A Chunk of Trinitite Reminds Us of the Power of the Atomic Bomb

Re:A Chunk of Trinitite Reminds Us of the Power of the Atomi... by AnimalMuppet on Thursday August 22, 2019 @08:04PM (#20773518)

> I'm not sidestepping the question. I'm claiming that the question is irrelevant because EVEN IF we knew that the war would have been shortened, fewer lives would have been lost, etc, etc, the committing of an evil action for a good end is NEVER justified. If you want a name for the principle behind this moral judgement, I refer you to the doctrine of double effect.

And we're claiming that you're wrong. The doctrine of double effect is not the be-all and end-all of ethical thinking, either among theoretical ethicists nor among people wrestling with an ethical dilemma.

You seem to think that dogmatically stating your position proves the point. It doesn't.

[Edit: On re-reading, you stated that this is what you are claiming, not that this is true, so I was a bit harsh. You may have gotten some spill-over from a completely different topic, where a completely different poster was stating the conclusions of a non-mainstream theory as if merely stating them clinched the matter. It's a bit unfair to you that you get the shorter fuse for someone doing that, when you aren't quite doing so.]

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Re:A Chunk of Trinitite Reminds Us of the Power of the Atomi... by danielam on Thursday August 22, 2019 @10:16PM (#20774061)

Not at all. From the fact that I made an assertion, as everyone here does, it does not follow that I was under any special obligation to defend the principle in question. Contradicting my assertion with incoherent counterclaims and false assertions accomplishes nothing. Same for presumptuously guessing what I “seem to think”. FWIW, natural law theory (from which the principle is drawn), is, at the VERY least, very defensible.

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Re:A Chunk of Trinitite Reminds Us of the Power of the Atomi... by AnimalMuppet on Friday August 23, 2019 @12:37AM (#20774550)

I would guess that, of the people here, something less than 30% would accept natural law as an accepted authority. Of those, I suspect that a large fraction would not accept the doctrine of double effect, or perhaps even know what it is.[1] (I had to look it up; I'd never heard of it before.)

While I disagreed with the substance of your post, it was the form that most annoyed me. (You could say I should focus on the substance, and you'd be right, but... I didn't.) Saying "theory X (that most people don't agree with) says Y about this subject, which supports my position" isn't a very effective argument unless you give reason why people should believe or trust X. As I said, I would hopefully have been less annoyed by it, except that I just ran into the same form on a completely different topic.

[1] Here I am presuming that the doctrine of double effect does not absolutely and automatically follow from natural law. I suspect that natural law is not unambiguous enough for that. I am not an expert, though; feel free to disagree if you think I'm wrong.

I myself do not accept the doctrine of double effect. When faced with a "do I or don't I" decision, inaction is just as much a choice as action, and you're also responsible for the (foreseeable) consequences of the inaction. If Truman had not dropped the bomb, and the US had not invaded, Truman would have borne some responsibility for the continued deaths in China, which his inaction allowed to continue.

Or, to use a different example, if you see the crime happening and you do nothing, you are to some degree complicit. You're not in the same category as the person who commits the crime, but you still have some responsibility.

(Hey, look, I'm giving unsupported assertions too! It's really hard not to, because nobody's got time to go back to first principles, agree on them, and then derive conclusions.)

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