling Saddam’s regime) were moral, but not the means (bombs bought with stolen money)?
Yeah, I agree here.
No (libertarian) principle, authority or majority allows you to skip judging and taking a correct decision. So the answer is “it depends”. It depends on whether we’re right or not. I imagine the answer is yes, but we’re not taking action because 1) we’re not very sure and 2) we’re not stupidly brave/daring.
Yes, those ends were moral.
I’m not sure which question you want me to answer.
Okay, we can go like this:
- naive people thinking about anarchy: “Nobody gives a crap.”
- people thinking about state: “The state is responsible for defending us.”
Somehow you managed to intermix these two: “Nobody is responsible for defending Iraqis.”. Because I otherwise can’t possibly tell why you asked that question. The answer is simple: nobody is responsible but everybody can take action.
As for threatening Iraqis, is murder the only threat possible? Saddam killed and tortured people. He was the head of the state and he had the power. Or all that babble about how governments are immoral suddenly disappeared into thin air?
Eduard, your point is so narrow that why even say anything? Yes if there were a giant cholera outbreak and 15 million people died and one of them was a head of state, then the latter`s dropping dead would actually be a good thing, but in a sea of bad things. So? Would you really go around saying “But listen up people, actually there was one good effect of the epidemic.”?
Anyone remembers this by the way (?):
A reminder of the real ends of the war.
Correct. Because Israel actually fears functioning Arab states that are tolerant of all the Abrahamic faiths more than it does primitive, tribal, Islamist ones.
It is one of my rants when I hear Obama/Bush speaking about freeing the people of Irak. Now if you read my first post again you’ll see that the main point wasn’t about the “wonderful” invasion, but about enslaving people under another regime, namely democracy. What right did US have to remodel a tyranny according to their own views?
You just spent last night arguing that they had the right to defend the Iraqis from Saddam. Have you now backtracked that position?
My idea was that anybody had the right to overthrow Saddam’s government. I kept arguing because some people seemed to deny this, in spite of taking the position that government is generally illegitimate.