The example I gave with Madeline Albright was not UNINTENTIONAL, she admitted complicit intentional killing, so that instance was definitely not “Collateral damage”
And wait, that’s odd, isn’t “Collateral damage” sometimes a phrase people will use to defend abortion. Hmmm…
For crying out loud guys, stop condemning one form of murder but then turning around and defending another
When confronted with a serious moral problem, Christians are bound to choose “none of the above” when confronted with two evils, even when one is a greater evil than the other. Consider a thought experiment:
You have been captured by a band of criminals. In a room stands you, two criminals, and 11 children. Criminal A hands you a gun and tells you to shoot one of the children in the head or the other 10 will be murdered by criminal B who has a machine gun. What do you do?
Saint Augustine established about 1600 years ago that the proper response in this case is to say “I chose neither. I will not cooperate in committing evil.”
This is the proper response for several reasons:
- 10 children are not worth more than 1 child. Each human person is infinitely valuable, and for you to cooperate in the murder of one of them, no matter what your motivation, is to be a murderer, and no less a murderer than the one who murders 10. Humans cannot be reduced to math equations in Christian morality.
- If criminal B proceeds to murder 10 children, you are not morally culpable. The murderers are the criminals, not you. You have a responsibility to not damn yourself and to not cooperate in evil.
- You cannot predict the future. You don’t know that if you shoot the one child that the criminals will keep their words and spare the children. It could be that you will all be murdered no matter what, and all that you have accomplished is to become a murderer yourself. You also don’t know that if you spare the one, that the criminals won’t spare all of you for some other reason.
Many Christians are choosing to shoot the one child in the vain hope of saving the lives of the other 10. For this, they will be called to account.
Another timeless truth - “It is better to endure an evil than to commit one.”