Too lazy to look this up, but I'd drop a fiver on Sam Harris condoning actual assassinations in the so-called War on Terror, either outright or through some tedious argument about exigent circumstances demanding situational morals.
Pretty sure he views them as a (regrettable?) necessity. I'm extrapolating from his views/justification of torture.
The only way to rule out collateral damage would be to refuse to fight wars under any circumstances. As a foreign policy, this would leave us with something like the absolute pacifism of Gandhi. While pacifism in this form can constitute a direct confrontation with injustice (and requires considerable bravery), it is only applicable to a limited range of human conflicts. Where it is not applicable, it is seems flagrantly immoral. We would do well to reflect on Gandhi’s remedy for the Holocaust: he believed that the Jews should have committed mass suicide, because this “would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.” We might wonder what a world full of pacifists would have done once it had grown “aroused”—commit suicide as well? There seems no question that if all the good people in the world adopted Gandhi’s ethics, the thugs would inherit the earth.
So we can now ask, if we are willing to act in a way that guarantees the misery and death of some considerable number of innocent children, why spare the rod with known terrorists?
https://samharris.org/in-defense-of-torture/
Okay, so I've heard about that piece Sam wrote for years and a couple of times in the past, I kind of skimmed it and lost interest after a while. But now's the first time I've read it all the way through because I legitimately wanted to see what the hell Sam was trying to say. Especially considering like his buddy, Daddy P, he consistently bitches about people supposedly taking him "out of context (tm)".
So now I've read the whole thing and...I'm still not sure what the fuck he's bitching about. I could be bad at reading and analysis (and sadly I HAVE been many times in the past), but I'm not seeing anything in the piece that goes against the impression that nearly all of his critics had on that piece. Just as the title says, it's LITERALLY A DEFENSE FOR TORTURE. He provides numerous examples throughout where there would be situations where torture would be appropriate, complains about a double standard on how we don't have as much a problem with civilian casualties, and even goes on to say that in certain instances, torture is actually morally
more righteous than other atrocities.
I mean, all he says
against the idea of torture is just spending a few sentences throughout the entire piece saying it's wrong, and if we didn't have to do it, he'd be happy. But that's not really saying....anything. He's basically saying "Torture is definitely bad and reprehensible, but with that being said, here's a 2,000 word argument on why it might actually be good and we should do it."
Maybe some of the smarter people here can tell me what I'm misinterpreting.
