Moral Calculus

In late 2002 and early 2003, I remember having arguments (and reading similarly motivated Nation-y articles) with leftists who thought that war in Afghanistan was rendered unjust in part because of the fact that more Afghan civilians died than the 3000 Americans who died on 9/11/01. This sort of facile arithmetic was, first of all, self-defeating, because it would have countenanced a massive rate of collateral damage in Afghanistan had the 9/11 terrorists succeeded in killing as many people as they had presumably wanted to. Secondly, it's perfectly worthless as a tool for moral adjudication, since it doesn't assess the explicitly murderous intent of the terrorists nor the moral good achieved by the overthrow of Sharia theocracy. Well, those were my thoughts at the time [don't blame me for the title--ed.].

At Pandagon, Jesse Taylor notices a particularly appalling specimen of the same pathology, as it has manifested itself on the right in accordance with the move to a new theater of war and the various reversals of fortune in Iraq. Let me second these comments whole-heartedly:

...And we lost fewer people in September 11th, the "day that changed everything", than we lost from [insert whatever the hell you want that kills people here]. During the battle of Gettysburg, more Americans were killed by other Americans than have been killed by terrorism in the past 50 years. This argument is disgustingly facile, all the more so because it allows us to simply set an upper threshold for any action or behavior and declare anything under it a safe zone.

This isn't just moral obliviousness - it's moral cowardice. So long as death and destruction doesn't pass some grossly high threshold, we're exempt from examining the sacrifices involved. In fact, they barely count as sacrifices - unless they serve a motivational purpose towards further sacrifice.

Follow this explicit logic of these trolls (Jesse doesn't take it as far as he could), and no life-ending disaster or crime is ever significant because it's always smaller in scope than another [the Holocaust being the asymptote--ed.].