[lit-ideas] Re: On the prospect of World Peace
- From: wokshevs@xxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Phil Enns <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 16:01:48 -0230
Also interesting. There seems to be two ways of looking at things here:
1. X is evil but it is also justified (morally?)
2. If X is justifiable (morally) then X as course of action or policy cannot be
evil (morally wrong). For nothing that is morally wrong can be morally
justifiable. (That's part of the idea that moral categories conceptually
originate in universal and necessary epistemic conditions of argumentation.)
"2." makes sense to me. "1." seems very strange, indeed, self-contradictory.
I confess I may not understand the concept of "evil" that Phil's vocabulary of
thinking/reasoning is riding on and, hence, I end up misunderstanding his
claims. (That word seems to inhabit the same language as the word "sin.") I can
only understand "evil" as meaning moral impermissibility or moral wrongness. To
say that Eichmann, for example, was evil, is simply to say that he was a moral
failure. And that itself means that for an authoritarian personality, epistemic
conditions of rational justification and action are ignored, or perhaps not
even recognized at all.
Walter C. Okshevsky
Memorial U
Quoting Phil Enns <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
> Lawrence Helm wrote:
>
> "Just wars are not evil. Just wars are necessary to oppose evil."
>
> I am not sure if Lawrence is intentionally referencing the Just War
> tradition, but if he is, he is wrong. The well-established tradition of
> just war is that all war is evil but under very specific conditions, war
> is justified. When confronted by great evil, it may be necessary to
> engage in the evil of war, but not without the greatest reflection
> regarding intentions and means.
>
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Phil Enns
> Toronto, ON
>
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