Do you really see it as black and white as you describe it?

Randomly start wars just to keep them occupied with something?

I'm pretty sure that those people are actually very rare and that most people that join the military do it because of patriotism and propaganda.

Most soldiers probably don't know what they will be facing and how it will affect them in a negative way, which would explain the high suicide rate.

The military doesn’t commit suicide at a significantly higher rate than the general population.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/02/02/but-there...

fit2rule: "when you are in the business of killing, murdering, maiming other human beings, you're no longer really part of society"

Soldiering sometimes requires killing. So soldiers are no longer part of society? What about the executive branch of our government (which issues the orders to soldiers)?

fit2rule: "we in the 'normal' society don't have a clue what those in the 'murdering business society' really think about us"..."This is a contagious disease, not some 'normality' about human existence..."

Murderous thoughts run through the minds of people everyday. They don't usually act on them but they are there. It's part of our nature: we've always done it. Here's a famous quote:

"I am a man: I hold that nothing human is alien to me." - Terence

For a history of killing and how the responsibility has shifted from the individual to the government:

"Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist" by Richard Rhodes.

fit2rule: "the 'official killers' really don't care about human life"

Categorical nonsense. People love their spouses, children, family and friends. Soldiers are people as are Presidents. Even psychopaths love and protect their children (usually). All will protect the ones they love from those who they fear will cause harm.

fit2rule: "if you get up in the morning with the intention of taking a human life, if ordered to do so, then you no longer belong to the human race." ..."Anyone who claims to have the right to kill others - for any reason whatsoever - should be treated by greater society as anti-human"... "anyone whose job it is to murder, maim, kill - officially, with sanction from the state - and who chooses to do this as a career is a very, very sick individual."

You're out on a limb here- this is simply a rhetorical blast. I fail to see how being a killer makes you inhuman. I don't know how you would treat someone as "anti-human" - possibly kill them?!8-\

Every villager killed is a missed opportunity to educate, enlighten, and liberate - both parties.

The point is this: there isn't enough evidence to support killing, and more than sufficient evidence to support not killing. Yet, it still happens - and the reason why is, the people have not woken up to the fact that they are responsible for the actions of their State, and that they do deserve whatever comes to them when they let their State murder, maim, kill.

I would say "Intelligence." There's an abundance of life on Earth but not much intelligence.

fit2rule: "The point is this: there isn't enough evidence to support killing..."

There often is. If someone has wantonly killed before, (s)he'll do it again. One can allow them to continue or stop the activity. I have little to no mercy for someone intent on homicide. Such people are not usually willing to sit down and talk their problems through.

fit2rule: "...the people have not woken up to the fact that they are responsible for the actions of their State, and that they do deserve whatever comes to them when they let their State murder, maim, kill."

Until now I didn't realize that you were laying out a justification for terrorists, jihadis et al to strike against nation-states. Thank you for that clarification.

The moment you remove that choice - either personally or socially - you become an animal, again.

Genetic traits? Well, we've overcome them before, with our free will - we'll do it again. We had lots of genetic traits that predetermined our inability to live on the Moon - but we soon decided that wasn't going to get in our way. Why can't we do the same thing with War?

Because viewpoints such as yours are contagious diseases which fester in the mind of Mankind, and very few are ever prepared to cure themselves of it.

Way to take an even-handed comment like mine stating facts with minimal value judgements and attempt to turn it into fuel for your idealogical steamroller. The only problem is you didn't really read and comprehend what I said.

What does such an organization look like, and how does it work?

It's very easy to say that we should just stop killing people and instead make peace. It's extremely difficult to put forth a realistic plan that accomplishes that.

Yes, I'm not sure I know what it would look like, but I'm pretty sure that its possible to develop the "B1 bomber" of education systems. I'm quite sure that the technology being used to deliver death from the skies can instead be used to improve the agricultural requirements of the average Afghani village. Heck, even an AK47 can be turned into a water pump, given the right intentions ..

While I agree with the sentiment, I disagree with talking about it as if it were something you could just decide to do one day, and then it would get done.

I would love to see more effort put into making peace. But making peace isn't simply a matter of declaring that you will "make peace, not war".

Yes it is. Because the same is true of war: you have to decide to do it. The problem is, the American people have subjugated all their decision-making responsibilities to people who are too lazy, stupid, or just plain evil to think that anything other than non-stop war is their solution. This has been the case in America for 80 years now - so its a generational thing as well, at this point..

Well, I supposed you are just calling every American government employe lazy, evil and stupid. You have just insulted millions of Americans. I am sure there are lazy and evil people out there, but your view is extreme, to the point you don't even know how to deal with reality. There are hardworking people. I don't know what people do in the government because I am never a government employee. Do you happen to know? Where did you get the impression that these top officials are all evil? Based on what? Selective events and newspaper reporting? Maybe there are nice top-ranked people tried to stop the war but others overpower him in the decision making process. Some biography says some X president is not stupid, that that former president was in fact very hardworking and very smart. How do you or me know whether that's the case or not. Can newspaper mislead us? Can popular gossip and stories mislead us to think that all the higher up officials are bad and evil?

We have to respect democracy. To remind you, this is a democratic republic. We elect people to represent us. I am sure there are some lazy stupid congressmen who don't care about voters until 6 months before election. I am also sure there are people who want to change the system. Also, people can become lazy after seeing how little they could do, so they either gave up and don't care, or kept on compromising and couldn't deliver his dreams.

> This has been the case in America for 80 years now - so its a generational thing as well, at this point..

No. It has always been that way. Why didn't we end slavery early? Why didn't we end racial segregation 200 years ago? See, my point is proved: it didn't happen just 80 years ago.

Things changed and evolved as time continues to roll.

So is succeeding at war, of course. But we're not talking with anyone who simply advocates "war" as a solution.

Why should resolving to make peace not war require more thoughtfulness than waging war?

Honorable and effective are not the same.

Seriously, the problem is hardly farming. The world has thousands of years of farming development, and Afghanistan has been farmed for just as long. Nor is the problem education systems. The problem is political, and I fail to see how we can drop K-12 educations on people who aren't allowed to or are unwilling to learn.

But, of course, you appear to be a flower hippie pretty dead-set in your ways, so I don't really hope to change your mind. You keep working on that B2 Tulip Bomber- I'm sure if we can only manage to bomb Afghanistan with flowers & love, world peace will be immediately achieved.

The problem is, and always has been: education. What sort of education gets delivered to the village when the US maims half its children, kills its elders, and terrorizes its mothers?

Fact: Women are killed in the USA, too. Fact: the USA has its share of militant religious fanatics, too. Are we going to bomb the USA because of this fact?

If you can't trust what anyone tells you about foreign events, it's too late. The voting public does not have time to travel to Yemen, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, China, and every other country on the globe to develop personally informed opinions.

Fact: Women are killed in the USA, too

For attending school?

The improvements would very likely violate Taliban law and the improved children and their parents would be targeted for accepting the improvements.

Humans do not work the way you think they do.

A very much black-and-white description of the current war. "Evil" is actually the most descriptive form about an enemy that can't be specified, a war that selects its foes arbitrary and which lacks any specific goals for winning. Lacking all that, all a person can say is: "we are protecting the good side that is us from the evil that are them". There is no more specific way to describe it, which also means it can never actually end.

Not to equate the Army with the Mafia, but this argument applies equally well to mafiosos. Both follow orders, do evil things, and suffer PTSD.

There is something ironic in there.

That's not true. Many joined the military because they believe in their version of patriotism. They are also trained to adopt to utilitarianism as much as possible. The part they are missing when they follow deonotology, as a solider, at least to the Kantian, using someone as a merely mean to an end is not right. So killing 20 villages to kill 2 terrorists is not acceptable (and Nagel's absolutism argues this). But they try to justify their action by remembering they are soldiers and they are fighting terrorists. So killing a few innocent may justify the end.

That is just fundamentally untrue. The notion that all life is sacred and killing for a living is wrong is a very, very modern notion.

Members of the military kill because it needs to happen. They would rather be members of a professional, trained force that means the number of total dead is minimised to the greatest extent possible. Modern wars by professional soldiers kill very few, both soldiers and non combatants, compared to the wars of conscripts and untrained masses.

Since time began, humans have been trying to stop it. So I don't think you're thinking this through ..

>Members of the military kill because it needs to happen.

Members of the military kill because they are ordered to do so, and no longer have the ability to express their own inherent free will. Nowhere in the history of war has it ever been true that 'to kill a little now means not killing more later' - if it were, the killing would have stopped.

Kant and Bentham are hardly since time immemorial. I'll give you Jesus (only 2000 years), but the God of the Old Testament was rather pro-conflict, and other religions have very pro-conflict tenements.

The accepted views of the majority of humanity until the late 20th century (perhaps not even now) is that different genders and races were unequal, that some were fit to rule over others, and that war was an inevitable consequence and participation in it was an honourable, noble and patriotic (once patriotism had emerged as a concept) activity.

Who is not thinking this through. Plus the killing has massively reduced - the last decade has been one of the lowest for deaths in conflict in human history.

Not so. You jihadis have found that, for example in Algeria, by killing off the (relatively small) leadership of centrist and non-radical muslims you can eliminate opposition to radical jihad. Once these people are eliminated, opposition to jihad plummets (people are afraid to speak up) and Taliban-like elements can take over.

So indeed _you_ and _yours_ have learned that "killing a little now means not killing more later".

This goes for the current Joint Chiefs of Staff as much as it does any historical figure.

Sorry, this is rubbish. This society we know of is built and established with guns and blood. We shall not have police, army or even guns. We fought wars. Your ancestors, my ancestors all fought in war one way or another. If you think that self-defending yourself against some murderer is wrong, then what is the purpose of protecting life?

Life is precious. Why are we killing cows and chicken? I supposed you are animal rightist then. That's anti-animal as anti-human (but humans are animals!)

We do not live in a world where War is necessary. We live in a world where War is created, for some purpose.

With the tools and technologies we have available to us today, why is that purpose still to maim, murder, kill? Shouldn't the purposes have been aligned, by now, to make the trillion-dollar debt of the American people worth at least something to the rest of the human species?

We don't need another B1 bomber. We do need schools where our children can learn to respect and love each other.

Yes, I'm a 'peace-nik'. I'm human.

If we never take hard problem to a philosophical discussion, what can come out from the discussion?

> We do not live in a world where War is necessary. We live in a world where War is created, for some purpose.

And why is war or violence created? Because we have desire, we as thinking things have thoughts and emotions. We become jealous and angry. We become depressed and sad. We harm others for these reasons.

> We don't need another B1 bomber. We do need schools where our children can learn to respect and love each other.

And we have schools. And we teach them to respect. The world you are describing does not exist. As long as there is freedom for someone to think, there is violence. Violence can be physical or verbal. You can kill someone by saying something very harsh and this person may go depressed for the rest of his life and ends up in a messy, unproductive life.

I will respect you being a pacifist, but I urge you to think about other ethics theories as well.

Just because we did do something in the past does not justify doing it in the future.

The right to defend yourself is not the right to kill, especially on a mass scale. The places that these drones are being used are not places that have a credible military threat to the united states. (unless you count their governments having nukes)

He is not asking not to kill at a mass scale. He is against killing others, regardless of what the reason is. There will be no ground for fighting for democracy. There will be no ground for protecting my life, my lover's life, or anyone's life. There is no mechanism to defend the things I cherish when a murderer comes to my doorstep with an AK47.

You do not have - unless the state grants it to you - the right to murder other human beings. States that use murder as a solution to their problems are undoubtedly going to fail - because the purpose of the State, in the first place, is to provide human beings with safety and protection from death. Death delivered, or received, is still a failure of the State to fulfill that promise.

I do not believe that anyones' interest is protected by the maiming, murder, and disfigurement of villagers' children, on the other side of the world, for the purposes given by the States that are doing it. I believe that the reason States are committing these crimes, is because the Murder Societies within these states are out of control, and no longer answer to the people who put them in power.

We as an individual can do anything we really want. So if someone wants to kick another person in the head, he could. He will be held legally responsible for kicking the victim.

Ideally, at least this is what the American government is/was supposed to form -- we are the one that gives the government the power. We can totally remove a President if we want. We can dissolve this Union if we want. But that won't happen easily because many of us think about stability, we apply utilitarian views. There is nothing wrong with that.

The issue that you want to raise is the state decides who can kill or not. This is part of civilization. Everyone is supposed to have a role and we determine what people can do and what people cannot do. We want to have police officers who will patrol around with a stick and a pistol. We agree that when the police officer is being attacked he can apply an equivalent counterforce. If someone shoots back, the officer can shoot back. We give the offices the permission to kill another human being because we apply absolutism. We only harm those who harm us directly.

Not every police shooting gets away from legal and moral judgement. Some are found guilty for using excessive force or intentional murdering.

We don't protect people why just educating them. We mobilize them. We arm them, we teach them how to build a healthy body, what to do when they face danger. The world you imagine will not work in any civilization as long as there is a freedom to think. As I said before, the only reason we have desire is because we are allowed to think for ourselves and for other people. We are angry because we have emotions. We become depressed because we have expectations. To protect people who become incapable of staying peaceful and respectful by harming another person physically or mentally (e.g. verbally), we use some form of force on them. And this could be military action (to protect people from invasion) or apprehension. This is true because we value our own life, and we want to be protected.

It is true that some of the military action is morally impermissible in this modern time. We don't need to do a revenge in order to show off our power to scare off our enemies (this was necessary in ancient time), but we shouldn't say that every time we slaughter a human is morally impermissible.

The ethic approach I take is virtue ethics, which looks at the environment, rather than the action or the consequence.

You said what makes us human is that we can decide what not to do and if we allow killing we will go back to animal. I don't see why we should disregard our familiar biological facts. We are animals. Animals have emotions. They can group and hunt. They can think on their own. They may not have science or computer to use, but they are also thinking. In fact, no one can prove or disprove whether physicalism is true or false, whether dualism is true or false. We cannot. We have "the other minds problem". We can't really know what it is like to be a bat (Nagel's paper). We can only speak from our own experience: oh so this is sonic vision and this is how we can see if we had a sonic vision, but that's it.

So what is left with us? We will continue to apply survival of fitness? There was a famous case in England where two sailors were charged to kill this other young sailor boy after the shipped sunk and after they starved for months.

(1) had the boy came up with the idea first and sacrifice himself, is killing that person in the first place wrong?

(2) had the boy asked about this, and the boy agreed, is killing the boy to help the other two more healthy sailors from starvation morally wrong?

Will you be willing to give up your space shuttle ticket to your friend and sacrifice yourself in a zombie crisis? If Russia had dropped an atom bomb years ago, would you think it was okay to destroy Russia like we destroyed Germany by saving the rest of the America? Or do you actually think we can apply peaceful talk?

(disclaimer: I don't advocate killing people, but I do believe that those concerns were and are evaluated doing wartime, if letting someone go is not an option)