A sharp real world rejoinder...

.. from the streets of Iraq, to those who might posit that philosophy, and particularly ethics, are marginal, near irrelevant, and/or cloistered pursuits.

I point to the following from a Los Angeles Times piece on the death of an American Military Ethicist, and West Point Professor, in Iraq - a death apparently brought on by an irresolvable collision between moral imperatives and the real world predominance of cold hard cash in unfettered capitalism.

"'Despite his intelligence, his ability to grasp the idea that profit is an important goal for people working in the private sector was surprisingly limited,' wrote Lt. Col. Lisa Breitenbach. 'He could not shift his mind-set from the military notion of completing a mission irrespective of cost, nor could he change his belief that doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do should be the sole motivator for businesses.'

One military officer said he felt Westhusing had trouble reconciling his ideals with Iraq's reality. Iraq 'isn't a black-and-white place,' the officer said. 'There's a lot of gray.'"

While some may see his suicide as driven by some psychological fault, his inability to sacrifice consistent ethics for economic or political expediency, I am heartened to some degree that, apparently, in the US Military I had once been proud to serve in, unlike the Israeli scholar who visited during Derek Parfit's portion of the syllabus of one of my current graduate courses in philosophy, some Americans, even when faced with the harsh realities of the MidEastern political and social landscape, cannot abide by a simple calculus whereby the ultimate or more immediate motivations of police officers are irrelevant, so long as they "get the bad guys off the streets."

Sometimes, the brutal force of economics, and reality, may ask us to sacrifice too much of the core values that make us ethically decent or laudable individuals, or even too much of our central moral tenets as a society. When Colin Powell, Wesley Clark, and others have argued against military and political policies (i.e.: pre-emptive war without imminent threat, prosecution of a war with reference to a real world jus ad bellum, and sacrificing elementary ethical principles in the pursuit of victory or profit) that run counter to our supposed core American principles, those of us who, when serving had internalized the ethical constructs or truly just behavior understood them as not simply speaking to a loss to the image of the United States and its military in the eyes of the world, nor simply to the dangers of retaliation by one's military adversaries such policies might bring about, some of us who had served, or whom serve today, understood the danger inherent to a post-Vietnam officer-corps steeped in a belief in the inviolability of honorable and ethical behavior when posited against empirical expediency. The toll extracted is not purely theoretical or academic. but an incoherence, a schizophrenia if you will, that threatens to rend the or unseat our firmest convictions and/or the very ethical underpinnings that make our society and/or our individual actions just.

What many who have not served in the post-Vietnam American military often fail to understand is that the spirit of ethical rightness and moral imperative, that drove John Kerry as a young veteran, and countless others who served, to oppose the tactics and prosecution of the war in Vietnam, so personally and vehemently that they felt incontrovertibly compelled to literally throw back their ribbons and medals at the Pentagon, had become, to a great extent part of the ethical fabric of the American Officer Corps. When placed in that context, the calls of Marine Veteran and conservative Democratic Congressman John Murtha, following a recent trip to Iraq where he met with senior military officers, to withdraw from Iraq or risk untold damage, was not simply the expression of marginal or peripheral qualms of a man worried about the obvious human and financial costs to our military of continuing along our current path in Iraq. No, his voice was that of the proverbial canary in the coal mine, warning of an ethical incoherence so deeply troubling that it threatens to: as began to happen during Vietnam, leave our military, both as individuals and communally, adrift upon a nihilistic existential and amoral sea, with no ethical rudder nor anchor. To accede to no greater guiding principle other than might IS right. Such a disjunction between beliefs we internalize as essential to our concept of self and membership in a just society, is far more destructive to our military than open public debate of the Iraq war might be to the morale of our military community, and will bear poisonous fruit, both within our military community and across our society more generally, for years to come.

As Albert Camus and the French nation learned so painfully in Algeria, and we should recall as part of the legacy of our own communal experience in IndoChina, philosophy, and more particularly ethics, is not simply some sheltered esoteric or academic pursuit practiced by geeks and gadflies, with time to waste, from the parapets of some "ivory tower." It is not simply some sort of disconnected debate over how many angels can stand upon the head of a pin. It is an imperative pursuit central to our very concept of who we are as individuals, a civilization, a race, or our planet.



Keith

"Just some guy," caretaker of the Multiverse's largest EPSON printer User Community (highly recommended by Vogon Poets and MegaDodo Publications), at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EPSON_Printers/
and the Multiverse's largest Canon printer User Community at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Canon-printers
"For the rest of you out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together guys"