When is it bad to cause bad stuff?

[fakename]

People generally accept that it would be bad to cause bad things.

For instance to accidentally cause someone’s death.

but I was wondering that is this always true?

I ask because cause is said in four ways -material,formal,efficient, and final. Now a soldier dies for the nation and so the nation is the final cause of his death because it is the thing for which the soldier dies. So is the nation wrong in causing his death? Is this what people mean by “causing death”?

 

[Sair]

I suspect the answer to your question hangs upon the extent to which one’s ethical system is consequentialist in nature - in which the goodness or badness of an action is determined by its outcome, regardless of intention. Most people, I would think, still attach importance to intention, and would find a purely consequentialist ethic to be far too damning, in some respects, and far too forgiving in others.

Your intimation that the nation or state involved in a war is the ultimate cause of the death of every soldier killed in war is, of course, true, but it doesn’t necessarily follow from this that the existence of nations is a wholly bad or immoral thing. Even on a purely consequentialist ethic, there are still good consequences that arise from the existence of nations - such as cooperation, fellowship and unity of purpose - which may on that basis justify their existence, even if it also leads to bad things like war and untimely deaths.

In answer to the title question, it’s pretty much always bad to cause bad stuff - the preference is always for good stuff - but again, it doesn’t necessarily follow that bad outcomes are always unjustified, either by original intentions or by the perpetuation of other goods.

 

[Crumpy]

It’s like the Supreme Court said about pornography. You can’t define it, but you know it when you see it. So, I guess that is consequentialist.

But, there’s truth in the other extreme of intention. Your on a slippery slope whenever you start talking about causing the death of another.

Years ago, my father’s cousin, a six-year-old, ran into the street at a busy corner and was literally run over by a car. Well, it was bad, The driver didn’t actually intend the death. It’s hard to say if he was paying enough attention to children at the edge of the road – probably not. He was not held in connection with the death.

The My Lai massacre in Viet Nam, during the war, was another story altogether, along with the other 900 massacres that were eventually reported. Those were “innocent” deaths, of old people, women, and children, done by our country – at war.

We don’t know (yes we do) what’s going on in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan. But, here, it’s business as usual.

My answer: it’s always “bad” to cause bad stuff. I was a conscientious objector during the Viet Nam War. That meant only that somebody else did the killing, not me. But, am I innocent?

 

[Brendan_McCabe]

The soldier does not die because of the state he fights for the state, he dies because someone else killed him.