Saturday, August 13, 2005
Define this!
I've always been fascinated by words, especially those that don't mean what they mean, or just mean whatever you feel like. One great example of this is "natural." What does "natural" mean? Or, quasi-related, though more specific, what about "organic"? Organic has a mildly specific meaning in chemistry, but what about foods? It has come to mean something fairly arbitrary when it comes to food-labelling. Organic food labellers constantly accuse each other of mislabelling things as "organic." What does it really mean? What good is a label if it means whatever the labeller wants it to?
Anyway, that's old ground, probably tread thousands of times by people who actually have a stake in the issue. Here's a thought prompted by a Globe letter: What's a war crime? When we complain about war crimes what are we talking about? Despite the broad term, crime is actually suprisingly well-defined. We say something is a crime when it is against some law. It doesn't have to be a government law, of course, but there is some standard that we expect things to live up to, and when they do not, we say that it is a crime.
What standard do we apply when it comes to war crimes? I'm not asking where do we draw the line between killing people in huge numbers and killing people in huge numbers during the commission of a war crime, as that's a rather vague personal judgment that can't really be argued. Instead, I'm asking what motivates us to try to draw the line.
While I'm more interested in other folks' opinions on this, here are some of my wild, unsupported ideas as to what factors go into drawing that line.
1. Standards of how human beings should treat each other.
2. Necessity of an action towards accomplishing a goal.
2a. Morality of the goal motivating the action.
3. The civilian/military distinction.
While I can see the importance of 1 and 2/2a, the civilian/military distinction seems oddly placed. It certainly does factor into what people consider war crimes, but why? Are the military folks cool with the whole "getting shot" thing while civilians are not? The line between the two is not exactly bright. The military sits on the back of the civilian population. When is targetting civilians to collapse the military acceptable, when is it not, and why can we draw that line?
Just musing. Input preferred.
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