How Do You Solve a Problem Like Ahmadinejad....Follow

Wars aren't fought with the aim of keeping our soldiers alive. Their lives are means to the end of protecting or expanding the interests of the country as a whole, which is a pretty hideous rape of moral decency, but an entirely expected and normal practice. The only way to keep the soldiers alive is to stop sending them in. If you value the life of a soldier, you don't use him.

It would be possible to incidentally save the lives of soldiers by just killing everything else, but at that point you aren't doing it for the soldiers; you're doing it for the interest of the country. The lives you save are incidental, and unintended; any attempt to claim that you value their lives as anything more than tools is fraudulent.

Worked for Osama bin Laden!

kind of.

Those pesky liberals conservatives, always making everything about W.

What exactly did Bush do that would be considered brave? He wasn't exactly fighting the war. Let's put credit where credit is due.

Edited, Sep 25th 2009 4:54pm by CBD

As usual, Varus is all over the place again... where's that flowchart?

I thought it was a bowl of spaghetti, so I ate it.

That's the word on the street in the UK, anyway.

This is a complicated and paradoxical question. There are also clear dis-analogies between how a soldier represents a country and how an athlete does, but they aren't really the most important thing here.

Anyways, the moral status of the soldier has nothing to do with it, and your question concerns that. I don't really care about that. I'd prefer that we have no military at all but I've already assumed that it's going to happen for the sake of making a judgment about how it should be used.

What is in question is the moral status of the soldier's employer and advocates. If you want to treat a soldier with the respect that he deserves purely insofar as he is human, then your duty to him is to put his life, and not your nations' prosperity, as the telos of his job.

Now if you don't care about his life as the telos of his job, then great, use the poor ******* in whatever capacity you can to increase the power of your nation. To do that, though, requires you to think that humanity, or will, or duty, or just having respect for people as people instead of tools, can be somehow thrown away. And it is certainly possible to throw that away in a functional, practical capacity, but in doing so, you're not only reducing the soldier to an inhuman tool to be used for some purpose, but also yourself.

None of this has any bearing on whether or not lots of people hold contradictory ideas about it though, and varus certainly seems to.

You can't ask your employees to do anything that won't endanger their lives. Asking your employee to get you a beer from the Co-Op down the road after 10 PM is probably as risky as asking them to go to Iraq. Their death is not the aim of their job, it's just an (unlikely) side effect. I ask, what's the difference, dispassionately? Besides, you can't not be interested in whether they are willing to risk their life for the sake of their nation's prosperity or not - it's a core issue. Do you believe it's immoral to assist someone, by providing a command structure and weaponry, to risk their life? I can't see how, unless you believe life is sacrosanct or something crazy like that. Is helping someone to kill themselves immoral too, Pensive?

Also, if the aim of their job is to keep themselves alive, then you end up not ever using them anyway, which is just as impractical as not having an army.



Why are you trying to reduce this to absolutes? Are you a sith? Why am I asking so many questions? I suspect the answer to all three of these questions is yes, but I'll soldier on regardless. You can care about the life of a soldier, and thus try and minimise the number dying, while still valuing the prosperity of your nation enough to risk their lives, as they do.



Your proposed solution is to ignore the issue entirely, and make arguments as if it did not exist?

Also, they never lose free will.

Edited, Sep 25th 2009 11:43pm by Kavekk

To make the unnecessary allusion to a completely obvious reference?

Yes, you're the only one.

Are you being at all serious here?

If you knew anything at all about the English and sports, you would not be asking me this question. See: reaction to beating Croatia at football.