[John Kilduff]

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It might (arguably) be not wrong to bomb their nuclear development sites and/or defang their military's capabilities. Since the Iranian regime's goals are evil, though, it would definitely be bad for them to launch an attack on a neighboring country.


I don't accept as axiomatic that reasonable and reasonably enlightened governments, and evil regimes, should both be held to identical rules of international conduct. The evil regime forfeits some of its rights and expectations of being treated equally by virtue of being for evil. And it would be silly for the USA to consider France to be equally as likely a threat as Iran, or to treat them both identically.

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Don't you see the difficulty with this though? Who gets to decide who is evil and who is "reasonable and enlightened"? Is it majority rules? Does whoever have the most nukes get to decide? I'm pretty confident that those in power in Iran don't believe that they are evil.

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This is the real world we're talking about, not some abstract philosophical debate. A muderer/rapist and his victim might each believe they are right and the other party is wrong (the rapist might even believe his victim is wrong for resisting), but one of them is wrong and the other is right. The murderer/rapist is wrong, and the question of "who gets to decide" is irrelevant to the moral question (though it might be applicable to the pragmatic question).

You might think that there is nothing that is absolutely wrong, that all values are malleable and equally interchageable based on point of view, or something like that. I don't believe that. Some things are simply morally wrong regardless of prevailing opinion. You might dispute that in some abstract philosophical vacuum, but in the real world, I'd bet that the closer you are to actual evil, the more you will KNOW it is evil (like if you witnessed some of the inhumanities and atrocities in Hitler's death camps. At that point, wouldn't your speculations as to "who has the moral right to decide" go out the window? You'd KNOW the Nazis were wrong and committing evil, even if they thought they were doing good).

Who gets to decide? Everybody has that responsibility to become capable of making good moral judgments. You have that responsibility too. The only caution, as you point out, should be the awareness that occasionally you might be wrong or overlook someting, but that should not stop you from making judgments. It should only caution you from taking precipitous action on minimal evidence or on matters that are not highly consequential. You have the ability and right to determine and state that aspects of Shari'a Law are wrong, and evil in their implementation, or that the Iranian regime is wrong and acting evilly by hanging 16-year-old girls for accusations of promiscuity. You have to have confidence that you can make a good moral judgment and moral or ethical estimate.

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I also didn't mean to imply that we should treat all nations the same in terms of our foreign policy. But I do believe that all nations should be treated the same with respect to international law. We can't take one action and then denounce that same action performed by one of our enemies.

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Inherent in your statement seems to rest the assumption that all countries should be treated as equally responsible and equally meritorious of having any weapon or being permitted any action.

That just isn't so, any more than it is true of individual humans: some you really can trust better than others, some are more maliciously minded, some are more or less responsible, etc.

There is no reason all countries or regimes should have equal access to weapons. Some human beings must be forcibly denied certain leeway: the criminally insane must sometimes be kept physically quarantined so that they won't harm other people. An axe-murderer isn't permitted to walk freely around the city and countryside carrying a couple of hatchets. His rights are abrogated, and rightly so. How does your argument stack up against that? So why should certain states not be quarantined, so to speak, or have their access to dangerous materials and weapons restricted? If they are bad actors, if they follow an evil ideology, if they are even simply our enemies, then perhaps their leeway and capabilities should be limited.