Dwein

kohenari:

A lot of people have been reading and commenting today; I really appreciate all of your thoughts and that you’ve taken the time to share them with me and with other people across several social networking platforms.

Given some of your comments, I thought it important to write up a clarification about the crux of my argument about the death of Osama Bin Laden: the argument I’m making isn’t about whether or not it’s ever appropriate to kill anyone. For one version of that argument, see Judah Oudshoorn’s blog; he argues the following:

(1) Killing is not a helpful form of justice.  It doesn’t lead to peace.

(2) It is important to separate out catching people who use terrorism from killing them.  Let’s celebrate the former but not the latter and be clear about it.

There’s nothing wrong with taking this position, as far as I can tell (though catching Bin Laden and other terrorists was clearly more difficult than we thought it might be nine years ago); it simply isn’t the position that I hold. My position is that killing and justice aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but the kind of killing likely matters a good deal. In my original post, I made some comparisons between capital punishment and the killing of Bin Laden; I don’t equate the two, however. What I intended for readers to take away was the similarity in the reaction of ordinary Americans to killing of that kind.

My message, ultimately, was that all of our triumphalism about justice isn’t much more than a very thin veneer covering our real feelings about getting our revenge on someone who hurt us.

That said, there’s a real difference between capital punishment and the military operation that ended Bin Laden’s life; both result in executions, one judicial and one extra-judicial, but the latter (however morally problematic assassination might be) seems potentially morally permissible to me whereas the former does not.

That is, I frequently argue in opposition to a capital punishment system that takes a person out of a cage to poison him to death, but I won’t say the same here of the Bin Laden execution. In the latter case, until he was either captured or killed, Bin Laden was a self-declared enemy of the United States; he had put considerable time, effort, and resources into attacking American civilians and military targets.

In any war, people will die. We might all think this is a terrible outcome and we might do whatever we can to minimize the loss of life, but we ought not to be so naive as to suggest that the only answer to any situation is pacifism. As I’ve said in the past, I recognize times when the legitimate use of force can be brought to bear and, while loss of life might occur, we can’t say that an obvious or necessary injustice has occurred. It seems to me that the same can’t be said of capital punishment: we are safe from the criminals locked away on our death rows in a way that we were not safe from Osama Bin Laden; he was intent on attacking us and he might have done so.

My objection is not to the killing of Bin Laden — as I said at both the outset and the conclusion of my original post — so much as with the reaction that so many have had to it. I maintain that no matter whether we acted properly or improperly in killing someone, we ought not to sing, cheer, or wave flags to celebrate the justice of our actions. Just as with capital punishment, this death was in revenge for a terrible crime perpetrated against us. Unlike capital punishment, it might also have been a legitimate military operation against a dangerous combatant. In either case, my sense is that people have clearly mistaken vengeance for justice when they spill into the streets and cheer about an execution as if their hometown team just won the World Series.

No one cheers when justice is done. Justice, more often than not, is the necessary (and proper) conclusion to a series of unhappy incidents.

If only those thousands celebrating in the streets took the time to read this…