Bravo Damocles. A wonderfully eloquent argument. What a shame it's utter bollox as usual. The judges would cringe at that sort of thing in a middle school debating competition.
Firstly, I never for one moment claimed that there was a price worth paying. I simply looked beyond the headline, read the source document and pointed out that the headline was hysterical.
Asking me, like Abraham, to murder my own child in the pursuit of world peace is completely nonsensical and I've no intention of justifying it with an answer. But I'll ask you a slightly less nonsensical question. Suppose we didn't take on terrorists and an unarmed drone watched a number of known intelligence targets have a meeting in a crowded area that later you found led to a massive attack on a UK target that led to hundreds or thousands of innocent deaths, including members of your family or friends. Would the fact that we didn't act, thereby avoiding the risk of killing innocent people, make you feel better?
It must be lovely to live in the comfy little world of moral certainties that you and Josh Blue appear to live in. Sadly the real world isn't like that and there are numerous shades of grey.
I also work in IT and work on large scale system implementations. When we test those they produce defects but we have to take a view about whether we can implement with hose defects because, if we waited until we'd eliminated every single one, we'd never implement the system. Or to put the question in human terms, in 2011 nearly 2,000 people were killed in road accidents. Some of those will have been the primary cause of their own deaths but the majority were presumably innocent. Should we therefore stop people driving because there is a very real risk that innocent people will die?
Or in WWII we bombed targets of strategic and tactical importance in Germany and occupied Europe. Civilians died as a result of these raids so, in your little morally certain world, should we not ave done that?
