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Speech Defending Attacks on Civilians: A Thought Experiment
I've heard some suggest that it's proper for universities to expel students for publicly defending the Hamas murders. (This has included both public universities and private universities that had pledged to protect student free speech.) Others have suggested that faculty members who defended the murders be fired. And there have been calls for nonacademic employers to refuse to hire students who have defended the murders. (Such refusals to hire based on a student's speech are legal in most states, though illegal in some.)
If you take this view, let me ask this hypothetical. Say that a student or a professor writes something like this:
With Iran getting a nuclear bomb soon, Israel has to make clear: If Iran (with a population almost 10 times that of Israel) bombs an Israeli city, Israel will bomb an Iranian city, aiming to kill 10 times the number of people killed by the Iranian bomb.
And none of this pretense about limiting the bombing to military targets. Japan surrendered because it was facing the loss of cities, not of military capacity. This is what Mutually Assured Destruction needs to be: tit for tat, civilian deaths for civilian deaths. In war, civilians pay for the sins of their governments, and the prospect of civilian deaths is often the main deterrent to aggression, or the main impetus to surrender; that's just the way it is.
What would your view be?
- The hypothetical author should be fired/expelled/etc. just like the pro-Hamas author. He's embracing the deliberate killing of civilians; such advocacy is immoral and creates a hostile environment for Iranian-Americans.
- The hypothetical author shouldn't be fired/expelled/etc. He's only defending killing of civilians (likely tens of thousands of civilians, or more), and not rape, kidnapping, beheading, etc. Likewise, people who only defended Hamas killing Israeli civilians shouldn't have been fired/expelled/etc., so long as they made clear they didn't endorse the rape, kidnapping, beheading, etc.
- The hypothetical author shouldn't be fired/expelled/etc., because he's not celebrating the proposed bombing, but just explaining it as a practical necessity. If he were to add more emotionally enthusiastic rhetoric, then he should be fired/expelled/etc. Likewise, speakers who simply defended the Hamas attacks on the grounds that they thought them to be a necessary means to promote the Palestinian cause, without emotional enthusiasm, shouldn't be fired/expelled/etc., either.
- The hypothetical author shouldn't be fired/expelled/etc., because he is just defending a policy of future killing of civilians, not actual current killing of civilians. But if the bombing does happen, and he defends it then, then he should be fired/expelled/etc.
- The hypothetical author shouldn't be fired/expelled/etc., because, in the scenario he is contemplating, Iran would be a sufficiently culpable initial aggressor and Israel would only be justifiably responding. In the Hamas attacks, Israel was not a sufficiently culpable initial aggressor against Palestinians, so Hamas's actions were not justified.
- The hypothetical author shouldn't be fired/expelled/etc. unless his statements cause enough public outrage, complaints by wealthy donors, pressure by legislatures, objections by student groups, and so on. If it turns out that not a lot of people are upset by the prospect of the bombing of Iran, the speech should be protected. But the pro-Hamas authors should be fired/expelled/etc., because their statements have indeed caused public outrage.
- Neither the hypothetical author nor the pro-Hamas authors should be fired/expelled/etc. by their educational institutions, because such institutions ought to have strong speech-protective rules that don't turn on contestable moral judgments about who in an international conflict is an initial aggressor. But when it comes to hiring by other employers, the employers can and should draw moral distinctions based on such matters, so employers ought to refuse to hire the pro-Hamas speakers but ought not refuse to hire the pro-bombing-Iran speaker.
- Neither the hypothetical author nor the pro-Hamas authors should be fired/expelled/etc. by their educational institutions or their private employers. (I set aside some exceptions for narrow classes of employees and employers where the employee's statements are inconsistent with the employee's specific duties, for instance if the bomb-Iran statement is written by a spokesman for an Iranian-American organization or the pro-Hamas statement was written by a spokesman for a Jewish organization.)
- Something else?
My personal view is that an Israeli nuclear strike retaliating for an Iranian nuclear attack would be morally justified, horrific as the death toll for innocent civilians would be (and I'd have said the same about, for instance, an American nuclear strike retaliating for a Soviet nuclear attack), but that the Hamas killings were morally unjustified (even apart from the rapes and similar abuse). But I'm skeptical that educational institutions committed to free speech should draw such distinctions based on their moral judgments about who is the true aggressor in a contested foreign conflict. And I think that people who are calling for suppression of pro-Hamas speech now might want to consider about the precedent that such suppression would set for the future—especially if I'm right to suspect that it's hard to draw defensible distinctions here.
But perhaps I'm mistaken, and in any event I'd love to hear what you folks think.
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I think the individuals generally shouldn’t suffer consequences for their speech, but the hypo could do with some more detail. For example, a professor of international criminal law or international humanitarian law should 100% be fired for such views. In that case it would be the equivalent of an astronomer who claims the earth is flat. Similarly, such an answer from a student would not be an acceptable answer for a student assignment in many circumstances, and so would justify a failing grade.
But the more interesting question is why a law professor would say that something as wildly illegal as mass murder is “morally justified”. One might expect from those of us who work in the legal profession that we’d limit the possibility of something being illegal but morally justified to laws made by oppressive regimes.
Got it — would you suggest that the two professors who wrote this article calling for a return to countervalue targeting should be fired? An excerpt:
Or is it just that law professors (or perhaps law professors specializing in international law) who dare endorse this view should be fired?
That example isn’t an incitement to violence or a condemnation of a people.
It’s dry as bones game theory.
This response seems intentionally obtuse. Or, I dunno, maybe it comes more naturally these days.
Or is it just that law professors (or perhaps law professors specializing in international law) who dare endorse this view should be fired?
I suspect that, if you had asked the scholars who wrote that blurb, “What is the legality or morality of the shift in strategy you’re recommending?” they would quite simply say, “Not our field.” They are experts in war and deterrence; not the law of war or international law.
That is quite clearly why Martin made sure to specify that he was talking about experts in international criminal law or international humanitarian law. If they were to express broad indifference to the problem of intentionally targeting civilian populations to achieve military objectives, there would be a real question whether they know what they’re doing.
The problem, in other words, isn’t the audacity of the utterance itself; it is how the utterance sits within the established body of knowledge that any competent scholar ought to be familiar with.
For example, suppose that you were to sit in on a talk by another putative Free Speech expert, and they dedicated a portion of their talk to saying that the First Amendment doesn’t prevent state governments from banning the Pride flag, because the First Amendment doesn’t protect so-called “symbolic speech.” Their argument being that flags and other symbols are simply not speech, literally speaking.
This is not just an incorrect understanding of the First Amendment; it makes no sense. It is hard to think of a defensible interpretation or theory of the First Amendment that protects literal “speech” but not other forms of symbolic expression. You might not personally call for such a person to be fired, but certainly you would question their competence, right? To such an extent that a university president might be justified in actually looking into whether they ought to be fired?
Contrast that with the way you go off on trans issues, or recently on the decision by Palm Beach County to buy Israel Bonds. You have big blind spots on those issues, blind spots you don’t seem to be aware of, but no one could reasonably charge you for professional incompetence for uttering those opinions, because they’re clearly not part of your expertise. Meanwhile, your arguments in favor of regulating social media companies, barring the hiring of judicial clerks with disfavored political views, and characterizing statements in support of Hamas as “material support” for terrorism, while specious, undercooked, and basically wrong, are at least within the boundaries of professional competence. They don’t illustrate such a deep failure to understand your area that you can fairly be said to be incompetent.
That’s the essence of the distinction that I think Martin is drawing.
There is another problem here — as long as the arms aren’t unstable (eg SNARK) and protected from rogue use, an arms race isn’t inherently bad.
We won the first one by simply outspending the Soviets. We never had to use them, we simply OUTSPENT them and they couldn’t keep up. And China is an economic mess right now, more than people realize.
So yes, we once were “targeting every pop stand on the trans-Siberian highway” but we never had to launch…
Operation Paperclip is an ethical dilemma outside the reality of Stalin and the Cold War.
Actually it was the argument of Sec Def. Robert McNamara
I don’t see how that’s remotely analogous. Those individuals are academics working on security study. The lawfulness or morality of nuking something isn’t their field.
Well, they’re certainly arguing that something ought to be done, which I take it suggests that (on balance) it’s lawful and moral. But, just to be clear, say that I — as a law professor — were to write a law review article concluding that their security arguments should lead countervalue targeting to be endorsed as moral and lawful (and suggesting, after suitable research, that if any supposed international law norms forbid this, they are misguided). Your view is that I should be fired for it, right?
Well, they’re certainly arguing that something ought to be done, which I take it suggests that (on balance) it’s lawful and moral.
This is not how the academy works.
But, just to be clear, say that I — as a law professor — were to write a law review article concluding that their security arguments should lead countervalue targeting to be endorsed as moral and lawful (and suggesting, after suitable research, that if any supposed international law norms forbid this, they are misguided). Your view is that I should be fired for it, right?
This is a bit like publishing an article in an astronomy journal that, having done a lot of careful research into the Bible and Christian doctrine, you’ve concluded the world is flat. Your career as an astronomer might be in trouble.
This assumes the argument is wrong, and not tsk tsk wrong.
Flat Earth: Provably wrong
Banning flags, targetting civilian cities not as military: Tsk tsk wrong
By tsk tsk wrong, I mean Emperor’s New Clothes wrong: “Everybody can see how beautiful and fine the clothes are, unless you are dumb or rough.”
This assumes the argument is wrong, and not tsk tsk wrong.
No.
The point I am making, to Eugene, is that different academic fields are predicated on foundational assumptions and understandings particular to each. That’s what makes them distinct academic fields.
In the example that I provided, the astronomer attempted to prove a point about the Earth based on sources and methods that most astronomers would treat as irrelevant to the conclusion he was making.
Another common mistake that people often make which illustrates the point is this: when asking whether a given act is right or wrong, they refer to whether the act is legal or illegal. They say: there’s nothing wrong with my doing X, because it isn’t illegal. But these are in fact two different kinds of questions. You can establish through rigorous analysis that a given action is fully legal, or definitely illegal; but that doesn’t necessarily imply that the action is fully right, or definitely wrong.
By the way, the distinction between “provably wrong” and “tsk tsk wrong” is untenable. You are trying to make a point about empirical proof, but the relevance of empirical methods depends, again, on the field. Just because it is of central importance in certain fields that feed into practical applications – for merely “tsk tsk” reasons that we can explain logically, but not empirically, by the way – does not mean that it is the only means of proof in other fields. Consider: how would you prove the existence of other minds?
So by your definition about what “the field is” then any deviation from orthodoxy gets you thrown out of the academy.
Well then no need for professors in a field like that at all, just engrave the current foundational assumptions and understandings in stone, there obviously isn’t any need for new understandings because the current foundational understandings define the “field” completely.
But of course what you are describing isn’t an academic field, it describes a theology. Just as Galileo and the Pope both thought they were debating astronomy one of them was just defending the fundamental understandings of the field from someone that had left the “field” to do science.
So by your definition about what “the field is” then any deviation from orthodoxy gets you thrown out of the academy.
No, this does not follow.
“different academic fields are predicated on foundational assumptions and understandings particular to each.” “In the example that I provided, the astronomer attempted to prove a point about the Earth based on sources and methods that most astronomers would treat as irrelevant to the conclusion he was making.”
This is hilarious. SimonP (and Martinned) have indelibly beclowned themselves. They are unmasked by the arguments out of their own mouths as people who would, if they actually believed and followed those arguments, have condemned Galileo for saying that the Earth orbits around the Sun instead of the so-called mainstream learned consensus of his time that it was the other way around.
Naturally, neither of them can admit that is so, and I look forward to their hilarious backfilling as they try to avoid the run of their own reasoning.
_E pur si muove_.
Nothing about how I’ve described fields of academic inquiry implies anything in particular about orthodoxy.
I’m trying to figure out where, in the OP’s example, there was use of irrelevant sources. And I’m coming up empty. In fact, the example relies on how things have objectively worked in past wars.
Brett, if the question is, “is it permissible under international humanitarian law for one warring nation to attack another nation’s civilian population with a retaliatory nuclear strike,” then an answer in the form of, “it is militarily more efficient and effective to incorporate countervalue targeting as an explicit part of the nuclear strategy” is simply not responsive. It’s answering a different question.
Figuring out the best policy for deterring nuclear war isn’t an exercise in determining facts, so it can’t be compared to a flat earth, pear shaped earth argument.
When you say it’s wrong, you ignore at least 50 years of MAD doctrine which did deter nuclear war. You may not like it, but don’t beclown yourself by saying it’s “wrong”, unless of course you are aware of a mathematical proof for your position.
When you say it’s wrong, you ignore at least 50 years of MAD doctrine which did deter nuclear war. You may not like it, but don’t beclown yourself by saying it’s “wrong”, unless of course you are aware of a mathematical proof for your position.
I am not disputing the strategic efficacy of MAD, or the point made by the scholars that Eugene cited upthread.
All that I am saying is that the fact that MAD is an effective strategy for avoiding all-out nuclear war does not mean that a retaliatory nuclear strike would, in fact, be a permissible act under international humanitarian law. The two questions are distinct, and are answered in different ways, using different methods applied to different sources.
“This is not how the academy works.”
EV has 25+ years of being part of the “academy”.
You?
Legal academia is a farce. Eugene is a computer programmer who picked up a professional degree and then started teaching law students after spending a couple of years clerking.
Wasn’t Martinned talking about legal academia?
So?
Twenty-five years and . . . not counting. Not anymore.
In-class racial slurs hardest hit.
But, just to be clear, say that I — as a law professor — were to write a law review article concluding that their security arguments should lead countervalue targeting to be endorsed as moral and lawful (and suggesting, after suitable research, that if any supposed international law norms forbid this, they are misguided). Your view is that I should be fired for it, right?
You’re a professor of first amendment law. Your views on international law are irrelevant to your work, and should have no bearing on your employment status.
Of course it is.
And then the wild card is that in a society where few of the upper class are in the military, such targeting means that the families and loved ones of political leaders will die in the conflict, while they may be more willing to dismiss the deaths of military personnel.
This is why I think that the Greenbriar Hotel would never have worked — you would have 538 legislators grieving for their incinerated wives, children, & loved ones and expect them to function as a legislative body?!? I don’t think so.
The US and USSR shared a Western value toward human life which is why WWIII never happened. But the Chinese don’t, and as to Iran, God help us….
The Greenbriar rules had provisions for including close family members, with strict rules about how close they had to be. This is covered in a tour of the facility, which is well worth the trip.
I’m trying to figure out if this is a morally neutral question. If Israel assassinated an Iranian civilian nuclear scientist who was important to Iran’s program, would Iran be justified in killing 10, or 100 Israeli’s? Does it matter whether the Iranian is a civilian or not? Does it matter if the Iranian was a nuclear scientist or not (what if Israeli agents killed collateral civilians)? Does it matter that we are more sympathetic to Israel than Iran?
What does “justified” have to do with it?
Iran would do what it wants and can, it is limited only by its capabilities and its fear of Israeli retaliation.
” If Israel assassinated…”
Didn’t you mean “When Israel assassinates…”
You’re missing a point that is implied in EV’s original hypothesis — is Hamas the legal government of Gaza, or is it a NGO? Is Hamas the lawful military of the Gazian government, or does it act outside International law?
Either way, Gaza’s responsible for Hamas, but if Hamas is like the IDF, it makes every Palestinian a legitimate target of sorts.
if Hamas is like the IDF, it makes every Palestinian a legitimate target of sorts.
I don’t see how that remotely follows. Do you by any chance hold the view that, because the IDF is in a state of war, every Israeli civilian is “a legitimate target of sorts”? I assume/hope not…
Is a factory building tanks a legitimate military target? Is it acceptable to destroy it, killing civilians?
How about the factory that makes ball bearings for said tank?
And how about the company that manufactures the MREs, and the farmers that grow the food that goes into the MREs?
Ever since the US Civil War, there really hasn’t been a clear line between combatants and noncombatants. “Total war” means “total enemy” and that is part of why Israel has moved its civilians away from the border.
But do you honestly believe that Hamas wouldn’t kill Israeli citizens if it could? What are all those rockets intended to do?
>> Is a factory building tanks a legitimate military target? Is it acceptable to destroy it, killing civilians?
>None of those people are legitimate targets under international humanitarian law.
Then international humanitarian law is being/has been/will be ignored in every war.
A factory building tanks is a legitimate military target.
Under ideal conditions, civilians (non-combatants IAW the Laws of war) are not to be attacked by the military forces of the other side. However, it is a clear violation of the Law of War for the armed forces to use non-combatants to shield their forces from attack. It is generally accepted under the laws of war that if non-combatants are willingly or unwillingly intermingled with otherwise hostile forces, that protection is forfeit as a matter of law and international treaty. Basically if grandma, grandpa and all of the rest are between the opposing forces, it truly sucks to be them.
It is generally accepted under the laws of war that if non-combatants are willingly or unwillingly intermingled with otherwise hostile forces, that protection is forfeit as a matter of law and international treaty.
That is in no way an accurate statement of the law. No need to take my word for it: https://www.icrc.org/en/document/icrc-president-tells-paris-conference-gaza-immediate-imperative-is-to-save-lives
Let’s get back to EV’s original question.
If the university claims (correctly, let’s posit)that only demonstration in certain places are permitted and that no disruption of University academic activities is allowed, and that student signed onto this code of conduct as a condition of admittance with the penalty being suspension, Then the University is completely within its rights to suspend a student who disobeys and is warned to disperse, else suspension will follow.
You might have your blog posts confused, because that’s not at all the original question in this post.
I think universities are entitled to resist trespassers. The correct way to deal with them is to hand them over to the criminal justice system. I don’t see why they’d need to be suspended/expelled.
If they violate directives not to disrupt instruction or university business or if they threaten violence, they certainly should be punished by the university.
Once you sign a “code of conduct, you’r bound by it.
As for the question about civilian casualties, the comments about MAD are incredibly naive and uninformed about US, Russian, and Chinese policies and their evolution. Tit-for-tat is not MAD; its a child’s game.
Fair enough: I don’t see why universities should ask their students to accept a code of conduct. Universities should teach and hold exams, that is it.
Because most professional organization have codes of conduct/ethics.
Because students never that the right to trample on the rights of other students, the faculty or other university employees.
So international law is as immutable as a spherical earth? And international law professors can be fired for suggesting anything contrary to the consensus on international law?
Indeed, Martinned’s last line attempting to dodge criticism that he’s confusing law and morality is circular. If a government makes something morally justified illegal it is oppressive by definition. Depending on the details, it may only be a little bit oppressive, but it’s a feeble escape clause all the same.
If a government makes something morally justified illegal it is oppressive by definition.
That’s a definition you just made up.
So international law is as immutable as a spherical earth?
Feel free to amend the law. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is possible to say what is and isn’t lawful today. As you know full well.
For example.
I think I’m a #7.
As an aside, how many people think that the U.S. should renounce any retaliatory strike that might kill civilians even if nuked by Russia/North Korea/Iran?
Some acts are so evil that we would rather be dead than do them.
Such as inviting a second nuke strike that kills even more civilians by failing to retaliate for the first strike.
Bringing a book of platitudes to a nuke fight does not make you moral, it makes you foolishly evil.
Such as inviting a second nuke strike that kills even more civilians by failing to retaliate for the first strike.
If some enemy kills hundreds of thousands of American civilians without doing anything to degrade our military capabilities, there is no military reason to do the same to them. It would be a pure act of revenge and would be just as evil. (If a mobster kills the 5 year old child of a cop, the cop killing the mobster’s 5 year old child isn’t less evil.)
Hitting military targets of that enemy that eliminates their ability to harm us again would be the goal. And doing so in a way that limits civilian casualties on their side would be a moral imperative, if that was possible.
“If some enemy kills hundreds of thousands of American civilians without doing anything to degrade our military capabilities,”
none of our enemies are that stupid.
You assume that a retaliatory strike makes a second strike less likely. Any evidence backing up that assumption?
“makes a second strike”
you mean a “third strike.”
The retaliation is the “second strike” in common parlance.
As to your question about evidence, the retaliatory strike should be as close as possible to a disarming strike, effectively destroying the attacker’s military capabilities. That has always been the declared policy of the US regarding a retaliatory strike,
“International Humanitarian Law”is just a fancy name for “Platitude Studies”
I think your grievance is with the presidents and senates who ratified the various treaties that are, together, called international humanitarian law.
So, rather than threaten such a retaliatory strike, your position would be that even if Russia nuked NYC, the US should not retaliate?
What would the retaliation accomplish? Were the civilians who would die in the retaliatory strike responsible for the deaths in NYC? If you murder my children, is it justice for me to murder yours? Or more to the point, would it accomplish anything good?
Think about how deterrence works. You tell me that if I hit you, you’ll hit me back. I hit you anyway. You don’t hit back.
Deterrence only works to the extent I actually believe you will hit back.
If you think nuclear war is a bad thing and ought to be deterred, the best way to deter it is to do everything possible to make potential attackers think that if they nuke you, you will return the favor with 100% certainty. Saying ‘if you nuke me, I dunno, might nuke you back, might issue a strongly worded protest, we’ll see’ does not minimize the risk of war. If you want to minimize the civilian casualties from nuclear war, you don’t want to be saying that.
Yes, but we aren’t really talking about deterrence. Deterrence is to prevent the first strike. But once the first strike happens, striking back isn’t deterrence any more, it’s retaliation. And I’m not sure retaliation is always moral, or even strategically effective.
To get back to the ostensible topic, would a massive retaliatory strike against Hamas in Gaza that kills a great many Palestinian civilians be moral, or even in the long term strategically effective? I’m not so sure.
“Would it be effective?”
Yes. In that it would prevent future strikes.
Let’s give you a different example. WWII.
In WWII, Germany and Austria unified. Britain and France did nothing. They were intent on avoiding a war. Then there was the Czechoslovakia. And once again, Britain and France appeased Germany. That only encouraged Germany further.
Appeasement doesn’t work. It just encourages further aggression. If an enemy power thinks they can strike you and you won’t do anything in response…they’re going to do it.
I’m not advocating appeasement. As for your assertion that “it would prevent further strikes,” it certainly hasn’t prevented further strikes for the 75 years of Israel’s existence.
“Yes, but we aren’t really talking about deterrence. Deterrence is to prevent the first strike. But once the first strike happens, striking back isn’t deterrence any more, it’s retaliation.”
“Before you attack, I’m going to say I’ll retaliate, but I’m just kidding, if you really do attack, I’m actually not going to do anything” is actually not very effective deterrence.
Food for thought: why didn’t Germany use poison gas in WWII? Here is what what FDR had to say:
“In June 1943, Roosevelt reaffirmed the US policy toward gas in warfare: “Use of such weapons has been outlawed by the general opinion of civilized mankind.
This country has not used them, and I hope we never will be compelled to use them. I state categorically that we shall under no circumstances resort to the use of such weapons unless they are first used by our enemies.””
If the Nazis did use them, Churchill said:
“In February 1943, in the course of communication with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, Churchill learned that the Germans were planning to use gas against the Soviets in the Donbas.
Accordingly, Churchill instructed his Chiefs of Staffs Committee: “In the event of the Germans using gas on the Russians…We shall retaliate by drenching the German cities with gas on the largest possible scale.””
…
…and, importantly, FDR and Churchill weren’t bluffing:
“On the night of December 2, 1943, the Germans bombed a key Allied port in Bari, Italy, sinking 17 ships and killing more than 1,000 American and British servicemen and hundreds of civilians. Caught in the surprise World War II air raid was the John Harvey, an American Liberty ship carrying a secret cargo of 2,000 mustard bombs to be used in retaliation if Hitler resorted to gas warfare.”
It wasn’t a case of ‘if you gas us, we’ll kinda sorta think about someday maybe retaliating’ – we were ready, willing and able to respond promptly and effectively. This was made clear to Hitler. You can form your own opinion about whether the deterrence worked, or if he refrained from using chemical weapons because he thought it was unethical.
You’re still talking about deterrence. What the posture should be before an attack, in order to deter the attack. I agree with you about that. But the topic at hand is what should happen after deterrence has failed and the attack or first strike has occurred.
To bring it back to Israel and the current day once again, it was surely clear to Hamas that Israel would retaliate. That did not deter them. It won’t deter them in the future, clearly. So the argument that retaliation now would deter further attacks seems wrong to me.
Therefore the question is what is the most effective way to bring the perpetrators of the attack to justice, and hopefully save the hostages being held. And what actions are going to increase Israel’s long term security, and what actions will decrease it. And what actions would be immoral and/or violative of international law.
Take a look at the concept of “reprisal” and why it exists. There’s a lot of history there that can answer your questions and clear up your doubts.
Take a look at the history of the modern state of Israel. Has reprisal made the Israeli people more secure? Has it deterred further aggression by their enemies?
“You’re still talking about deterrence. What the posture should be before an attack, in order to deter the attack. I agree with you about that. But the topic at hand is what should happen after deterrence has failed and the attack or first strike has occurred.”
1)I get your theory – your strategy is ‘say that we will definitely retaliate, but after being attacked actually don’t’. And, OK, that’s a nice in an infinite frictionless plane theoretical way. But it depends on you being a perfect bluffer. In the real world, if your opponent thinks you are bluffing – for example, he reads comments like yours, or has a mole in your government – he is going to know he can attack without reprisal. And that uncertainty raises the likelihood of a nuclear war, and thus raises the likely number of civilian casualties.
2)You are also assuming a one round game, so to speak. Nations think about war because they have some profound difference of opinion. The USSR, for example, might think Nebraska best ruled from Moscow, and we disagree.
They decide to make their point by nuking Los Angeles. We say ‘well, OK, we’re not going to respond in kind, but we’re sending our military after yours’. And good news!, our military is winning that nice, no-civilian casualty (other than the LA residents) war. Do you expect the USSR to surrender at that point, or nuke New York City?
I might go along with your view in some hypothetical world where each side had exactly one bomb or something, but that’s not the world we live in.
=====
I would also note, the same logic applies to non-nuclear war. After Pearl Harbor, we could have said ‘bummer, we have a few thousand dead, but that’s a fraction of the dead we’ll get if we go to war’. But that would have meant letting Japan continue its depredations across the Pacific. In the long run, do you think that would have been a smart move? Or, if we had the capability at the time, would it have been unjust to respond to Pearl Harbor by sending a few hundred B29’s to flatten Tokyo, as we eventually did? Would that have ended the war with many fewer civilian casualties? If it would have, is it immoral?
““In the event of the Germans using gas on the Russians…We shall retaliate by drenching the German cities with gas on the largest possible scale.””
That’s an escalation…
“What would the retaliation accomplish? ”
I answered that about. But you are correct that tit-for-tat accomplishes nothing.
Yes, but we aren’t really talking about deterrence. Deterrence is to prevent the first strike. But once the first strike happens, striking back isn’t deterrence any more, it’s retaliation.
No, “deterrence” means to “deter” an instance of something, and that meaning isn’t limited to the first such instance. If you carry out an act of aggression against me I want to deter you from doing it again. That you did it once already doesn’t change that. And a method of deterring an aggressor from continuing their aggression is to make the consequences of that aggression sufficiently painful that they realize it is not in their best interest to continue it. On the other hand, a great way to encourage them to keep it up is to just take it. Most people learn this general principle of human behavior before leaving primary school.
“What would the retaliation accomplish?”
Destroy the remainder of the enemy’s war-fighting capability
Perhaps. Is there a point where the number of civilian non-combatants killed in order to achieve that goal makes the action immoral? I think so, although I don’t know what the number would be that tips the balance.
What would it accomplish? Deterrence. My god, we nuked a big city, and got every city in our nation annihilated.
It would suck to come to that, but if so, so be it.
You assume it would deter another strike. But would it? More likely that they would retaliate against our reprisal. In my view that’s at least as likely as our reprisal showing them the error of their ways.
“But would it? ”
Yes, if the second strike is effective at destroying the attackers war-fighting capability.
Tit-for-tat accomplishes nothing and deters nothing especially after the initial attack.
Now plays the game for North Korea, which explicitly advocates preemptive nuclear attacks.
Like Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
I’ve related this before, but my late father-in-law was a 21 year old lieutenant in the Japanese Imperial Army in the closing days of WW2. He credited the two nuclear strikes as saving his own life and a million more. He was training for human wave counter attacks on the beaches when the war ended. He commanded an infantry company supporting tanks.
Let me know when you have to make a decision with choices like that rather than just pontificating from afar.
You would rather be dead. Not the rest of us. I would see continents wiped before we lost our freedom, assuming a last resort. Which we shoud never let get that far, and aren’t, with a dominant military.
But would you really rather be dead? Some apologists live happy and free in the west, as true believers. Others, actually living under those dictatorships, not so much. Except for participants in their dictatorial kleptocracies, like Tony Sopranos’ lackies paying visits verbally on the Internet.
‘I would see continents wiped before we lost our freedom,’
There’s no freedom in those circumstances. It’s gone. It ain’t coming back.
‘Others, actually living under those dictatorships, not so much’
The focus on students who may or may not support Hamas is so weird compared to the blithely pro-genocide views you lot come out with.
Not very many. The position invites a preemptive strike by the enemy
No US leader, military planner, etc. has ever held that position. Even the predominant opinion in defense circles, that nukes should target war-fighting capability, has never fooled itself that there would not be massive civilian casualties.
“Japan surrendered because it was facing the loss of cities, not of military capacity.”
Neither is that true, nor was Hiroshima a true civilian target. It was a major military city with significant Army & Navy facilities, and it would have been critical in the defense of the home islands.
And Japan had already “run out of cities” — we killed way more people in the firebombing of Tokyo than we did nuking Hiroshima, there was the psychological aspect of it being only one plane, but you really can’t carpetbomb with nukes (your planes need time to get out of the way).
Notice that we did *not* bomb the Emperor’s Palace in Toyko — I don’t know how much we knew at the time and how much we learned later, but he was trying to end the war (and — in spite of the two nukings — was almost deposed in his attempt to do so).
MAD is an issue in and of itself, right on down to the “token cities” (Kiev & Boston) that each side was allowed to nuke without it escalating into a full-fledged nuke war. The thing to remember is that the Soviet leaders post Stalin had seen the results of scorched earth and FEARED a nuke war.
But as to your question, there is a difference between law and ethics. Beheading babies and raping hippies is *illegal* (violation of international law) while nuking them isn’t…
Umm, lets see, so if Mike Tyson punches me in the face I can punch him 10 times?? (like I’d even survive, and he’d bite my ear off just for fun) Iron Mike’s bigger, stronger, why would I fight in his ring? Be much smarter to plant a bomb in his locker room, slip him a “Mickey”, or pay someone even meaner to hit him before he could hit me, Long way of saying, if Israel lets Ear-Ron get a Hydrogen Bomb, they’ve already lost. Ronaldus Maximus should have taken out Ear-rons 20 largest industrial/military sites in 1981, would have saved alot of death/destruction in the long run.
Frank “Atoms for Peace!”
Remember that Israel took out Iraq’s circa 1986 — Regan publicly criticized and quietly praised Israel for this.
June 1981 to be exact, “Operation Opera”
It was over before anybody knew it; before anybody could equivocate. It’s nice to have a memory of something [useful] having been done where I didn’t equivocate.
(I used to be young and stupid. Now I’m old and stupid.)
circa /sûr′kə/
preposition
In approximately; about. “born circa 1900.”
Approximately; about; commonly abbreviated ca.; — used especially before dates and numerical measures.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition •
Sp it happened 42 years ago as opposed to 37 years ago — does that really make that much of a difference?
Actually, yes. It demonstrates carelessness.
Ha! reading a little too fast, thought Eugene said
“… in any event I’d love to hear what you FOOLS think…”
Frank
7, but without the judgment between the two scenarios. Employers can decide for themselves what speech on what issues they feel disqualifies the candidate. I don’t know if retaliatory nuclear strikes are justified, that is a difficult question. I hope to God the situation never arises.
9. Freedom of association. It’s entirely up to the individuals involved, and none of my business to tell the nuts to shut up or to tell the employer to fire them.
If I were the employer, I’d only fire based on how indispensable to the business and how much their continued employment hurt the business. Since I am not these people’s employer, I don’t know the answers to these questions and it is not my problem.
Agreed. Unless they are making an imminent threat of a specific violent act, or whatever the legal standard is, I do not believe in canceling people for their personal opinions. If I did, I would start by firing all those who subscribe to religions that particularly offend me.
Have we lost all ability to distinguish what is said from how it’s said?
The reality is that too many people can’t distinguish those things in their own mind and shouldn’t be speaking in public on sensitive topics.
So I think it’s perfectly reasonable to decline to hire people who can’t express themselves carefully in public. Especially for professions like law that require an ability to thoughtfully advocate for a client.
My personal view is that an Israeli nuclear strike retaliating for an Iranian nuclear attack would be morally justified, horrific as the death toll for innocent civilians would be (and I’d have said the same about, for instance, an American nuclear strike retaliating for a Soviet nuclear attack), but that the Hamas killings were morally unjustified (even apart from the rapes and similar abuse).
“My moral views on this are actually incoherent, under-researched, and poorly-considered, but that doesn’t mean I have any reluctance in sharing them.”
I always enjoy reading your comments, and usually agree with them. May I suggest to you that hate-reading this blog may not be the most constructive and/or healthy use of your time?
Oh, my good lord, if only you knew.
I appreciate the sentiment. Unfortunately my obsessive-compulsive tendencies are what they are.
Maybe we should abandon them to wallow in their self-reinforcing delusions and move on to a less ignorant place…
Know of one?
I take your point. I was concerned that if Simon felt the need to constantly take pot shots at the blogger, he might be happier at a different blog. I guess different things make different people happy.
The difference turns on the question of whether you are viewing the act in isolation reviewing it as part of a strategy of deterrence.
MAD, which is the framework under which the nuclear strikes would occur, uses the threat of retaliation to deter an enemy from using their nuclear weapons first. The problem with deterrence is that it has to be clear to everybody that you will follow through on your threat.
Are you rejecting deterrence (MAD or conventional) as a morally acceptable defense strategy?
Eugene was talking about a retaliatory strike, not a defense posture.
You are trying to imply that if MAD is a morally acceptable defense posture, then so must be a retaliatory strike directed at civilians. But this does not follow.
I would agree that MAD must be backed by a believably genuine threat that it would be carried out by the victim of a nuclear attack. That is strategically clear. And I would be inclined to agree that deterrence via the threat of overwhelming force in response to an unwarranted attack is a morally acceptable defense posture (whether we are talking about nuclear attacks or otherwise). It is always better to deter war than to fight it.
But it does not follow from this that actually carrying out an overwhelming use of force, killing (say) 10x as many civilians in response to an unwarranted attack, is necessarily morally justified. In other words, I think an act remains a war crime, and wrong, even if the threat of responding with a war crime could effectively deter attacks, and it is morally acceptable to make that threat clear, as a means of deterring attack.
The moral calculus shifts, after the deterrence strategy has failed and a nation has been attacked. At that point, MAD is no longer about deterring attacks. It’s just destruction for destruction’s sake.
So you’re saying that it is morally acceptable to make the threat, but not morally acceptable to mean it?
That strikes me as a a morally consistent position, but a game-theoretically untenable one. The iterated prisoners dilemma, particularly with multiple participants, requires a willingness not merely threaten retaliation, but to carry it out because people are always looking to see if you have lost your nerve. Failure to follow through invites further defections.
As we move into the future, more such bullshit would be encouraged by rogue regimes on democracies. Therefore it would be vital to paste the attacker in response.
Your analysis, which I view as faulty regardless, presumes a one time incident, rather than a world with slowly proliferating nukes over the coming decades.
Such an incident needs a crushing response, to destruction, and not a tit for tat, so future rogues who might want to take a pot shot will know they will be killing most of their own citizens.
“My moral views on this are actually incoherent, under-researched, and poorly-considered, but that doesn’t mean I have any reluctance in sharing them.”
Yes, that describes you very well.
If Israel fails to reciprocate, then it gets another nuke, you moral cretin.
Perhaps you could pay more careful attention to the passage I was criticizing – or, I dunno, one of the half-dozen comments I have left elsewhere in this thread. I am so tired of repeating myself for people so immune to critical thinking.
It’s called “treason” and the mistake was not prosecuting Hanoi Jane. The Vietnam war was won on the battlefield — and lost on American college campi and the biggest mistake of all was letting that treasonous cadre take over higher education.
Treason is defined as “giving aid and comfort to the enemy” and while I’d prefer a more explicit Congressional declaration, (a) Congress has declared war on “terrorism” and (b) Hamas is defined as “terrorist” — QED it is the “enemy.”
Expressing support for Hamas gives it “aid and comfort” and hence constitutes treason.
We can go down the road of cancel culture coming around to bite those who invented it — which *is* happening and I am quietly saying “I told you it would” — this is more simply the definition of “treason” and holding treasonous persons responsible.
You don’t have to imagine — we threw the German-American Bund in jail and/or internment camps. We didn’t tolerate ‘We Love Hitler” rallies during WW-II — we did the exact opposite.
So it’s not just firing but incarceration.
A. Without a declaration of war, is there an enemy? None in Korea, none in Vietnam, none in Iraq or Afghanistan. None in the Cold War for that matter, or any of the Central America banana wars.
B. If you say the declaration is unnecessary, then what does it take? Does that War on Drugs mean that every drug dealer and user and proponent is a traitor?
C. Perhaps it’s time to stop pretending to be the world’s policeman.
Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf: Under U.S. law, the rules related to war come into play for undeclared wars as much as for declared ones; see this post for more details.
This having been said, I agree entirely that the U.S. isn’t actually in a state of war with Hamas, and aid to Hamas is governed (as a legal matter) by the law of designated foreign terrorist organizations, not the law of treason. I’d also add that simply independently arguing that a foreign terrorist organization is in the right — or that even our wartime enemies are in the right — is generally protected by the First Amendment. (That may not be true of arguments made in coordination with a foreign terrorist organization or a wartime enemy.)
Congress has also declared war on drugs. Does that make everyone who buys drugs a traitor?
It would have been nice if someone had asked Nixon that…
Presumably not. Drugs purchased and subsequently consumed are destroyed by that consumption.
By that logic, once a murderer has fired the bullet or stabbed someone, no need to prosecute.
“Congress has also declared war on drugs.”
Metaphors, strange and alien things to some people.
You mean “German internment campi,” of course.
Cactus, cacti.
Campus, campi.
Cat, catti.
Camp, campi.
Scamp, scampi.
The short rascals stepped on the schools’ overly stylized thorny succulents, or, the shrimpy scampi trampled the campi’s campy cacti.
Indeed.
You don’t actually need this hypothetical at all. Just make the hypothetical someone arguing that Hiroshima was justified. If there’s some political context which leads to protestors supporting the death of civilians in Hiroshima, you have the same question.
But my answer is that the question can’t be answered without reference to the specific facts. In this case, I’d suggest that there’s a difference between arguing for civilian death as part of a genuine debate and for a terminal goal that is not just “see how many people can die”, and doing so because you hate someone and want them to die. I’ve never heard of either Hamas or a protestor saying “of course ideally Hamas wouldn’t kill civilians, but that’s their only chance of defeating Israel, so it is necessary in this case”. Hamas kills civilians because Hamas hates the Jews and you kill people you hate. Not all support of civilian death is equal.
There’s also the whole “from the river to the sea” thing. Israel isn’t planning to wipe Iran off the map and colonize it in your hypothetical.
Hiroshima WAS justified, do you have any idea how many people we killed in Toyko?
Except the modification would need to be that Hiroshima was justified, good and the civilians deserved it. Once you step beyond weighing costs and benefits of the action and start declaring the slaughter of innocents a moral good in itself, you’ve lost all decency.
Somewhere between #7 and #8 for me. Perhaps some employers should draw moral distinctions, but I don’t like blacklisting.
What if instead, the student/faculty member publically endorsed the Holocaust? They believed it was righteous, the Jews deserved it for their crimes, and the only problem with it was that the Nazis didn’t finish the job.
Same response?
Yep. If the Nazis can march in Skokie, the same principle applies your Nazis.
We’re not asking about a march though.
We’re asking about hiring people with those views, into potentially sensitive positions.
It’s one thing to say “Nazis can march” in a public space which is well patrolled with police.
It’s another thing entirely to say “This Nazi, who has proclaimed he wants all Jews to die, is going to be in a position of authority over several students, including Jewish students, in a classroom without other adult supervision”.
In the second case, there may be a certain amount of foreseeable risk that the school would be opened up to, if something did indeed occur.
It’s fascinating how you’ve come around to arguments similar to those about hiring racists and misogynists and homophobes. I believe they were labeled ‘cancel culture.’
Perhaps there are “sensitive positions” for which the employer should decide, and your example, assuming it is K-8 or perhaps K-12 at a private school (in a public school, I would think you would have to hire him so long as he doesn’t espouse his views on the job), seems reasonable (I did say I was between #7 and #8). But generally, I oppose blacklists.
Just want to make sure I get your position straight….
If an individual has publicly, repeatedly, said, in writing and otherwise that they want to “all the Jews to die.” i.e., this isn’t a one off event, but very well known, consistent, and constant… and they applied for a public job as a high school teacher, in say chemistry. In a district where he’s be teaching Jews.
The school couldn’t say “no, this doesn’t work”. They’d have to hire him? So long as he doesn’t say anything while on the job?
That’s your view?
I think that’s First Amendment law (being descriptive, not normative), but Eugene would know better than I.
After further review, the school district might be able to fire the teacher under the Pickering balancing test because of potential disruption (perhaps harassment). So while I said your hypo was reasonable for private schools, it looks like it might be for public schools as well.
Nonetheless, my general opposition to blacklists remains.
A blacklist for political reasons (ie communism) is one thing.
A blacklist because the individual in question has actively said they want to kill/rape/murder people of your ethnicity (or ethnicities that would be under them) is something else entirely.
Differentiating these is critical.
Of course calling for the death of people is not speech worth protection. But the principle of freedom of speech is we don’t let the government punish those who say valueless things because we don’t trust the government to distinguish between valuable and valueless speech (except for cases such as true threats). That’s why the Nazis can march in Skokie.
I think the same principle applies to blacklisting because we ought not trust a collective group of employers to make that judgment either. They are analogous to a government because of the power they yield in impacting people’s lives. To be sure, they can’t imprison people. But, their power is at least on par with the government’s civil penalties.
I’m going to say this: It’s one thing to be born here, but why the heck are we letting America-hating students into this country — and why aren’t we revoking their visas for things like supporting Hamas?
Operation Paperclip was a tough call in the midst of the cold war, but otherwise, we didn’t let Nazis in after WWII…..
Because we haven’t (yet) instituted ideological purity tests for student visas?
Typo
I’m not sure I exactly fall into any camp (perhaps a mixture of 7 and 8). I may be old-fashioned but I don’t see that the question whether the October 7 attacks were right is a “contestable moral judgment.” What is arguably contestable are claims that what happened on October 7 was wrong in the abstract but justified by the so-called “genocide” committed by Israelis. Perhaps because of the need for universities to be speech-protective, they should just ignore the speech, for the reasons implied by Eugene. But for other employers, I’m not sure that they should be treated like common carriers and forced to accept employees who defend such savagery – or any other kind of savagery. If I, as a faculty member trying to decide whether to hire a particular candidate, learned that the candidate endorsed such atrocities, I don’t know that I could let my notions about “speech protectiveness” carry the day. If I asked myself, “Should this person, who endorses murder, rape, torture, and kidnapping of civilians, be hired to teach our students?”, I might have a hard time saying yes.
I’m inclined to side with #3. These jihadist rallies might have value in that people are able to blow off steam, but so do fighting words. It is no longer legal to “demand satisfaction”, which is what it appears these people want.
Also, instead of Israel promising to avenge 10x against Iran, maybe NATO should promise to avenge 1x against Iran, as long as it takes.
2, 3, and 9.
Regarding point 9. There does need to be made a differentiation between the deliberate targeting of civilians on a personal level, and “targeting” civilians on a city-wide level.
One of the significant issues with nuclear/strategic bombing, is civilian, military, and military-industrial targets are intermingled. An automotive factory which can be converted to a tank factory is a legitimate target. Would it be ideal if countries would simply place all the purely civilian facilities (like elementary schools) in an area outside the nuclear blast range of the other targets? Sure. But it’s unpractical, and unfortunately gets groups into “collateral damage”.
The same isn’t true on an individual level. And when a hostile force deliberately targets and assaults an elementary school (that isn’t being used for military purposes), it is wrong.
If cowards put their military command and control under a civilian hospital, and we attack the legitimate military target, are we targeting civilians?
It was the United States who began destroying civilian crops and infrastructure because they could also be used by and for the military. (aside form the more economic nature of ancient pillaging)
This is an ancient technique, going back at least to the first crusade, when the Islamic armies poisoned or blocked up all the wells during their retreat to Antioch and Jerusalem to deny the crusaders access to water. It’s also the intended effect of a siege.
Genghis Khan also famously totally destroyed a kingdom for murdering his envoys, including slaughtering every civilian and sowing fields with salt to turn them into wasteland.
Let’s ask a different question though.
Let’s say a student or faculty member publicly defended the Holocaust. They said it was righteous, that the Jews deserved it for their previous crimes against the German people, and that it was a shame the Nazis didn’t finish the job.
Should the student be expelled, the faculty member fired, or the student not hired?
Yeah, the big problem here is the right is at risk of undoing all the good work it’s put in protecting and coddling Nazis.
You know what Nazis and Hamas have in common? They both liked throwing live Jewish babies into ovens.
https://www.thejc.com/news/news/i-saw-a-baby-who-had-been-baked-in-an-oven-says-israeli-emergency-worker-6A8bb0Tq56ytMO46OevOzy
We’ve gone from if you don’t defend Nazis you’re a fascist to if you object to killing Palestinians you might as well be throwing Jewish babies into ovens.
We’ve gone from “Let’s burn down the Constitution to go after a tiny collection of neo-Nazi losers who couldn’t get a dog catcher elected” to “We must protect to the death the First Amendment rights of people chanting ‘From the river to the sea’ who count sitting members of Congress among their number.”
As it happens, I agree with the second statement, because free speech is of primary importance. Let’s not pretend that you or your fellow travelers really care about free speech though. You just care about who and whom.
More like ‘if you don’t invite Nazis to speak at colleges you’re barbequing the First Amendment!’
‘You just care about who and whom.’
I know enough to spot that when you get people going on national television and getting columns in national newspapers claiming that they’re the ones being silenced, they’re full of shit.
Are you seriously arguing that if conservative campus groups, say opponents of illegal immigration, had behaved even a fraction as badly as the pro-Palestinian groups have that they would not have been instantly banned from campus and denounced by the administration?
Free speech should be available to everybody, but it needs to be available to everybody equally. It can’t be a shield for even the worst of the left and an empty promise to even the moderate right.
These are your people calling for genocide. I can defend their free speech rights without being a hypocrite. You cannot.
‘Are you seriously arguing’
No, you are, and whether this counter-factul is true, or true-ish, or utter bullshit is irrelevant, isn’t it? Who gives a fuck about campus groups except people who are a) anti-university and simply carrying on a tradition of inflating incidents on colleges into ridiculously high-profile stories of manufactured outrage b) are desperately trying to exclude politicians and people with power who are calling for the destruction of the Palestinian people from the discussion around support for genocide especially c) when some of them are in the Israeli government and carrying out attacks that are killing thousands.
‘I can defend their free speech rights without being a hypocrite.’
Fuck your virtue signalling. Fuck your straw manning. There’s plenty of free speech for people who want to kill Palestinians.
And once again, you demonstrate that you do not know what “virtue signaling” means. It is a costless (and generally thoughtless) display in which the signaler announces their moral virtue in a way that does not require them to make any hard choices or accept any of the attendant sacrifice.
In this case, I am calling for people who hate me and would like to see my co-religionists dead or displaced from their homeland to nevertheless be given the same rights as anyone else to express their views. That is neither costless nor easy.
I am, however, pointing out that it is absurdity of someone who has consistently argued that the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze when it came to conservative speakers and viewpoints is suddenly a born again defender of free speech.
You are not, of course. It’s just that the who and the whom have shifted, and so you ride forth in defense of your side.
The hypocrisy is staggering.
You appear to be going wildly from one strawman to another.
Here’s the actual argument. If you defend Hamas, you’re defending an organization that thinks it’s righteous to throw living Jewish babies into ovens, and baking them alive.
Here’s the strawman: if you criticise Israel, you’re baking babies for Hamas. (Palestinian babies getting vapourised or slowly dying in incubators with no power don’t count.)
See, I didn’t make that strawman argument. I made a direct argument. “If you defend Hamas, you’re defending an organization that thinks it’s righteous to throw living Jewish babies into ovens, and baking them alive.”
Do you think there’s anything that’s a strawman there?
You’re right, that’s not a straw man, that’s just virtue signalling. What *I* described is a straw man.
You don’t appear to know what virtue signaling is. You’ve got strawmen down, that seems to be your MO.
Oh no, I remember the flavour of virture signalling well from back when it was ‘Saddam gassed his own people!’
Yes, being opposed to throwing live babies into ovens is brave virtue signaling. Look as he stands there, legs quivering, hoping people approve his brave stance.
Say, what’s your opinion on cutting a baby from a screaming mother’s belly, killing it in front of her, then shooting her in the head?
I think I’m against it, but I’m scared to virtue signal.
It certainly is a brave stance to say those things are bad, such courage it takes, but when you’re using it to justify killing thousands and thousands of civilians, many of them babies, it’s rather disgusting, really.
No, no, and maybe.
The countervalue strategy of the middle of the Cold War was driven in part by the inaccuracy of delivery systems. It was easy to make a multi-megaton city killer. It was hard to drop a nuke accurately on a hardened target.
There might be value in making Iran believe, incorrectly, that Biden will push the button and turn the country into a glass parking lot if a red line is crossed. On the other hand, Saddam Hussein’s chemical posturing c. 2000 backfired.
Everyone on the planet know Biden couldn’t find the damn button, let alone push it.
(unless maybe it was under a skirt)
“Everyone on the planet know”
And yet somehow, you missed the ‘s’ key.
Hint. It’s between the a and the d.
John,
You have it backwards, the high yields were motivated by the inaccuracy and the hardness of missile silos and other harden military facilities. Even 100 kT weapons could easily produce hundreds of thousand of casualties per bomb. Even into the 70s, the CEPs of US ICBMs was of order of 250 meters, meaning it took 100n-200 kt nukes to have a good probability of destroyonhg a missile silo.
Let’s ask another hypothetical question while we’re here, but this time from the standpoint of legal liability.
Imagine we have an individual who loudly and repeatedly proclaims that white people are superior and it is his mission to make black women submit to him, and support those who will make black women submit to the superior race. No direct evidence of him having raped or physically abused any African Americans, but he is “very” public about his beliefs and views here.
As an employer, do you have any potential legal liability if you hire this individual and then his words are acted upon? For example, if you hire him as a teacher, and it’s later found he has abused African American student? Or hidden evidence of other employees who have acted upon his words?
I think it’s a no-brainer to fire any teacher who abused any student.
I also think it’s a no-brainer to refuse to hire a teacher who expressed those views.
And I expect any sort of wrongful discharge suit would be laughed at.
Indeed.
A person who “defends the Hamas murders” is defending the views and actions of people who believe in the genocide of the Jewish people, actions taken to promote those goals.
If such a person was hired as a teacher, and then a Jewish student under their authority was abused or murdered, a lawsuit would be a reasonable conclusion. Even if they didn’t commit the action themselves, one may ask if their actions or inaction contributed to the murder or abuse. And if the school had knowledge that this individual had such leanings.
You’re absolutely right (apart form the bit about the Jewish student – what if they were murdered by white nationalists? Maybe the white nationalist teacher is liable?) – if you weren’t busy labeling every criticism of Israel as pro-Hamas, and if that weren’t the point, I’d congratulate you on being woke.
Jews are always an exception for you, aren’t they?
I think you hit the wrong macro here, Armchair.
We’re literally seeing you lot carve out this massive exception to the dismissal of claims of bigotry and racism as being a ‘woke mind virus’ for (your version of) anti-semitism, so long as you can use it to silence criticism of Israel.
Sounds like a yes.
QED
We are the chosen people.
Yes, do some people try to hide every criticism of Israel behind the shield of anti-semitism. This is a problem. However, this is not what we are discussing here.
We are talking about people actively supporting terrorist actions and actively blaming Israel for war crimes committed against them, including rape, kidnapping, and mass murder of unarmed civilians in cold blood.
Don’t try and claim that everything is fine when it’s clearly not
We’re focusing on students. Actual politicians and other people with power and influence are saying shit about wiping out Palestinians. Ergo: it’s not really about that, it’s about finding someone, anyone, to highlight as saying this other shit, and then trying to inflate their significance.
I think EV is describing what the speaker is doing a bit inaccurately.
He is not calling for bombing Iran. He is threatening to bomb Iran if they do a certain thing. These are not the same.
Bombing is an effort to destroy. Threatening bombing is an effort to maintain peace.
Remember Nimzovich. “A threat can be stronger than its execution.”
Somewhere between 7 and 8. Educational institutions should have strong speech protection measures, but other (private) employers *may* draw lines on speech that is unacceptable for representing the company. (And consumers *may* choose to judge the company on such policies and make their patronage decisions accordingly).
Individuals may also make arguments about why a private employer *should* draw lines on speech, and may make arguments about which companies *should* be patronized by consumers.
I think the est argument for an employer firing or refusing to hire a Hamas supporter (or a Klan member, etc) is that the people who will have to work with the individual in question will–rightly, I think–find his presence in the workplace insuperable. Why should a black person have to work with someone who marches with the Klan? Why should a law firm that employs Jews (and many of the named partners appear to be Jews!) hire an anti-semite?
It is a nuanced line to draw, in some instances; but the two examples I gave are bright line distinctions.
What if heterosexuals find the presence of a transgender or homosexual insufferable? What’s the difference between that and your hypothetical?
I said it requires nuanced thinking in some cases; other instances are so egregious a kindergartner could decide.
One assumes the transsexual is not calling for the murder of heterosexuals, nor for them to be considered as sub-humans.
The affront of the KKK marcher or the Hamas apologist is not what goes on in his mind, but what he advocates publicly–that a group of humans be slaughtered or relegated to the margins of society because their race makes them not truly human.
Why would a company that has Jews on the payroll want to hire a strident, open anti-Semite? Why would a firm that has black employees want a KKK member around?
Careful with that one, clingers. There are more educated, inclusive, modern Americans (culture war winners) — especially in the strong, educated, productive communities — than there are disaffected, bigoted, right-wing culture war casualties.
And the old-timey conservatives are dying off in the natural course, so America seems destined to continue to become even less religious, rural, bigoted, backward, and white.
That’s why the Volokh Conspiracy is working so hard to carve out safe spaces and special privileges for our vestigial right-wing bigots and religious kooks.
What’s the difference between that and your hypothetical?
Duh. You’re not too smart.
The obvious difference, if you think for two seconds, is that the prospective homosexual does not hate heterosexuals. So the heterosexual employee is not being placed in the position of working with someone who hates him.
OTOH, the Black or Jewish employee is being placed in that position when you hire a racist or antisemite.
See, that’s not hard.
Nobody HATES blacks or Jews by virtue of being black or Jewish. They hate the pathologies that those two groups disproportionately possess. If you, as an individual member of one of those groups, don’t behave in that way, nobody will hate you.
Don’t hate me because I’m smarter/richer/better looking than you, OK go ahead, hate me, if my life sucked as much as yours I’d probably hate me to.
Nobody HATES blacks or Jews by virtue of being black or Jewish.
OK. That’s moronic, so far wrong as to throw doubt on your rationality.
They hate the pathologies that those two groups disproportionately possess.
This deserves no response except “fuck you.”
To avoid wasting even a few more seconds reading your inane, racist, antisemitic, and no doubt otherwise bigoted as well, comments, I am muting you.
I don’t expect you to care. It’s for my own convenience.
My view is that all civilians lives are not equal, and Western lives are superior in value to non-Western lives, so the hypothetical author would be a hero.
Furthermore, if America were non-insane, anyone advocating for Hamas would be tried for treason, and summarily executed.
Publicly supporting terrorists gives them aid and comfort, and thus they’re just as culpable as someone who joins them to fight.
Voltage!
Oh wait is this Chuck in disguise?
I’ve been suspecting he was a former poster under a new nym, but he just doesn’t feel to me like BCD. BCD was far less articulate, and angrier.
“Western lives are superior in value to non-Western lives”
This is the giveaway. Besides, he didn’t just disappear— he’s clearly here somewhere posting.
Leaving aside the nonsense, this
“My view is that all civilians lives are not equal”
is true in the sense that the government of Ruritania has a special responsibility to protect the citizens of Ruritania, over and above any general humanitarian moral responsibility to the citizens of the world. It is the government of Ruritania, not the government of the world, and its primary duty is to its own citizens.
Which is not to say that a Frenchman’s life should be worth nothing to the government of Ruritania, but it does mean that in a war with France, the Ruritanian government is entitled to value Ruritanan civilians, and indeed Ruritarian soldiers, more highly than French civilians. And vice versa of course.
Absolutely. But that extends to people of more similar cultures. While the government of Germany should prioritize Germans over Frenchmen, they should prioritize Frenchmen over people in the Palestinian territories or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
#8, especially because your phrasing indicated that neither “should” be fired, rather than “shall.”
I can only advocate for *tolerance* of *expression* of who should or shouldn’t attack whom (and pretty much everything else). To preclude it is so crazy that the people who tend to bar such expression, on one hand, are the same people who believe in protection of such expression, on another. (It’s like “what’s right is right, right?”)
Except in some very narrow cases (e.g. exhortation of immediate present action to physically harm somebody), such types of expression [of who should attack whom] are clearly distinguished from *physical* *actions* of attack. (Sorry to exclude protection against “emotional harm” here, but such protection undermines attempts at substantive protection of expression.)
It’s surprising to me how many people who see themselves as “believing in free expression” have no problem excluding expression simply because of its content. (“Oh but it’s more than that!!!”) It’s a cowardly view of expression, I think, and reflects a softness and lack of resilience in its adherents. If you stifle the debate before the war, then it seems to me you will have shortened the distance to war itself.
“It’s surprising to me how many people who see themselves as “believing in free expression” have no problem excluding expression simply because of its content.”
No kidding.
Just ask Artie Ray.
If you could.
Just ask Artie Ray.
Or Ron DeSantis.
Do schools such as Liberty, Regent, Franciscan, Biola, Wheaton, Cedarbrook, Notre Dame, Brigham Young, Ave Maria, Oral Roberts Bob Jones, and Ouachita Baptist see themselves as believing in (or claim to believe in) free expression?
Herman Kahn in his book “Thinking about the Unthinkable” advanced an update to the concept that “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” by adding that “Those who will not discuss nuclear Armageddon are likely to stumble into creating it”. The purpose of a strategy of nuclear deterrence is to deter the attack in the first place, not to try to get even. Without public deterrence you invite your opponent to miscalculate. Another prominent participant in the discussion was Henry Kissinger, who became Secretary of State. Before you decide that every member of the Executive to serve in the last 70 years is complicit in advocating murder, remember that nobody wants anyone to die in the first place. On the other hand, if someone actually advocates a first use of nuclear weapons as a way to more efficiently conduct ethnic cleansing or genocide, then go ahead and toss him out.
Why didn’t you tell the world, EH?
It was to be announced at the Party Congress on monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.
I would fall in camp 7 or 8, although it’s hard for me to pick one. I’m concerned about the erosion of free speech but also I am somewhat inclined to think that some employers at least should be able to fire employees whose express beliefs violate the values of the employer. I’m a criminal defense attorney with both left liberal and libertarian views on various issues.
Attempting to justify civilian casualties based on relative population is evil. Period.
There’s a strong difference between a discussion about hypothetical mutual assured destruction in a total war scenario compared to actual support of actual terrorism and war crimes.
Mutually assured destruction is terrifying, but it has a track record of being a successful deterrent to nuclear war, and a nuclear war is by definition a total war where everything is on the table.
On the other hand, there is no excuse for deliberately targeting civilians instead of military targets. Especially when this is just added to Hamas committing countless war crimes by not being uniformed soldiers, using civilians as human shields by hiding behind or within churches and hospitals.
This is a false equivalence and you know it.
I’m not sure that “if you kill 12.37% of our civilians we will kill 12.37% of your civilians” is a very sensible deterrent strategy anyway.
The sort of regime likely to zap a million civilians is usually the sort of regime that values its own civilians at close to squat. That sort of regime is best deterred by an assurance that “if you start something, we will destroy you (ie the ruler) and your power, whatever it takes” because that’s what the enemy values. We nice caring folk might value civilians but not everybody does.
Dictatorships are kleptocracies. They don’t like existential threats because that interferes with their cushy lifestyles they worked so hard murdering their way to the top for. Oh they can muck around, mini cold war style, but risk their own destruction, no.
Dictatorships may develop into kleptocracies over time but they don’t always start out that way.
The better known dictatorships of the 20th century had ideological raisons d’etre. Neither the N people nor the C people went into it for a cushy lifestyle, they went into it for power and to create their vision of Utopia with that power.
Both Ns and Cs rapidly developed massive corruption but that’s because enormous government power attracts jackals to the flag, and jackals gotta jackal.
” In war, civilians pay for the sins of their governments, and the prospect of civilian deaths is often the main deterrent to aggression, or the main impetus to surrender; that’s just the way it is.”
Which is why greater control over any and all governments is top priority. Government is too important to be left to politicians – the lowest of the low, generally speaking of today’s crop.
Unless at war – declared properly – no speech advocating violence against people is proper or justified. Anyone defending outright murder must be dealt with according to law or custom.
Frankly, this topic and so forth about never ending conflicts should be criminalized for no other reason than that it is NEVER ENDING and nothing will change these never ending degenerate peoples in other parts of the World – they are ALL lost people trapped in their miasmic vortex of self delusion. We could pity them, but WHY ? Let them kill each other – IT’S WHAT THEY WANT ! Then, we deal with the survivors.
Old World degeneracies drag all down.
Eric – GOVERNMENTS ARE OUTTA CONTROL WE GOTTA REIN EM IN !
More Eric – ALL THIS WICKED TALK MUST BE CRIMINALISED !
Answer: Something else, a hybrid of 7 & 8.
First, the hypothetical is a school. So, neither author fired.
The rest of us can make choices as well, on our own. One choice is not to hire. Another choice might be privately shunning the individual, and avoiding any kind of contact. A third choice might be to help the author broadcast their POV far and wide, ala Libsoftiktok.
Lucky for him, but Machaiavelli died in 1527 before The Prince was published in 1532, making him immune to retaliation.
The advice in The Prince is still valid today. It presents the necessary policies to promote peace and stability, even if those policies are inhumane. The bitter part of the truth is that stability and humanity conflict.
Machiavelli should be celebrated in free-speech circles because he stands almost alone in calling out inconvenient truths that challenge our humanity.
Machiavelli should be celebrated in free-speech circles because he stands almost alone in calling out inconvenient truths that challenge our humanity.
“Machiavelli should be celebrated in free-speech circles because he stands almost alone in calling out inconvenient truths that xxxxxxxxx describe our humanity.”
FTFY
The interesting thought experiment is reality, as the Washington Post now reports on freedom of speech in Israel: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/12/israel-free-speech-arrests-hamas/
Earlier today — to the surprise of no-one — Israel announced that it intends to (quoting Netanyahu) perpetually maintain “total security control” (aka occupy) Gaza and continues to “actively defend” the portion (the Golan Heights) of Syria that Israel previously invaded. These announcements come after Israel successfully shelled a UN office in Gaza and ordered the International Red Cross to refrain from sharing images and information.
These Ham-Ass Terrorist supporters at Hah-vud, Columbia, NYU, UNC Chapel-Hill (when will it be changed to “Mosque-Hill”?) Berkley, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, are the “Our Bettors” Coach Sandusky blathers about daily replacing us Klingers.
Unfortunately, he may be right
about the, “Replacement” part anyway
Frank
It would depend on the whether the speaker and supporters of the speaker are willing to play by the rules. One who claims free speech protection must grant it to others. For example, not grab their flags or take down their posters. If pro-Hamas speakers may justify terrorism, pro-Israel speakers may justify the IDF killing Gazan civilians. The administration, faculty, and other students also have free speech to publicly condemn the speaker. Rabbi Meir Kahane and Dr. M.T. Mehdi were willing to play by the rules and debated each other. The former even had a sense of humor. When he came on stage for one television debate, he hugged the latter and exclaimed “Dr. Mehdi! How wonderful to see you in America!”
Moreover, in this case the line is very thin. Someone who justifies killing Israeli civilians can easily cross over to justifying violence against all “Zionists” (= Jews). In view of the wave of antisemitic violence gripping the world, revisions of the “clear and present danger” and “intimidation” doctrines is also in order.
Law is not mathematics. Each generation of judges must decide on a case-by-case basis according to the needs of the generation.
There are comments and speech, then there are different comments and speech. The teacher who found the murders et. al. “thrilling” should be fired. The view that it is right and proper to do such, shall we say incivilities, is for me, beyond the pale.
Supporting Hamas’ views, within limits should be fine. Encouraging genocide is not fine, and should be beyond acceptable conduct for a professor, law student, and others.
Just as Free Speech is limited by not allowing for the speech that would encourage the violent overthrow of the government, or the speech that would incite violence, restricts American Free Speech, there is no reason it should also not stand as a standard for restricting foreign students, professors, and others, even at the risk or deportation, speech, when it crosses this sort of line.
Despite my dislike of the vile incidents that created this present situation, asking for Justice is not the best call. People may get the Justice they want, but what will they do when they need Mercy? Who will there be to answer that call, when all they have sought and cried for is Justice?
It seems useful, in light of the conversation above, to note that the International Court of Justice already considered the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons. Once you get past the obvious “the threat or use of nuclear weapons is illegal if it breaks this legal provision” parts, the key conclusion is that:
“the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law; However, in view of the current state of international law, and of the elements of fact at its disposal, the Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defence, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advisory_opinion_on_the_Legality_of_the_Threat_or_Use_of_Nuclear_Weapons
“seems useful, in light of the conversation above, to note that the International Court of Justice already considered the legality”
Snort. Useful!!!!
Since, you raised it, one thing that bothers me about all the “war crimes” talk is that in many cases, there is no clear answer as to what is a war crime. In US law, this would never pass muster under Due Process, which requires for criminal law that there be a clear statement of what actions are criminal.
How can anyone possible be prosecuted for something that the ICC cannot agree on whether it violates international law or not.
(Of course, SCOTUS has ignored this principle itself. See United States v. O’Hagan, 521 U.S. 642 (1997))
I vote option 1 — because the proposal directly targets civilians.
But I would not sanction someone who advocates a disarming strike against the troops or weapons of an aggressor country, even though such a strike will certainly kill lots of civilians too.
The moral difference between terrorism and war is all about the shooter’s intent.
I generally agree with Professor Volokh both that the proper rules of war in the modern total war age are matters up for discussion.
I also strongly disagree with the idea that the same opinion can be simultaneously perfectly reasonable for discussion in one academic field but completely off the wall crazy in another. Such differences suggest that the judgements involved should be interpreted as statements about the academic departments’ respectice prejudices, not statements about the opinions’ merits. For first amendment purposes, an opinion reasonable in any academic field is reasonable in all.
I don’t think a theologian attempting to publish in an astronomy journal is a remotely fair example. The theologian’s opinion is on an obviously different subject matter from the astronomers. But questions of possible practical consequences are always relevant to discussions of law and ethics. So Professor Volokh’s example, the paper discussing the potential consequences of direct nuclear weapons targeting as a matter of game-theory-based strategy, is obviously very relevant to discussions of the legality and ethics of direct targetting. If law-and-ethics academics say it isn’t, they are just being close-minded and aren’t entitled to any deference from the judiciary.
But then again, I was perfectly willing to defend the professor who argued that pedophila should be treated more as a mental health issue rather than as a strictly criminal matter. This argument has been made on many other matters, such as drug addiction, sometimes successfully. The professor might be wrong, but just because other people don’t like his opinion and feel strongly about it doesn’t make that so.
“IDF Protects 50,000 Palestinians Fleeing Northern Gaza; Coordinates Safety For Those Evacuating Hospital”
https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-idf-protects-50000-palestinians-fleeing-northern-gaza-coordinates-safety-for-those-evacuating-hospital
Man, those Jews really, really don’t know how to commit genocide, do they?
Of course, the fellow travelers around here will say it’s all part of their diabolical plot to appear to save Palestinians, even while they really want to kill them.
I’m not quite in the ‘they’re committing genocide’ camp, but the forced movement of populations isn’t dispositive.
Plus it’s ethnic cleansing.
We can’t make that judgment until we see if the displaced will be allowed to return after the war is over.
If you like, but if you’re not doing genocide right by displacing them, you can certainly be doing ethnic cleansing.
You just again assumed an outcome in the future that you can’t know will happen.
Uhhhh, I think we can take a stab at that now:
Q: When Israel pulled out of Gaza, in 2005, it also closed down settlements in the region. This was under the Sharon government. And there’s been talk by some settlers since October 7th about the need to repopulate Gaza with settlements. What are your feelings about what should happen with Gaza?
A: “Right now, I’m on my way to a TV interview where I’m going to speak about our movement’s efforts to return to Gaza, the entire Gaza, and build settlements.”
Q: Where should the Palestinians in Gaza go?
A: To Sinai, to Egypt, to Turkey.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-extreme-ambitions-of-west-bank-settlers
I would love to see Turkey assert some leadership and muslim brotherhood by taking in palestinian refugees. 🙂
The biggest question, post war, will be: What to do with an entire society stewed in a toxic brew of Judeocide.
“What to do with an entire society”
Oh? What’s your suggestion? Daniella Weiss has shared her thoughts— how about you?
What an extremist from the settler community thinks ought to happen does not allow to me to conclude what will happen.
“Extremist”
I agree it sounds extreme.
https://hashiloach.org.il/israels-decisive-plan/
This person is the finance minister— also dismissible as an extremist?
Yes. His extremist party has only 7 MKs. Sometimes a parliamentary system ends with an extremist cabinet member.
Oh please explain further the nuances of parliamentary government.
Let me ask you this: any cabinet members on record committed to Gazans returning to their homes at any point?
The future is uncertain, of course. But sometimes you have to take people at their word.
“But sometimes you have to take people at their word.”
Yes. Like when Hamas says they want to eliminate Israel, they mean it. And act on it.
Oh, and guess what’s a popular work in Hamas-controlled Gaza?
https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-772894
Deplorable, but not relevant. Unless… you bring it up to justify this view:
“Q: Where should the Palestinians in Gaza go?
A: To Sinai, to Egypt, to Turkey.”
In which case I take it you disagree with JoshR?
I take Smotrich at his word. And no, I am not aware of any cabinet minister making that commitment, Nonetheless, we cannot yet conclude what will happen. Patience grasshopper.
“Deplorable, but not relevant.”
But it is relevant. The Palestinian territories have been incubators of the most vile Jew hatred on the planet. Mostly in UN run schools. paid for by Western money. Apparently you think the status quo ante should continue.
“Apparently you think the status quo ante should continue.”
You know nothing of my views, because I have expressed none.
I am questioning this statement:
“We can’t make that judgment until we see if the displaced will be allowed to return after the war is over.”
While technically true (the best kind of true!) my original comment was that we can take a guess on what will happen based on various public statements by people in positions of power. I then provided a few.
As is typical, you responded by pointing out bad actions by Hamas and ascribing views to me without justification.
Did you have anything else besides the point to add?
And even though you don’t deserve it, I WILL in fact grace you with a substantive view.
“Apparently you think the status quo ante should continue.”
No. I believe the opposite. The status quo ante cannot— and will not— continue.
Now I will ask you the same thing I asked CXY above.
“The Palestinian territories have been incubators of the most vile Jew hatred on the planet.”
Do you agree with Ms. Weiss?
“I take Smotrich at his word. And no, I am not aware of any cabinet minister making that commitment, Nonetheless, we cannot yet conclude what will happen. Patience grasshopper.”
Ok, fair enough
“Do you agree with Ms. Weiss?”
In a word, no. She is someone who thinks the messianic era can be brought in by militarism.
Nor do I agree with Smotrich, in everything. But he is correct about one thing: the chase after the two-state solution has been a colossal failure, and continuing to pursue it is the definition of insanity.
“if the displaced will be allowed to return after the war is over.”
So… You are predicting yes?
Don’t worry, it’s just a “concept”
https://www.timesofisrael.com/intelligence-ministry-concept-paper-proposes-transferring-gazans-to-egypts-sinai/amp/
From Jabalia to Rafah / the Gaza Strip shall be Israeli!
Q: You said, “Settlement is the way to return to Zion”?
A: Yes. It’s the end of the dispersion and the beginning of the revival of the Jewish nation in this homeland.
Q: What are the borders of that Jewish nation?
A: The borders of the homeland of the Jews are the Euphrates in the east and the Nile in the southwest.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-extreme-ambitions-of-west-bank-settlers
I addressed the general question (who should be free to do what) here:
https://reason.com/volokh/2023/11/03/nate-silvers-free-speech-is-in-trouble/?comments=true#comment-10303111
(The suggested “thought experiment” doesn’t change my answers.)
My personal beliefs on morality are close to 5, but I would come down on 8 for “what should be consequences”. Our moral systems differ, and if we punish people for speaking about what the better approaches are, then we don’t have full and robust debate of it.