I recently had another one of those weird conversations in which one of my conspecifics failed to recognize the moral equivalency of morally equivalent scenarios. He went off on how a suicide bomber is an immoral murderer while military killers are not. Here’s the scenario I put to him.
Ali the Jihadist goes into a grammar school in Baghdad and blows himself up, killing 100 children and some faculty in the process. Stone cold murderer? No question. The US military finds out that Ali the Jihadist is in a grammar school in Baghdad and lobs a missile on it, killing Ali, 100 students and some faculty members. Stone cold murderers? Of course not, says my conspecific. The US military didn’t intend to kill the children. They were just “collateral damage”, whereas Ali the suicide bomber set out to kill the children. That made all the moral difference in the world to him.
The US military in my scenario, and in actual cases in which collateral damage is inflicted, knew about the presence of the children, knew that they would be killed in the operation to get Ali, and carried out the attack with this knowledge. How can anyone plausibly claim an absence of intent under these circumstances? Both Ali the suicide bomber and the US military considered the children expendable in furtherance of their political agendas.
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This is a similar discussion to the one I was having with a friend last night. My friend was telling me about one of Hussein's henchmen who was hanged by the new Iraqi government a while back and suffered a head decapitation as a result of the hanging. I wondered how the new Iraqi state is really any different from the terrorists who run around their country beheading their captives. Undoubdtedly someone will point out that the likeness of a fair trial was given in the former case, whereas this feature was seemingly lacking in the latter. But the end result was the same. It reminds me of a bumber sticker I once saw that stated, "why do we kill people to show that killing people is wrong?"
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