Part of the dilemma in this thought experiment is basically about weighing the worth of the lives of unknown numbers of "them", against one of "us".
The President must distinguish "them" or "us", otherwise he has no business leading the country in a war. He must treat the killing of one of "us" with a different judgment.
The other part of this is remote controlled killing versus visceral engagement. Suppose that pushing the button is the right thing to do for the country, but the President has a personal aversion against the bloody engagement form of killing. As President, he's supposed to push, but a personal, psychological reason is preventing him from doing it as a man.
The "bad guys", the ones you might actually refer to as "them", are sitting somewhere comfortable, far out of reach of any of this. Their only interaction in this is that they pressed a button.
This selfishness if of course natural for any human, but that does not make it better.
It's the self justified "us" than do most damage, not some "others".
I'm not saying that war is not necessary, but pretending that you're fighting zombies thirsting for nothing but your blood is idiotic. The soldiers you're fighting joined their army to protect their people. The people itself most likely just want to passively continue with their life, not understanding what the war is about, knowing nothing but the date of the first bomb. The people that started the war is sitting somewhere cozy, out of reach.
Simply not true in the case of, say, an aggressor who initiates conflict by invading other countries.
Many a times there is definitely a right an wrong in war.
The side which is right has no choice but to respond with aggression. Fight, or else be laughably annihilated for the sake of a pacifist ideology.
Any evidence for that?
Because again and again, humans are well-documented to NOT dance on each other's graves. We consistently pull back from the brink of destroying the "other" and not only let them live, but help them rebuild.
And yet you demonstrate it yourself with, "I expect them to do it, but not us in the HN community. We're different here."
Also: Baseline human psychology is tribalistic and violent. We need education and culture to behave as modern - and sustenance amd safety.
If you put a gun to my head, I'm certainly not going to care if you're my local baker or a North Korean soldier, just to name a random nation. Hell, I'll probably have sympathies for the soldier, as they are just doing what they were told, like any other soldier would. Getting angry at them would be pointless, although I'd of course do my best to fight for survival, and if I came out the winner, I would be upset that the life I had to take was not the life that was to blame.
For the baker, it would be hard to tell if the hand was forced, or if the idea of slaughter was of their own making.
Pressing the button means killing of lot of "us" in the end too, because there's no such thing as one-way nuclear exchanges nowadays, with subs ready to fire from anywhere in the world.
Starting from the 60's, the concept of MAD and a truly global, total war made this distinction irrelevant. As soon as you push that button, you're not only condemning "them" to death.
As if the establishment haven't killed (and allowed the killing) of tons of "us" without flinching an eye...
From this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
to much worse stuff. But suddenly when it becomes matter of open public scrutiny it's some kind of big conundrum...
They just make their general discontent known ("oh, those pesky anti-vietnam protesters" etc), allow for the cultivation of an "us and them" dynamic, and then their people ensure that for years the police is not just allowed to do bad things but even encouraged (with protecting policemen that stepped out of line, giving promotions to their leadership if not directly, then after some such scandal gets forgotten, etc).
From McCarthy and Hoover, to the treatment of the human rights activists, the 68 democratic convention and onwards to this, the Watergate and more, it's not about some "bad apple" or "stressful panicked" actor, but about systematic cultivation of such solutions.
For one thing, "those pesky anti-vietnam protesters" had burned down the ROTC building a couple of days before, there was quite a bit of violent rioting prior to the shooting and the National Guardsmen had already had to use their bayonets to manage it (when bayonets get fixed and bloodied you know things got very serious). Today's "campus protests" are utterly farcical by comparison.
In general, violent civil insurrection was common, and the authorities management was very mild by the international standards of the time, and there was plenty of pressure from the bottom up for much more strenuous measures. Note it's the only major incident of that type in that period, and is a trifle when compared to atrocities like Waco.
McCarthy? Please, if you don't know what the phrase "submit to party discipline" means, and that it resulted in every member of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), back when it was popular and selective in admittance (through the '30s at minimum), was a self-declared traitor, well, read up on what the other side was saying, or things like the Venona decrypts which eventually revealed just how accurate McCarthy's raw information was.
And note how the authorities' flaccid response to GRU and NKVD spying through these traitors like Hiss paved the way for crude men like McCarthy. That's a lesson you'll see from the Weimar Republic to a lot of what's happening today, and there's plenty of history of this sort of thing in pre-modern times.
Hoover was a bad apple, I'll grant you, and the rest of the barrel remains rotten to this day; has the FBI Hostage "Rescue" Team ever actually rescued anyone? Latest is their shooting in the only fatality resulting from the Bundy Oregon mess, and then trying to cover that up.
There is never going to be a one-sided nuclear exchange when a substantial number of powerful, ideologically opposed countries have access to ICBMs.
In short, there are no realistic circumstances under which the US would launch a first strike with nuclear weapons. The political cost is too high, and the benefits could never outweigh the costs.
How most nuclear powers would actually react to large-scale non-nuclear aggression is of course a whole different discussion.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the most destructive bombing runs in WWII.
The March 9th 1945 bombings of Tokyo were far more destructive.
This shows just how much 20th c. nationalism still holds sway in many minds when it is as ridiculous as sports fandom.
Please stay!
I wonder what else people would be more willing to do by pushing a button rather than doing it themselves.
I mean, it's not surprising that gov higher-ups would incinerate human beings with a button, dump toxic waste on people from a plane with a button, poison water supplies, launch tear-gas from choppers, etc.
They should be forced to open their eyes and WATCH the effects of their buttons. Like Clockwork Orange or something.
I mean, what's the solution to these types of problem where the adversary keeps getting better and better? I feel like Forever War touched on this too, where the Taurans just kept getting more and more advanced, and it was always an arm race to have the better technology and better weapons and better tactics, etc.
The American military fighting in Vietnam dehumanized the Vietnam soldiers in order to justify killing them, but imagine if one of those American soldiers were told by his commanding officer that in order to kill more "Charlies", he'd have to kill his friend he's been fighting with since the beginning. Sure, you'll probably find someone crazy enough to do so, but a lot of people wouldn't do it.
TLDR: It's different when it's someone you work with
Can you agree that sometimes it is morally just and legally permitted to use violence?
Can you also imagine that someone may know that it is the right thing to order this violence, but be put off by physically having to hack someone up themselves?
If so, do you now see the practical problem that the friends in the Pentagon were warning of? With the capsule in the person you are clouding the judgement of the president and making it harder for them to make a cool assessment of the right course of action, not adding some kind of clever moral check. Can't you see that?
If you want to know more about this issue, read up on the 'trolley problem'. It's a more complex moral issue than your snarky comment implies.
Perhaps the butcher knife and the capsule is too extreme, but on the other hand, perhaps just having to issue some codes is too easy.
The situations where a nuclear counter-attack serves any moral purpose are limited enough that such thought experiment are worthwhile means or considering what level of deterrence should be in place.
I disagree. The instinct for revenge serves a very important purpose in stabilizing society. If I know you will want revenge should I kill your brother, it makes me less likely to do so, and vice versa. Revenge is also the basis of the justice system, though obviously not its total extent. For example, if you kidnap someone, we do exactly what we condemn and forcibly hold you in a facility for a number of years or life. And yet the moral implications of that are different because of the differing situation.
>You try to appear strong, you tell everyone that you will lunch retaliation strikes, but the leaders of this other country don't give a shit, they really hate you and launch a first strike.
Appearing weak doesn't prevent a first strike by our opponents either. In fact, it increases likelihood of one. So if our options are appear strong or weak, and appearing weak has grave consequences, I will appear strong.
>You really want to nuke the people of that country? You won't hit the leaders and the people didn't do anything to you. Chances are that they hate the leaders as much as you do. So why on earth would you do that?
The people are guilty of allowing a criminal regime to initiate nuclear warfare against another party. No individual or small clique (small enough to fit in a bunker) can launch a nuclear first strike without the cooperation of a large, representative sample of their nation. They are complicit. They launched a strike. They will suffer and die.
Revenge is not supposed to be the basis of any modern justice system, we don't lock people up to make them suffer, we do in order to change them, to make them not commit crimes again, to make them honor the rules of the society they live in. This necessarily involves an element of force, acting against the will of the criminal, but the motive is not revenge. We actually try to avoid revenge as much as we can, we condemn vigilantism because people act irrationally and are likely to overreact or even go after the wrong one. Revenge is not stabilizing, it is destabilizing.
Appearing weak doesn't prevent a first strike by our opponents either. In fact, it increases likelihood of one. So if our options are appear strong or weak, and appearing weak has grave consequences, I will appear strong.
If you really believe this to be true, you have to conclude that it is irresponsible for any country not to try to obtain nuclear weapons. You would have to support North Korea to obtain nuclear weapons because that will reduce the likelihood of war. Nuclear disarmament would be a stupid idea. You are suggesting that humans are egoistic greedy assholes always wanting to just conquer the entire world, to grab all the resources and the only thing that prevents them from doing this are the expected costs and causalities of the conflicts. It is a bit like suggesting that wearing sexy cloths is a bad thing because it provokes getting raped. Being strong and able to fight an attacker is not the same thing as being able and willing to nuke innocent people. The right thing to do is building missile defense capabilities, that might actually save your people. And you of course don't do that in order to gain first strike capabilities because you no longer have to fear retaliation strikes, you actually do it to have a strong defense against attackers. You don't develop or get rid of you offensive weapons to show that you really do it for defense and not for improving your first strike capabilities.
The people are guilty of allowing a criminal regime to initiate nuclear warfare against another party. No individual or small clique (small enough to fit in a bunker) can launch a nuclear first strike without the cooperation of a large, representative sample of their nation. They are complicit. They launched a strike. They will suffer and die.
So if a dictator forcefully acquires the power in a country, the people are guilty? It is immoral if they just try to survive instead of resisting and risking getting killed? The people in North Korea really enjoy their liefs and support the regime? Which by the way certainly fits into a bunker. Is a mother guilty in case her child, despite her best effort, becomes a murderer? Should we kill the mother in revenge for unleashing her child onto the world? Just throw her into jail for a decade or two?
That's patently untrue. The very notion of justice is built upon revenge. To say modern justice systems aren't based on it is to say they float in the air, founded upon nothing.
>If you really believe this to be true, you have to conclude that it is irresponsible for any country not to try to obtain nuclear weapons.
Well, yes, it is eminently sensible in many situations to obtain nuclear weapons for your country. That doesn't mean I have to support them doing so, as it is not necessarily in MY interest for them to do so, even if it is in their own interest.
> You are suggesting that humans are egoistic greedy assholes always wanting to just conquer the entire world, to grab all the resources and the only thing that prevents them from doing this are the expected costs and causalities of the conflicts.
Our domination of the planet suggests this is the case.
>It is a bit like suggesting that wearing sexy cloths is a bad thing because it provokes getting raped.
No, it's not.
>So if a dictator forcefully acquires the power in a country, the people are guilty?
A dictator cannot gain power without the support of a large segment of the population.
> It is immoral if they just try to survive instead of resisting and risking getting killed?
Yes. It is immoral not to resist evil.
>Is a mother guilty in case her child, despite her best effort, becomes a murderer?
What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
Citation needed. »Justifications for punishment include retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitation.« [1] Note that retribution is not revenge and that retribution is probably the most controversial justification for legal punishment. [2] What good does it do, whom does it help?
Well, yes, it is eminently sensible in many situations to obtain nuclear weapons for your country. That doesn't mean I have to support them doing so, as it is not necessarily in MY interest for them to do so, even if it is in their own interest.
Why would it not be in your interest unless you want to attack that other country? You argued that not having nuclear weapons increases the risk of being attacked, so more nuclear weapons should reduce the likelihood of armed conflicts which in turn means a more stable world which benefits everyone (besides weapons manufacturers and the like).
Our domination of the planet suggests this is the case.
How does that follow? The dominant species on a planet can certainly be benevolent. I grant you that humanity had and probably always will have a fair share of assholes and that they are good at getting into influential positions, but without good additional arguments I wilt not grant you that it is a fundamental aspect of humans that will forever prevent us from living together in peace. We certainly still have to go a long way, but we also have already come a long way.
No, it's not.
If you don't have nuclear weapons you increase the risk of being attacked, you should really consider getting some.
If you wear sexy cloths (not wear non-sexy cloths) you increase the risk of being rapped, you should really consider getting some non-sexy cloths.
A dictator cannot gain power without the support of a large segment of the population.
A coup d'état does neither require the participation nor the support of a large fraction of the population.
Yes. It is immoral not to resist evil.
That is a bold statement. How far does that go? If I see someone pointing a gun at somebody, should I try to intervene even if it is likely that I don't stand a chance? Is it my moral obligation to travel to North Korea and try to topple regime?
What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
You argued that the people are responsible for the actions of their leaders. It is admittedly not the best analogy but wouldn't it similarly follow that a mother is responsible for the actions of her child?
(The US has never been bombed by any other nation but it has bombed a couple dozens. In the case of nukes, it is the only nation that has used them against another country.)
At the time of their introduction, nuclear weapons were not yet understood as qualitatively different from an equally powerful amount of conventional weapons. The qualitative difference observed after Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped establish this qualitative difference in the minds of people.
Having the grit and resolution to hack someone open and being able to make a good decision about using weapons are unrelated. Why conflate them?
An alternative might be to have the person carry the suitcase with orders never to surrender it, forcing you to be prepared to shoot him or order him shot if he can't be subdued, or any number of "easier" variants.
Part of the point is forcing people to think about why it is appropriate to order the murder of millions of innocent civilians if you are unwilling to kill a single person face to face.
There may be valid answers, such as if you have reasons to worry about further, more destructive additional strikes and want to try to take out their capabilities. But there are also many digusting reasons, such as being willing to carry out mass murder on innocents out of a desire for vengeance.
Why? So that when a new intelligence emerges on this planet they'll know the value of deterrence?
Even if one can agree, which I think most of us can, this particular dilemma is specific to weapons of mass destruction, because their use inevitably (and intentionally) causes the death of many, many people who aren't the target but are in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So, the thinking goes, it makes some sense to force the president to kill someone who isn't the target to ensure that it's a worthwhile sacrifice.
By the way, have you ever wonder which type of meat you would eat if you had to kill the animals yourself?
"The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic."
From their response, killing through a button isn't killing.