| | Quoth Aaron:
"What is your view of ethics concerning making a mistake? If I am told of a hitman planning to kill me and where he lives, and I act first to eliminate him, obviously that is an ethical decision. If my information is wrong however, and I end up killing the family next door, does the fact that I acted in 'good faith' on what to the best of my knowledge was correct mean: my actions were still ethical and justified, that they were completely unjustified, or maybe something in between (eg. taking intent into account such as the difference between murder 1 and murder 3) ?"
That's a very important question, for all that you don't want to "link it back to Iraq." It's as good description of "collateral damage" as any.
I consider myself (and others) responsible for what I (or they) do. Period. While one may be engaging in a pursuit that, in the meta, is ethical, one is still responsible for one's actions and the consequences of those actions.
In the "hostage situation" that's been described, yes, I would try to kill the person threatening to kill me, even if it meant that someone else might be hurt or killed (by me) in the process. And if someone else WAS killed or hurt (by me) in the process, then I would be responsible for having hurt or killed them. "You break it, you bought it." I might have mitigating circumstances to cite (I was acting in my own defense, I took the utmost precaution possible not to harm an innocent, etc.), and that might carry weight in others' judgment of me, but I still did what I did.
Part of my opposition to the war on Iraq was the fact that it seemed likely (and seems to have transpired) that innocents would be unintentionally harmed -- some through accident, some through negligence, some simply because situations would exist in which it was unavoidable in the process.
Had that likelihood not existed, I'd have had no problem whatsoever with taking out Saddam Hussein.
Likewise, had Hussein's regime represented a threat to the United States, I'd have conceded that those carrying out the attack were simply making the best of a bad situation (and a situation not of their making) and that, so long as they took the utmost precaution to avoid harming innocents, they shouldn't be held culpable -- as long as they were trying to act morally, the most punishment I could really demand would be that handed them by their own consciences.*
However, a) the likelihood DID exist, b) the threat did NOT exist (at least as claimed by the US government) and c) the utmost precautions against killing innocents that were consistent with eliminating the non-existent threat were NOT taken.
Tom Knapp
* Anyone who's been involved in an incident where someone else has been severely injured or killed -- or even a situation where that became a matter of high likelihood -- knows that the punishment of one's own conscience can be quite severe indeed.
I came within a fraction of a second of killing someone on our own side in the 1991 war, and I still get the shakes just thinking about what MIGHT have happened. I was part of the security detail for Headquarters Marine Corps, Southwest Asia in al Jubail at the time. A number of our posts had come under small arms fire during the first few days of the war, and our intelligence briefs said that we should expect car-bombings. I was manning a perimeter post when a panel truck came careening around the corner a quarter mile or so from our fence and accelerated to top speed toward the concrete barrier blocking the road in. I was behind a Squad Automatic Weapon and had most of the slack taken out of the trigger when the driver stomped on the brakes, turned around and took off in the other direction. The truck was a new Saudi field ambulance, and the red cross and red crescent had only been painted on the back, not the front.
If I'd fired, I'd have killed the driver and possibly any other EMTs or patients in the vehicle. And despite the fact that it was only half a second and dumb luck on both our parts that saved the situation, HAD I fired, I, and only I, would have been responsible for the results.
Tom Knapp
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My beloved nation is filled with flaws, errors and outright stupidities, and I will always strive against those. But Ed, there is no equivalency between the flawed West, and the primitive tyrannies; it's not close, it’s not even in the same fucking ballpark. Stop providing the moral sanction that the low life cowards and anti-Americans of LewRockwell and others use. They are beneath contempt, and to treat them with anything other than total contempt, is a betrayal of the good. 
