Bitesize Ethics 2024 Week 6: The Ethics of War, Ukraine and Gaza

[@purikurix]

Long awaited. Is there a sequel? Where is the part about Ukraine?

[@UehiroOxfordInstituteChannel]

Thanks. Given the complexity of the material Prof McMahan decided to focus mainly on the war in Gaza on the day.

[@purikurix]

@@UehiroOxfordInstituteChannel Is there sheduled to be a follow-up?

[@stevenseagull3867]

Reminded me of Dr. Cholakian 🤔

[@nunyabizz3357]

awful moral analysis. if the cause is just, then the baseline for acceptable harm has to be the amount of harm required to accomplish military objectives in service of the just cause. this baseline of contrasting with harm to self if action is withheld is incredibly weak. i have no idea why he'd define it as he did. it makes no sense, particularly in light of point 2. i'll go over some other problems with his analysis: the trolley problem that this guy likes invoking so much suffers from multiple flaws, but the worst of them is that it's a highly contrived scenario that occurs in a vacuum. what if the person contriving the scenario was a part of it, instead of being some force of nature? imagine the branch track had 1 person, and the main track had 12 people, but one of them was the madman who constructed the trolley scenario. if you save the majority group, he will now live on to create another trolley scenario. this will repeat again and again until someone chooses to kill him. this massively changes the analysis as the trolley problem itself isn't just a random scenario you popped into, but a lose-lose scenario that you're being continually forced into, and will remain trapped in unless you break the cycle by refusing to play the madman's game. 2. any measure of harm opted into by the opponent must be factored into the calculation of the baseline for acceptable harm. A dictator can post a sign on his border saying "for every step you take into my territory i will torture a child to death" and "for every projectile fired into my country, i will torture a child to death". this dictator can now freely aggress on any actor. none will be able to ethically fight against him, because they will have to factor the harm against the civilians of the dictator - that the dictator himself is choosing to force into the equation. this is an insane concept of proportionality which renders war impossible for a moral actor. it simply cannot be the case that Hamas can pack more people into a hospital and as a result of that become immune by reaching some threshold. NO amount of intentional stake raising by Hamas can turn a target immune. only circumstance can render a target invalid through disproportionality, never contrivance. 3. in thought experiments there exists a clarity of information that is simply not existent in reality. as a result the baseline harm is NEVER the actual target for one engaging in proportionality analysis, rather one always tried to exceed it by a margin that will acceptably minimizes chance of failure. say destroying a target at an 85% success chance is expected to kill 10 people. you can reduce the casualties by 20% if you use a smaller munition, but you success rate will decrease to 75%. alternatively, you can use a larger munition, killing succeeding at 95% rate, but increasing casualties by 20%. now what if you went for the mitigating option and you failed? now you'll have killed 8 people and achieved nothing. next time you'll have an opportunity to strike the same target, you'll have to run the same risk again. at best in that scenario you'll have killed 16 people total. this already carries 2 HUGE assumptions, however. the first being that you'll get another opportunity at all, and the second is that that opportunity will have an identical potential cost, rather than a higher one. we can also ask what if the intel itself that is used to assess success rate also carries uncertainty, which ofc it does. then once again we have to factor that margin into our use of force. of course there are diminishing returns here, but generally it is the case that succeeding the first time is more important than minimizing casualties, since underestimating the required force will still cause collateral, but also necessitates further harm in the future as the objective is still not met. so operating on the base line is bad practice. uncertainty will introduce unexpected failures, and the loss of opportunity will result in more lives in the long term, even under ideal conditions. as a result it is EXPECTED that one overshoots the baseline assessment. one must conduct the assessment with the understanding that, despite moral intuition, undershooting the baseline is IRRESPONSIBLE. 4. comparing the duty of a nation to defend its people with the duty of a single person, even a state official, is incredibly misguided. i don't think this needs some special example to demonstrate, it's just a silly comparison to make.

[@Jon-jr7kx]

Exactly, and it's just straightforwardly false that Hamas (and it's backing) doesn't pose an existential threat to Israel. Even if we (blindly, as McMahan does) assume that, there's practical moral justification in overestimating that enemy's apparent military capabilities--since there's a track record of Israel suffering the consequences when it took a "they haven't given us current reason to think they'll attack" approach.