A list of examples of reversed moral criterion: civilian-military:
|
|
Patriotism can reverse standard moral criteria. Consider the way we ordinarily think about governments that take professional military personnel with professional military equipment designed for fighting state militaries, and use them to target civilians, people who are not professional military and who don't have the equipment of a professional military, but have to use scrounged or improvised weapons if they want to fight back. Ordinarily, we say that this unequal relationship of military-versus-civilian disgraces the military side and adds merit to the side of the gutsy civilians. That is, ordinarily we say that the fact that one side is real military and is using real military weapons and the other side is just civilians with makeshift equipment, gives extra moral credit to the civilian side. In Iraq we see exactly the opposite: the Iraqi resistance's lack of proper weapons counts against the Iraqi resistance morally; they are even more evil, even more sinister, because they don't have real military equipment. Use of bombs from airplanes against people who have no military is nonviolent, not disgusting, perfectly normal. But use of swords, homemade bombs, oxcarts, or car bombs that require the user to have the courage to die, the use of these improvised weapons, the weapons of a civilian person who has no military of his or her own but is being attacked by a real military, makes a person even more evil, more sinister, than they would otherwise be. There is absolutely nothing wrong with flying a remote-controlled airplane to spy on and kill Iraqis from the safety of a Las Vegas base, and killing Iraqis from the cockpit of a sophisticated bomber jet is an act of positive sainthood. But for a civilian Iraqi to use a homemade bomb to try to fight back against the awesome might of a military force that is targeting his or her fellow citizens in their own home is simply disgusting, evidence of an evil so great that the people who would use such homemade equipment are just animals, not human at all. Rather than counting against the US, the fact that the US troops are military and the Iraqis they are fighting are civilians actually counts against the Iraqis. |
patriotized morality
