Getting Ugly in Russia

[smoothmoniker]

Dana and Jag, there are some underlying assumptions to your arguments that I’m not prepared to grant without much better substantiation.

1) That there exists a context which justifies the targeted killing of children. You argue that we don’t understand the complexity of the political realities which has borne out these actions, but that presumes that there is some conflation of political, economic, or social circumstances which makes this action not only understandable, but permissible. If so, then the concept of moral behavior has lost any meaning. “Treat other people as an end in themselves, never as a means to an end.”

2) That only those persons who have existed within such a context are capable of evaluating the moral permissibility of their actions. You argue that because we have not lived through what they have lived through, we cannot possibly make moral evaluations of their ensuing actions. I reject this wholesale. Is the father whose daughter was raped in the best position to evaluate the moral permissibility of his retaliatory actions? Is the husband whose wife committed adultery the best judge of the morality of her actions? Those who have skin in the game are not the ones I want making the rules. It is the outside observer who is best able to make moral evaluations about a given action.

Just my $.02

-sm