Re: Divine command and moral value in Judaism

On Mar 30, 11:04 am, flav...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On 30-Mar-2007, "Eliyahu" <lro...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:



On Mar 30, 8:45 am, Joel Shurkin <jshur...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2007-03-30 01:21:01 -0400, flav...@xxxxxxxxxxx said:

On 29-Mar-2007, "(PeteCresswell)" <x...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Per Patricia Heil:
they have disobeyed the law, but only after proper
procedure is followed. Read Tractate Sanhedrin in Mishnah to see
how
that
works. Do you think it can possibly be moral to kill somebody off
the
cuff?

Where would that put carpet bombing or the firebombing of Tokyo?

Most likely under self-defense.

That's really a stretch.

Then try the military version of the legal doctrine of necessity. In
retrospect, it may not seem as necessary as it did then, but we have a
different perspective and the advantage of hindsight to help us
along.

Japan showed absolutely no signs of surrender.
Bombing them - and doing it again when they STILL refused to surrender
probably saved as many of our citizens, if not more, than it killed of
theirs.
Yeah, go ahead & tell me how immoral that is, & I'll reply that a state
has an *obligation* to protect its citizens, and we did NOT start that war!

As I've said in the past, it's not always an easy decision when
determining where to draw the lines in wartime. There are clearly
some things that none of us would countenance in the prosecution of a
war, such as germ warfare, targeting of elementary schools and
nurseries, machine-gunning streams of elderly refugees, etc.. The
firebombing of Tokyo is one of those things that gets pretty close to
the line, if not indeed crossing it. We knew when we attacked with
incindiary bombs that the ensuing inferno would kill children, women,
the elderly, as well as affecting the ability of Japan to produce war
materiel, and I'm uncertain that we made the correct choice there.

Eliyahu

.

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