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If they succeeded, they also would have perpetuated much good. With hindsight, we recognize that the evil could be unwound without immediate disaster; from their perspective, there were good reasons to suspect that wasn't possible. So they can fight to protect the good, and they can fight to forestall what they see as a worse evil. That's two understandable reasons. I can disagree with those reasons, even to the point of being willing to kill them over the dispute, without losing my understanding of their fundamentally honorable motivations, nor respecting those motivations. You should do the same.
Neither Rommel nor Lee thought they were fighting to perpetuate evil, and that was in fact a reasonable conclusion for them to draw, even if we are confident that their assessment was wrong. You don't seem to be able to comprehend how this could be, but that's how it was, as their contemporaries recognized.
Yes, it is a "both sides" argument, because no war I can think of has ever been a straightforward contest of Good vs Evil. If you believe that wars are commonly Good Guys vs Evil Guys, I'm not sure what to say to you, other than that your view is childish and naive in the extreme. Wars involve too many people acting in too many ways for too many motivations to shake out to simple "good vs evil" narratives, even when they involve remarkably evil acts on the part of their participants.
Why does this bother you?
War is part of the human experience. It has been a constant part of the human experience for all of observable history. It's one of the bedrock examples of how nothing in humans actually progresses, of how we are as we have always been as far back as the record goes. It's not a mistake, it's not straightforwardly avoidable, it's not some tragedy that we can or should eradicate through careful technocratic social engineering. Like death, it is an inevitability that one must understand and accept if anything in our experience and history is to make sense.
You seem to perceive war as something to be avoided at all costs, which makes you hate the people on the other side whom you see as forcing a conflict through their intransigence. I see it as a thing that happens, has happened before and will happen again, to be avoided if possible, and embraced if not. Your attitude leads to the sort of bitterness that perpetuates conflicts. Mine, I think, leads to durable peace. If you resent those who've fought you, how can you make peace with them?
What you are advocating is not some untested idea. We've tried it before, and the results are uniformly awful.
The instructive example here would be the Russian revolution, which systematically rejected the concept of honor or loyalty to existing structures, and resulted in the rule of highly concentrated evil lasting decades. The people who perpetrated its atrocities thought exactly as you do: "Do the right thing, be the good guys, and to hell with anything or anyone that gets in the way". They sacrificed everything to a core moral axiom, and created hideous atrocities thereby. Lee balanced competing principles against each other, and so committed no atrocities: he fought a war, lost, surrendered honorably, and helped secure the following peace.
Over and over again, you revolve back to the central idea of fixing everything by just being correct. The problem is that being correct is not easy, and sometimes is not possible but by luck. People are not good at figuring out what the right thing to do is, so telling them to just do the right thing will often result in them doing the wrong thing instead, with disastrous results.
Good men didn't, because war isn't evil.
I won't speak for Hlynka, but you are straightforwardly wrong in my case. I do not particularly value the right of blacks, women, or for that matter myself to vote, nor the right to vote in general. Miscegenation is not something my forebears two hundred years ago believed was wrong, my opinion of homosexuality is not different from theirs either, nor what constitutes fighting words. Not one of your listed examples is accurate. Cthulhu might swim left. I am pretty confident you do as well. I do not.
I think you misread the question. In this scenario, New York City is attempting to preserve the practice of abortion, and the Anti-abortion forces are about to bomb the city back to the stone age. My question is whether, even if I think abortion is wrong, I might nonetheless think that bombing New York City back to the stone age is not a good solution, to the point of being willing to defend a society I think is perpetuating serious evil, because the alternative seems worse.
As I understand it, your position is that I could in good conscience join in on the bombing of New York City, or I could stand aside and do nothing, but defending New York City would be straightforwardly evil; they've embraced and perpetuated evil, and they'll continue to do so if they aren't defeated, so fighting for them is unconscionable, correct?
Of course not, any more than the South is alone to blame. It takes two to fight.
And yet, even if I think Jack is morally right, I can still recognize that other people see it differently, without assuming that they are evil for doing so.
I'm responding to the current narrative on Lee, that he fought to perpetuate evil and was therefore evil himself. This is the narrative you're arguing for. If you aren't concerned with racism and the legacy of slavery, why do you care about Lee at all?
I care about Lee, because I consider the Civil War to be a foundational part of our national history. We should not have accepted slavery as part of our society. Having made the mistake of accepting it, allowing it to sink its roots deep into the nation, it seems inevitable that we would have to pay the price for our acquiescence to evil. I'm glad that the abolitionists pushed to end the practice, and while I wish that the practice might have ended peacefully, it's easy to understand why that wasn't possible. Given that decisions made centuries earlier made a conflict all but inevitable, I'm glad that the southern half of the conflict was prosecuted, in the main, by honorable men who fought bravely and honorably and laid the foundation for a durable peace. I think the Union's glory is enhanced by the character of their opponents, and I do not resent those on the other side who fought for their homes and families, as soldiers always do. I have no problem heaping scorn on their political leadership; Davis and his associates were very fortunate not to have been hanged. But soldiers and generals serve a purpose that we can neither deny nor dispense with, and the honor and obedience that your scorn are to me hard-won social technologies that ward off an unspeakable array of atrocities. A few thousand more dead in this war or that one is a small price to pay to avoid armies guided by their own ad-hoc moral instincts, or worse yet no army at all when one is sorely needed.
Disagree. I just stumbled across this survey, which says over 50% of americans agree with “we should all be willing to fight for our country, whether it is right or wrong.”Source . You’re constantly making it seem as if I’m imposing my 21st century morality on people, and who am I to say that my morality is correct etc . But lee and rommel , like the people in the survey, know they are perpetuating evil when they do it. Do you agree with them on the survey question, and if you do, how can you claim that valuing lee is valuing peace? They value neither peace, nor morality. I do.
My point is, if you truly believe that there is no good side, the correct course of action is simply not to fight. Otoh, if there is a good side, the least you can do is not to fight against it.
I feel like the reason I can’t pinpoint your political position is that you’ve been cagey about what your position actually is. When I was defending the Enlightenment and classical liberalism during our discussions, I asked you more than once, ‘so are you an absolutist monarchist then, a theocrat, an anti-enlightenment reactionary? ‘ , and you just refused to answer, content to take potshots at other positions and implying that there was an undefined third way. You often present and act as an ally of @HlynkaCG ’s, who sees himself as a besieged supporter of the american republic, a position incompatible with the one you take here.
No. First, I don’t understand why the ‘good’ side in your hypothetical is killing civilians by the millions. I don’t endorse that, it’s pretty much the worst thing you can do. That kind of atrocity reverses the moral polarity. So it’s fine to fight for the new yorkers. I think you should consider the possibility that you have misinterpreted my position. Condemning lee does not imply crushing “evil” by any means necessary.
Of course in our real-life examples, in the civil war no one was doing that, and in WWII it was the ‘bad side’, rommel’s side, which was doing it. That’s why I called your hypothetical a convenient, massive stretch.
To illustrate my moral position on the killing of civilians, I think Hiroshima was justified because an invasion or just a blockade of Japan would have caused even more civilian deaths. And for examples of the failures of monarchy, and of the worship of a monarch’s authority as the impersonation of the state, you don’t need to look further than the staggering incompetence and casual evil of such figures as Nicholas II, Victor Emmanuel III, and, especially, Hiro Hito.
No one could accuse the japanese of not valuing “honor”, duty to their fatherland, and obedience. And yet, even the crimes of a stalin pale in comparison to theirs. So contra your ‘the honor and obedience that you scorn are to me hard-won social technologies that ward off an unspeakable array of atrocities‘, those social technologies have not only failed to ward off that unspeakable array, they contributed to it. While it is true that some atrocities have been committed for morality, people have done at least equally terrible things for god and country. And at least the moral man thinks about what he's doing and gives himself a chance to catch a mistake, instead of blindly obeying orders 'whether it is right or wrong'.
I told you why, because of the analogy to rommel, to the Imperial japanese army , and to the butchers of WWI. Lee’s defense is rommel’s defense.
I reject this political-military distinction, every man bears his own cross, he doesn’t get to pass it on to the president/ Führer because he wears a uniform. He’s not a responsible moral actor in one sphere, and an irresponsible tool in another. Somehow a common southerner should be condemned for his political decisions, but praised for his actions as a soldier? The decision to fight is eminently political.
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