Re: Concept of suicidal bombers.
Originally posted by Raha
Suppose you are loving husband and father, but you are very poor and unable to provide for your family. Also you believe in God. Somebody comes to you with an offer: Take this bomb, carry it to the spot X and let it explode when many unbelievers are around. You will go to Heaven and your family will be well in exchange. According to what you were taught, there is nothing wrong in killing infidels. The only thing that matters is your own life. How much value does it have? How much value has the promise of ?better? future for your wife and children? Also - what is the value of you as a father? As a husband?
I for one agree with Searle that all functions are observer relative, including the function of a father, and so I will not venture into what my subjective definition of fatherhood is.
Regarding the killing of infidels, however, I believe there is an objective claim to be made. The father places a value on the infidels' lives. More specifically, he places more value on his family members' lives than he does on the lives of the infidels'. The infidel's place more value on their own live's than they place on the family of their would-be killer. While both value systems are subjective, an objective deduction can still be made here.
All* conscious agents will place a higher subjective value on their own life than they place on the lives of others. As a direct consequence of this fact, it benefits all conscious agents to adopt a policy inwhich each conscious agent is the judge of his life and his life only.
*Exceptions abound such as people willing to risk their lives for loved ones, or people in such depressions that they contemplate suicide, but even in those cases it benefits them not to have someone else prohibiting their activity by judging the value of their lives from outside of their own subjective experience of it.
By killing the "infidels" he is committing behavior which he would not permit someone else to commit against him or his family. If he has any love at all for his family, he would not engage in activity which would bring someone else (a family member of one of the infidels) to engage in the same activity towards them.
In short, he kills the infidels, the infidels' family members hunt down his family after he is already dead.
Now you say,"Hey, there's no guarantee that revenge will be attempted." This is very true. The family members of the dead infidels could decide not to retaliate. That would be an example of an act of non-violence. The same non-violence which could cut the violence at its root, might instead stop it seven generations later, or might have prevented it from the get go if the father had decided not to blow up the infidels.
At any given moment you are engaged in activity even if all it is is breathing and thinking. All activities (I believe) can be categorized into two bins, non-violent, violent. In this sense Hitler was only committing violence when he actually pulled the trigger at someone. He was not committing violence in his sleep nor while taking a shit nor while sipping tie. Every conscious agent is responsible for his own conduct, so Hitler didn't kill the jews at the camps, the individual soldiers did. But even they were not engaged in violent activity while playing cards or shouting.
It is always peaceful activity that "saves the day" when violent activity has begun.
Lets say that this chain of violence
does actually continue for
seven generations and finally someone decides not to reap anymore revenge. The same peaceful, non-violent behavior that is NECESSARY to stop the violence (whether its seven generations away or two days away), would have also prevented it to begin with.
You can be peaceful now or you can postpone it for AFTER the violence, but in either case, at any given collection of moments, you're either peaceful or your violent and the violence stops when the peace starts and the peace stops when the violence starts.
If you choose violence then you better not even give a shit about your family, because you are putting then at risk.
If you (and everyone else for that matter) choose peace, then no one would have to worry about their families again, cuz there'd be nothing to worry about.
SIDE-NOTE: if the world actually operated the way Nietzsche wanted it to, he'd never have lived long enough to write his works, cuz some tougher guy would have killed him long before. If all the world was a bunch of Ubermen, then it would be a short lived world, cuz they'd all kill each other in their amoral, blind ambition.
You can't argue with the fact that non-violence benefits EVERYONE
