A Sticky SItuation: Is it Moral?

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FFReborn

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Suppose I have a neighbor who I know for certain intends kill me and my family. Fortunately, we live in a castle and he can’t harm us. But then one day, I am pretty sure he buys a cannon, which he can blow down the walls of my castle. Let’s call our certainty that he has this cannon 99%. Let us also assume for the argument that if he did in fact have the cannon, he would definitely use it against my castle in order to kill me and my family.

According to Catholic teachings, would I be justified in blowing up his house and killing him?

Thanks so much!
 
the moral thing to do is call the police castle and have them send a police dragon.
 
FFReborn said:
Suppose I have a neighbor who I know for certain intends kill me and my family. Fortunately, we live in a castle and he can’t harm us. But then one day, I am pretty sure he buys a cannon, which he can blow down the walls of my castle. Let’s call our certainty that he has this cannon 99%. Let us also assume for the argument that if he did in fact have the cannon, he would definitely use it against my castle in order to kill me and my family.

According to Catholic teachings, would I be justified in blowing up his house and killing him?

Thanks so much!
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lol, you must be a troll. I wouldn’t be surprised if this poster also had an account on the richard dawkins website or something.
 
FFReborn said:
Suppose I have a neighbor who I know for certain intends kill me and my family. Fortunately, we live in a castle and he can’t harm us. But then one day, I am pretty sure he buys a cannon, which he can blow down the walls of my castle. Let’s call our certainty that he has this cannon 99%. Let us also assume for the argument that if he did in fact have the cannon, he would definitely use it against my castle in order to kill me and my family.

According to Catholic teachings, would I be justified in blowing up his house and killing him?

Thanks so much!
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They see me trollin’.

They hatin’.

Reportin’ and tryin’ to catch me postin’ dirty.

Trust me, I used to troll on the internet a lot (Those days are done). Obvious troll is obvious.
 
Haha, sorry about that. I’m no troll though.

This is an analogy: I’m writing a paper on whether the Iraq war was a just war or not. For it to be a just war, according to the CCC, it must meet four conditions, one of which is that more harm would be averted than would be caused.

Now in Iraq, if you consider that we were 99% sure (more or less, depends on source) they had WMD, it was obvious that more harm would have been averted than caused. However, I do not know if it is morally acceptable to act on a suspicion like that. So I was simply wondering what the Church teaches in that situation.

Thanks kage-ar for your reply, would that be kind of like saying that it would be morally just to let the UN decide?

Thanks again,
Sorry if that seemed too trollish. =]
 
There are better ways of handling the situation. Sending Ninja bears with laser eyes to destroy the cannon in the dark of night, for example.

A combination of diplomacy and attempting to destroy his cannon without the loss of life would be the preferred moral way of handling the situation.
 
And if he had multiple cannons hidden throughout his house and has in the past consistently defied authorities demanding he disarm?

/devilsadvocate
 
FFReborn said:
Haha, sorry about that. I’m no troll though.

This is an analogy: I’m writing a paper on whether the Iraq war was a just war or not. For it to be a just war, according to the CCC, it must meet four conditions, one of which is that more harm would be averted than would be caused.

Now in Iraq, if you consider that we were 99% sure (more or less, depends on source) they had WMD, it was obvious that more harm would have been averted than caused. However, I do not know if it is morally acceptable to act on a suspicion like that. So I was simply wondering what the Church teaches in that situation.

Thanks kage-ar for your reply, would that be kind of like saying that it would be morally just to let the UN decide?

Thanks again,
Sorry if that seemed too trollish. =]
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The act is immoral, why? Because we didn’t know for sure either in Iraq nor in your analogy. And both in the real case Iraq and more than likely in your analogy if you were paying close attention to the facts at hand it most certianly would have been possible to figure out that the “neighbor” didn’t have cannons. More over your analogy is faulty, it would be more like you have an empire, and your “neighbor” lives on the "otherside of the country, and by comparison lives in a tent. More over, your empirial inspectors have access to this tent, to search it and you were in fact searching it (we had UN weponds inspectors in country at the build up to the war) before you decided to go to war. Much like in real life, your emperial inspectors were reporting that in fact, there was no cannon and more over your neighbor had no where to hide a cannon, but your response is “well it’s not good enough for me that my inspectors are in his tent, can’t find a cannon, and that he has no where to hide a cannon. I’m going to assume he has it anyway, and kill my neighbor who lives thousands of miles away from me and has no capacity to attack me anyway”.

Put things into perpective?
 
Just compare the death toll from 9/11 - 2,973

To the civilian death toll of the war in Iraq - estimates put it somewhere between 100,000 and 1 million as far as I know there hasn’t been an official number released.

I am beginning to wonder if there will be any Iraqis left in Iraq after the war ends.

Or just U.S. Oil Companies
 
crazzeto said:
I’m going to assume he has it anyway, and kill my neighbor who lives thousands of miles away from me and has no capacity to attack me anyway".

Put things into perpective?
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Its the Sequel to the Vietnam War
 
Jonny87 said:
Its the Sequel to the Vietnam War
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And much like Vietnam was based on a faulty idology of the “domino effect”, that we in fact were at risk due to the idea that all surrounding nations would fall like domino’s after vietnam leading to a massive buildup of communism world wise.

Likewise our idology at the start of the Iraq war was that they’re all arabic, they’re all muslim, al-quida and saddam both seem to dislike us a whole bunch, that means they’re definietly going to ally up against us. But this missed completely the realities on the ground. Osama Bin-Ladin considered Saddam Hussain to be an apostate and well, not a very good muslim, because Saddam suppressed Sheria(sp?) law and forced secularism.
 
Well politics aside, the reason I created the analogy was because I’m trying to drill down to a specific question that perhaps could be summarized like this:

Would I be morally justified if I did evil in order to *probably *prevent a greater evil?
 
You cannot commit an act of evil even if your motivation is to prevent a greater evil. That is “ends justify the means” thinking, which is denounced incatholic morality.

Catholic just war theory is not based that way. Instead, it states that violence can be justified to protect the innocent against an unjust aggressor under certain circumstances. Look 'em up - I’d just butcher the wording too much.

In the case of your neighbor, nope. “Probably” doesn’t cut it.

In the case of Iraq, nope. Probably doesn’t cut it. (Mind you I was an earlier supporter of the Iraq invasion. I will probably have to explain that to a couple hundred thousand Iraqis some day.) Mind you it was not as cut and dried as one above poster would like it to be. The fact is that Saddam had X tons of chemical weapons suitably inventoried after Gulf War I. UN inspectors quantified that Y tons were destroyed after that war. X - Y = Z and Z is a positive number. Inspectors have to this day never been able to account for the whereabouts of Z. It was mostly likely destroyed in secret so that Saddam could keep his enemies guessing about his capabilities. He rather badly miscalculated that one. But it doesn’t make what we did right. Does it rank high on the list of historic national atrocities? No. The death toll is probably not that much worse than it would have been if the Saddam regime had continued its bloody trajectory under indefinite UN sanctions. But that blood would have been on him, now its on us. 😦
 
FFReborn said:
Well politics aside, the reason I created the analogy was because I’m trying to drill down to a specific question that perhaps could be summarized like this:

Would I be morally justified if I did evil in order to *probably *prevent a greater evil?
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I don’t think this question can possibly be answered. That’s about as gray as gray can be; after all, we’re called to protect all human life but we have the right to take out threats to our own safety. When it comes down to evaluating the threat, I think it’s fair to say we can’t kill people to stop “remote” or “unlikely” threats, but we can do so to stop “likely/very probable” or “certain” threats to our lives or the lives of other innocents. It really comes down to figuring out if a threat is unlikely, possible, very probable or certain. Fire away at the latter two and hold your fire with the first two.

At least that’s what I think.
 
FFReborn said:
Haha, sorry about that. I’m no troll though.

This is an analogy: I’m writing a paper on whether the Iraq war was a just war or not. For it to be a just war, according to the CCC, it must meet four conditions, one of which is that more harm would be averted than would be caused.

Now in Iraq, if you consider that we were 99% sure (more or less, depends on source) they had WMD, it was obvious that more harm would have been averted than caused. However, I do not know if it is morally acceptable to act on a suspicion like that. So I was simply wondering what the Church teaches in that situation.

Thanks kage-ar for your reply, would that be kind of like saying that it would be morally just to let the UN decide?

Thanks again,
Sorry if that seemed too trollish. =]
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There are certain conditions that one needs to meet in order to have a just war:
  • The damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
  • All other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
  • There must be serious prospects of success; the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.
  • The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.
In the case of the certainty of WMD’s I think we lacked the certitude that they actually existed. Last I checked we never found them. It is not to say that no good has come out of being over there, I think it has, but whether the reasons we used to get over meet the conditions for just war is another thing.

Here is the link to the CA page that goes into it more.
 
manualman said:
You cannot commit an act of evil even if your motivation is to prevent a greater evil. That is “ends justify the means” thinking, which is denounced incatholic morality.
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So what about self-defense? The Church says we have the right to defend ourselves. CCC 2264 says, “Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one’s own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow.” So if my motivation is to preserve my life I can strike my aggressor, even if that cost’s that person their life, and I have committed no wrong. Just war theory is like self-defense for a country.
 
jegow said:
So what about self-defense? The Church says we have the right to defend ourselves. CCC 2264 says, “Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one’s own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow.” So if my motivation is to preserve my life I can strike my aggressor, even if that cost’s that person their life, and I have committed no wrong. Just war theory is like self-defense for a country.
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Yes exactly. Just war is self defense on a community scale. If killing the agressor is necessary to defend yourself, it is not murder. This is not ‘ends justify the means.’ You did not set out to kill, you did what was necessary to defend yourself.

This is not a blank check. Nobody argues that it is OK to shoot and kill a scruffy looking guy who is walking towards you in a dark alley just because you are scared and THINK your life is in danger. Similarly, you cannot kill a guy because he drunkenly punched you in a bar brawl. Yes, he attacked you, but you cannot use lethal force if the danger posed to you isn’t lethal.

See the distinction?
 
Thanks so much for all of your help! That clears things up. I’ll post the paper when I finish it so anyone interested can read. Thanks again!
 
FFReborn said:
And if he had multiple cannons hidden throughout his house and has in the past consistently defied authorities demanding he disarm?

/devilsadvocate
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Duh.

Ninja Bears with laser eyes don’t miss hidden cannons. :rolleyes:
 
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