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Collective Responsibility
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oh it's just as appropriate as this bullshit argument.
I mean come on. AAHHHH I bought a bottle of coke! The taxes I paid fuel the American war machine! WOE IS ME!
Better not pay my taxes so I have a clean conscience .... oh no! Coke pays taxes to the american government which in turn went to war and killed civilians! I'd better not buy anything ever again.
Xaquin's Manly Knitting Blog! Conquest Tactics .... a better CCG
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I don't get what you are trying to say. There is nothing ridiculous in the assertion that you share in the benefits and responsibilities of a societies actions.
Half the people are arguing that the people of a nation are partially responsible for the actions of the government of that nation and thus people should be more polically concious, and the other half fails to understand why that doesn't make it ok to rape babies.
Can every individual's actions be classified as 'society's actions'?
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How does having fewer absolute rights suddenly equate to being meat puppets with no value at all?
It was world war 2.
16 million chinese civillians died in the pacific theater ('only' about 6 million of those were directly attributable to the Japanese). That's approximately 80 times more than both of the atomic bombs put together.
On the shit that killed people scale of World War 2 the a-bombs barely registered.
Context is important.
You're disgusting.
Ham, and those defending him, however, think they had less right to life than, say, a citizen of Sweden whose government insisted on remaining neutral.
You're an idiot.
You can not possibly have any idea what it was like to be living in the world in the 1940s when hundreds of thousands of people were dying everywhere every day, when monsters really did walk the earth, and when death by war wasn't something abstract, but something that happened every day to people you know.
So yeah, feel free to sit there in your house and judge those people. You're completely morally justified.
It isn't a fucking straw man. You're arguing that paying taxes makes you directly, personally responsible for what happens when your country goes to war, and that this makes you, personally, a valid military target when your country's enemies retaliate.* All I'm doing is extending that moral reasoning.
*And if this isn't your argument, spend more than two fucking sentences explaining your reasoning to me.
my unofficial autobio will be accompanied with tips on how to smile
cause I've found that when they don't see you frown, they never know that you're a threat
and they don't sweat you when you came around
How's this:
It is not sufficient justification but it is a necessary one for the utilitarian and other reasons to even come into play.
In other words, the acts a nation (in this case Japan) can make forfeit certain rights of it's citizens.
Which was not the case in Watchmen and thus making the difference between Hiroshima and Nagasaki being justified and that thing that happened in Watchmen, if you know what I mean, not.
The actions of a nation can't make the right to life of it's citizens forfeit. That's the point I'm making with the genocide comments. We don't have some cosmic math to tell us that the U.S. was justified in bombing however many hundred thousand japanese to death, but not justified in bombing all of them to death, under that reasoning.
And that doesn't even touch the fact that a bunch of people below the age of majority got killed, and that the Japanese had a monarchist government, not a republican one.
my unofficial autobio will be accompanied with tips on how to smile
cause I've found that when they don't see you frown, they never know that you're a threat
and they don't sweat you when you came around
I've already answered this. You're justified to keep bombing them till they stop trying to kill you, at which point you cease being justified in continuing to bomb them. If you somehow manage to just kill all of them before they stop trying to kill you, well, sucks for them.
The question, though, is who "them" is. Is "them" the military of your enemy, or is "them" the entire civilian population?
That isn't an answer. Either people are cuplable, or they aren't. If they aren't, then you don't get to kill'em. If they are, then they're legitimate targets.
You can apply it to situations writ small, too. If three dudes assault you, and the court sends one of them to prison, and the other two are like "oh shit prison!" and they apologize, that doesn't erase what they did somehow.
The issue is how glibly you seem content to assign responsibility, and then just remove it at will when the consequences start becoming uncomfortable.
my unofficial autobio will be accompanied with tips on how to smile
cause I've found that when they don't see you frown, they never know that you're a threat
and they don't sweat you when you came around
Since when did civilians = military? Civilians of any country are not acceptable military targets. There are parts of the military that aren't acceptable military targets. I don't see what paying taxes does to make more acceptable to kill civilians.
Chiefly, I am willing to believe in many cases that civilian deaths from hitting military targets can be justified under the mandate of collective responsibility but that doesn't make causing civilian deaths acceptable in the first place, particularly when we consider the fractional responsibility of those involved plus the considerations of the completely innocent (anyone who was not around at a time when their actions could make a difference).
No country thinks it's wrong to kill civilians. They just don't want to risk theirs.
Here's a better analogy:
Guy attempts to mug you. You have a gun. You are within your rights to respond with lethal force and shoot him.
You do. It misses the vital organs and clips him in the shoulder (or whatever) and now he's down and not moving. You are not within your rights to finish him off.
The police arrive, take him to the hospital, and he survives. He is charged with attempted robbery (with a deadly weapon possibly) which is generally not allegible for the death penalty, so he gets some amount of time in jail.
Through out this entire example, he has been responsible for trying to rob you, but the justifiable response has changed due to the changing circumstances. Is there something about this you don't understand?
It's likewise in this example. If a country is invaded, and fights back, and eventually defeats the invading country, pushing back into their territory and deposing their (for the sake of argument, let's say) elected government, the responsibility you claim a bunch of their citiziens had for the hostile military action doesn't just disappear into the ether. If they're all responsible for the invasion, to the extent that the invading army would've been justified in targeting them specifically, that still has to be accounted for.
my unofficial autobio will be accompanied with tips on how to smile
cause I've found that when they don't see you frown, they never know that you're a threat
and they don't sweat you when you came around
Actually, here's a good counteranalogy: what if the mugger is schizophrenic and believes that you're out to get him? Aren't insane people not responsible for their actions?
To broaden this example, think of the government as the malfunctioning brain chemistry - typically the citizenry at large doesn't want to commit mass murder (obviously there are exceptions, but this is my hypothetical). Is the general population of the country - the body - responsible for the actions of a runaway government - the malfunctioning brain?
You're right, of course: since none of us were present in the theater of WWII, we have no moral grounds to object to any actions taken by Imperial Japan at the time.
As for the bolded part: Way to dehumanize the enemy there.
Guy attempts to mug you. = Nation A declaring war on nation B.
You have a gun. = B has a military.
You are within your rights to respond with lethal force and shoot him. = Nation B can respond by attacking A's military, destroying A's industrial capacity via bombing, etc.
You do. It misses the vital organs and clips him in the shoulder (or whatever) and now he's down and not moving. = B kills some number of A's citizens in the process. A surrenders.
You are not within your rights to finish him off. = B cannot continue and commit genocide.
The police arrive, take him to the hospital, and he survives. He is charged with attempted robbery (with a deadly weapon possibly) which is generally not allegible for the death penalty, so he gets some amount of time in jail. = A has to pay reparations, is occupied by B, etc.
People were claiming that if Japaneses citizens (or soldiers) were guilty via collective responsibility for their governments actions that the USA would have the moral right to nuke them out of existence.
This is clearly not the case, as once the Japaneses were defeated it didn't matter if they shared responsibility, you don't have any moral reason to kill a man or nation that no longer poses a threat.
No one fucking asked if it was moral to shoot a guy with no arms. We were asking you to explain how the citizens of an empire with absolutely zero say in its policy were at-all-in-the-first-place valid targets.
Well, now wait a minute. In the mugging example, the mugger still receives the appropriate punishment after the assault/self defense itself. It is the same for citizens in war.
If you're going to argue that being killed is an appropriate punishment during war for the act of being a citizen of an aggressor country, then it's still an appropriate punishment after the war is over.
The fact of the matter is that civiilians being bombed isn't ever appropriate. There are particular conditions that might make it necessary as a lesser evil in specific circumstances, but it isn't ever acceptable.
my unofficial autobio will be accompanied with tips on how to smile
cause I've found that when they don't see you frown, they never know that you're a threat
and they don't sweat you when you came around
In an all out war like world war 2, there are some civilians that are valid military targets. If you are going to bomb the factory where they make bombs and tanks and whatnot, is it not in your best interest to kill that countries engineers who know how to repair the factory or build a new one and would likely be working in the factory?
They didn't bomb at night to avoid killing civilians, they did it so their bombers would be harder to shoot down.
If you have a morally defensible reason (self defense?) to be at total war with a country, then your arguably justified to kill some of their civilians to win that war and safeguard your own civilians. Part of your justification is that they are part of the empire attacking you. No empire would be able to maintain a war if its citizens revolted and they had to try and quell an outright revolution of all its civilians. By passively accepting the empire's supremacy they are at least somewhat responsible for its actions.
No. Wrong. Your justification is that you're morally allowed to do what you have to do to stop the country from attacking you, not that you have some weird vengeful right to punish their citizenry for "passively accepting" the aggression of the nation.
my unofficial autobio will be accompanied with tips on how to smile
cause I've found that when they don't see you frown, they never know that you're a threat
and they don't sweat you when you came around
Wouldn't this be a better analogy than a single mugger attacking a single victim?