I don't post this as a dilemma or anything; I just feel its interesting. Its a set of quotes from the Alinsky book 'Rules for Radicals', which is often held up by conservative US bloggers as somehow related to the community organising past of their President. I think they are an excellent practical statement of political realism and political ethics - at least because they DO get explicit about them. Got it from this site :http://rightwingnews.com/2010/05/the-best-quotes-from-saul-alinskys-rules-for-radicals/

I think that is interesting, too, agree with a Alinsky, except his views on ethics:

Quote:
The fifth rules of the ethics of means and ends is that concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa. To the man of action the first criterion in determining which means to employ is to assess what means are available. Reviewing and selecting available means is done on a straight utilitarian basis -- will it work? Moral questions may enter when one chooses among equally effective alternate means. -- P.32
Quote:
The seventh rule of ethics and means and ends is that generally success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics. The judgment of history leans heavily on the outcome of success and failure; it spells the difference between the traitor and the patriotic hero. There can be no such thing as a successful traitor, for if one succeeds he becomes a founding father. P.34
Quote:
The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical. -- P.35
Quote:
The tenth rule of the ethics of rules and means is that you do what you can with what you have and clothe it in moral arguments. ...the essence of Lenin's speeches during this period was "They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet." And it was. -- P.36-37

It doesn't seem that harming innocent people because the ends are noble can ever be justified. Donald Rumsfeld referred to the thousands of innocent people killed and maimed during the "shock and awe" on Iraq as "collateral damage", but he probably wouldn't like it if his wife and children became collateral damage during the successful assassination of a suspected terrorist leader by CIA or Mossad agents. Thus, Rumsfeld, and Alinsky, are probably willing to abide by a double standard instead of the time-honored Golden Rule of reciprocity.

Well lets test an example.
You are a soldier on an anti-aircraft battery in London in WWII. The sirens go off, you are scrambled to your gun position and take post on the firing seat. A bomber heaves into the searchlights close above you, its doors opening. You take aim but do not fire.

You tell the rest of your gun crew that the gun may drop UXO shells and shrapnel on innocent Londoners if it misses the bomber, and "It doesn't seem that harming innocent people because the ends are noble can ever be justified".

Ethical fail.

Can we say that "collateral damage" from "friendly fire" is an acceptable consequence of self-defense where the defenders calculate the risk of greater loss of life? I'm not sure how this would square with the Golden Rule. How about retaliation to prevent further aggression? The Timothy McVeigh case comes to mind. McVeigh said that he bombed a federal building housing FBI and ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearm) agents in retaliation for the massacre of religiously incorrect men, women, and children in Waco, Texas; and that the children killed in a day care center within the building were unintentional "collateral damage". Does retaliation square with the Golden Rule of reciprocity? If so, how about collateral damage during retaliation? Could abolitionist John Brown's raid on a Federal Ammunition Depot be considered ethical?

Then there is the ethical dilemma of fighter pilots shooting down bombers.
The disabled bomber is going to crash somewhere, possibly killing many innocent people.
There is also the rain of fired cases falling from the sky and they are capable of killing a person who doesn't have head protection; not much chance but the possibility exists.

Collateral damage can take many forms.

Collateral damage and unintended consequences. When we had civil disorder and riots here in 2006, those demonstrating would put women and children in the front line so if there was a violent response they would get good press. I don't consider that either collateral damage or unintended consequences. It is, the end justifies the means.

When considering collateral damage or unintended consequences, I feel one must consider the likely outcomes. For example, for the police to chase a fleeing criminal in a vehicle going at a high rate of speed into a heavily congested area means that someone being seriously injured or killed is very high. In a less heavily congested area, less risk.

When one decides to remove DDT from the market place, the millions of deaths from malaria are so certain I can't consider it anything but an intended consequence. The end justifies the means.

Obviously, there’s collateral damage, and then there’s collateral damage. Not all collateral damage is the same. Consider:

1. ChrisPer’s example above of the anti-aircraft gun in the blitz. If the operation goes wrong and you miss the bomber, there is a chance that the stray missile could injure or kill a noncombatant. Even if you hit the bomber, there is a small but non-zero chance that the falling fragments could harm a non-combatant. However this is very much not what you want; nor is it the expected outcome of what you are doing. it can only result from mischance.

2. You attack a building which accommodates both combatants and non-combatants. Your motive is to injure the combatants, but your mode of attack poses the same threat to everyone in the building, and you are aware of this. Your intention is to attack everyone in the building, but your motive is to kill only particular people in the building.

3. An attack in which bringing about noncombatant deaths is part of the strategy. You want noncombatants to die, because you think this is an effective way to pressure the authorities to do what you want them to do.

Tom Palvern invites us to consider Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma bombing as an example of no. 2 above. That’s how McVeigh himself presented it, and is possibly how he saw it, but a lot of people would say that the civilian casualties were likely part of his strategy, and so the Oklahoma bombing is really an example of no. 3. I think what this points to is the fact that the lines between these three categories can be fairly blurred.

That doesn’t mean, though, that they aren’t distinct categories, and that we can’t find clear examples of each. As a clear example of no. 2, for instance, we can point to the US assassination in 2006 of Iraqi Al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi by bombing his home. Predictably, everyone in the house died, including not only Zarqawi but his wife, their baby son, a five-year-old girl and several others.

As ChrisPer’s example illustrates, I think most people would say that noncombatant deaths of type no. 1 above can be justified. I think we’d hedge that around with qualifications; you should do what you can to minimise the risk to others; the risk that you can’t avoid needs to be justified by the moral value of what you are trying to achieve, etc, etc. But, basically, risking noncombatant lives in this way can be justified, and on occasion even morally required.

Equally, we’ say that it would be very hard to justify attacks of type 3 above, where we deliberately target innocent noncombatants in order to put pressure on others.

It’s in type 2 that things get very murky. If we consider the bombing of Zarqawi’s house justified, would we consider it justifiable to bomb, say, a civilian airline flight on which he was known to be one of the passengers? If not, what’s the difference?

Talk about murky, can anyone say Machiavelli? Who paid people to foment violence in Kyrgystan? Could be the Brits since they perfected the Machiavellian arts? The Oliver North types in the KGB, CIA, and Mossad lie awake nights only dreaming that they can come up with schemes as nifty as their 007 counterparts. But the Brits don't have a dog in this fight while the Russkies and the Yanquis do. Who's going to follow the money, and who will we believe?

Tom, er... huh?

I think the point here is well made - in war you have to consider the consequences and try to minimise harm to innocents.

However, the 100,000 claimed dead Iraqis are mostly the consequence of terrorism, deliberately killed by illegal combatants. The deaths of the illegal combatants themselves, perhaps 20,000 of the total is a net social benefit, because they demonstrated the intention to keep killing.

Of course, the Lancet figure of 100,000 was itself highly questionable, proven wrong later and was specifically published by Lancet to provide a political benefit against Bush.


And I specifically reject any argument by Timothy McVeigh that frames his action other than as a crime. The overwrought terrorist mentality he brought to his actions is one of the best arguments around for pre-crime interventions.

Somewhat off topic but has anyone seen footage of celebrations in some parts of the world where the discharge of firearms into the air seems to be an accepted part of the event. Is there something about the law of gravity that these guys don't understand? Have there ever been any estimates of the collateral damage done by these events?

I don’t know about “some parts of the world”; in one form or another loosing off a few rounds to express one’s feelings seems to be pretty common wherever guns and high spirits coincide. It’s called a feu de joie and, if there’s a French term for it, we know it must be respectable. It takes quite a formal shape in the artillery salutes fired to celebrate royal accessions or births, or with which visiting sovereigns are saluted. We also see it in the volley fired over a soldier’s grave – though perhaps joie isn’t quite the word in that instance. The artillery salutes are fired with blanks of course, but the small arms volleys not always so.

Can people be injured or killed by a falling bullet? You might think that if you fire a bullet up into the air until it loses velocity, and it then starts to fall and accelerate downwards, by the time it gets back to ground level it will have accelerated more or less to its starting velocity/ But no. The falling bullet stops accelerating when it reaches terminal velocity, which happens when the acceleration due to gravity is exactly counteracted by the frictional resistance of the air. It never approaches anything like its starting muzzle velocity on its upwards journey. The question is, can it approach a velocity which can kill or injure someone?

You’re not the first to wonder that, PhilT. The US army has done research into this. Ever desirous of increasing the sum of human wisdom, they fired a bunch of .30 bullets vertically into the air, measured their velocity on landing, and worked out given the weight of the bullets what punch they were packing. And, lo, they were packing a punch of about 30 foot-pounds. Please don’t ask me what a foot-pound is; it’s something they use in America to measure energy. For our purposes it’s enough to note that the US army specifies that its weapons need to be designed to deliver at least 60 foot-pounds per round, this being the amount of energy a round needs to have if it is reliably to disable the poor bugger that it hits.

The falling .30 bullet only has about half this energy, and so won’t necessarily kill or incapacitate you. But it could; it depends on where it hits you, and at what angle, and how lucky you are.

A bullet other than a .30 might of course have a different terminal velocity. A denser bullet will tend to have a higher terminal velocity. And a bullet fired at an angle, rather than vertically upwards, could still have a lateral velocity as well as a vertical one.

Do falling rounds, fired in exuberance, kill or injure people in real life? It seems they do. Apparently the charming folk custom you describe is traditionally observed in the US, or parts of it, at New Year’s Eve, and again on the evening of 4 July. A study in a Los Angeles major trauma hospital found that between 1985 and 1992 they treated 118 people for falling bullet injuries, of whom 38 died. The study classified a bullet wound as a falling bullet wound if it was consistent with being hit from above, and if neither the victim nor any witnesses reported either seeing any firearm or hearing any shot. It’s possible that some of the victims were lying; they may have had their reasons for not telling who shot them or why. But the point is there was a large spike in such injuries on 31 December and again on 4 July.

So, bottom line, you’d have to be unlucky to be killed or injured by a bullet fired in an exuberant display of joie de vivre. But sometimes people are unlucky.

I had a different part of the world in mind when I wrote that, I am surprised that such is legal in the U.S. This was the scene I had in mind, a former Iraqi leader now deceased, firing from a balcony overlooking a crowded square.
http://www.famouspictures.org/index.php?title=Saddam_Firing_Gun

I doubt that it is.


He could, I suppose, be firing a blank, though I wouldn't like to take odds on it.