Moral Calculus
I took three semesters of calculus in college, from which I learned three important lessons:
- Isaac Newton was a genius
- Numbers make me cry
- If my life ever depends on calculus skills, I will die
I purged all of that toxic shit out of my mind a couple minutes after the last exam of my last class, but nevertheless come away with some tiny seeds of admiration for calculus: the precision, the ingenuity, the satisfying sounds that mathematical gears make when they meet and mesh and crank out answers. Calculus kills ambiguity like Raid kills roaches.
Not so for moral calculus. Notwithstanding CS Lewis’ claim that humanity has a built-in moral sense for Right and Wrong, that we instinctively know bad things when we see them, there’s an awful lot of carefully thought-out, rigidly considered, meticulously argued bullshit out there in support of various brands of sin and murder.
The mind is a rationalization machine, remarkably versatile. It can takes facts and organize them into conclusions — or it can flip the process around and assemble facts around predetermined conclusions. This isn’t as easy as just making stuff up: fact-based lies are like found art, carefully chosen tatters of truth Frankensteined together into some horrible perversion of reality.
There’s a lot of this in the various justifications for the war in Iraq, naturally. But recently you find the best specimens of this degenerate art in the opinions of people who take the side of Israel in the recent war in Lebanon. William Arkin’s column from today’s Post is a fairly typical example of the breed, though perhaps a little more contorted than most:
So here is the truth: Israel did not do anything close to what it was capable of doing. Hezbollah did all it could.
Because of Israel’s means, thousands of apartments are gone, selected and meticulously excised by a high-tech military force. Only a very short drive from the neighborhoods of southern Beirut though, you are back to bustling boulevards; a few neighborhoods over and there are luxury stores and five star hotels. Beyond the “Hezbollah†neighborhoods, the city is normal. Electricity flows just as it did before the fighting. The Lebanese sophisticates are glued to their cell phones. Even an international airport that was bombed is reopened.
An accurate reading of what happened and what south Beirut means might produce a different picture. Israel had the means to impart greater destruction, but that does not mean intrinsically that it is more brutal. If Hezbollah had bigger rockets or more accurate ones, it would have done not only the same, but undoubtedly more.
So the argument, as far as I can tell, is that Israel is not really at fault here, because they didn’t kill everyone. Hezbollah managed to murder far fewer innocent Israelis, but are more evil because they couldn’t have possibly killed more. This isn’t just a “down is up” argument. This is more “down is cranberries.” Just completely batshit insane.
There aren’t any answers here. You can’t flip to the back of your moral calculus textbook to check your solutions. Everything is contingent, nothing is absolute. Fine, granted. Nevertheless, there are a couple of questions that have the same answer 99% of the time.
- When is it ok to kill innocent people?
- When is it ok to scatter unexploded cluster bombs throughout villages and farmlands?
- When it is ok to destroy the infrastructure of an entire country in an effort to spook a couple hundred terrorists?
This stuff is pretty clear-cut, which is why the people writing these columns have to twist themselves into such interesting and alarming shapes when they try to argue against them.
But they keep trying, bless their souls. You’ve got to admire that.
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