TPQs (10/26) Group 2 Posts, Group 3 Responds

[Becko Copenhaver]

[rh...@lclark.edu]

On page 137 the author stats "One could even say, as one bayonets an enemy soldier, "It's either you or me."  But one cannot really say this while torturing a prisoner."  Now imagine you are holding a military prisoner in an isolated outpost near the enemy's border.  At the moment, you are unable to retreat because the helicopter you came in on is not working, and you don't know why.  You know that a large enemy enemy force is about to attack your position and you have no hope of surviving the assault.  You know for a fact that your prisoner knows how to repair your helicopter, but he refuses to do so.  No amount of reasoning will convince him.  Your only options are to die or torture him for the information, you could tell him "It's either you or me."  Do you believe this situation to be fundamentally different from choosing to bayonet a soldier?  Why or why not?  Either way, is it permissible to torture the prisoner?  What does your intuition say?

[afin...@lclark.edu]

"... the most serious of the prohibited acts, like murder and torture, are not just supposed to require unusually strong justification. They are supposed never to be done, because no quantity of resulting benefit is thought capable of justifying such treatment of a person." (142-143)

Nagel and Kantianism hold that it's never right to use such strong tactics as murder or torture, because they fundamentally violate the rational, autonomous will that Kantianism values so highly. Just as fundamentally, however, war entails conflict and is essentially a clash in perceptions of power. Is it war that Kantianism has a problem with, or is it the exertion of power? Is there any for Kantianism to coexist peacefully with power clashes? 

[sluh...@lclark.edu]

One way to approach your question is to ask what our analysis was of the famine situation that we discussed in class. As our professor pointed out, because we are bound by the dual imperatives to self and other, and because we must strive beneficently to help others achieve their own ends as much as we have the duty to ourselves (that perfect duty to sustain our own self-hood--accepting the situation where falling on the grenade for our comrades supersedes this imperative) certain tragic circumstances--extreme situations--what might be called "Socrates Situations", allow within the moral framework of Kantian ethics only a kind of tragedy wherein the outcome would be one's own demise. If the famine situation is one such extreme, it strikes me that the battlefield would certainly be another arena that Kantianism demands an exacting moral sacrifice, that of one's life. 

[leep...@lclark.edu]

Generally, it seems that war operates under a maxim that is unable to be universalized. The maxim seems to be this: kill your enemies to enforce your will on them. 
The countless deaths that result from war are the definition of using a person as a mere means, as their lives are being used to bring about whatever actor is engaging in the war's ends.I don't think that Kantianism allows any sort of leeway for war, because, as I said above, it operates under a maxim that violates the principle of humanity as an end in itself, and it fails the test of universalizibiltiy

[epro...@lclark.edu]

Many wars have been called on with the intention of land or resource seizure.  While is may seem justifiable to sacrifice one's life to protect the lives of others in certain tragic circumstances, is it justifiable at all the enter into warfare where one is fighting with the intended consequence of taking land or resources from an opposing body of people?