Reply #105: What does being under surveillance for several hours

[Truth2Tell]

have to do with whether or not any of the victims were innocent? Again, you have no evidence for any of this, other than your own internalized belief that Americans just wouldn't do such bad things.

When you say (correctly) that intentionally blowing up women and children is prohibited and counter-productive you are getting part way to the point. The other part is that blowing up women and children is also prohibited and counter-productive even when it is NOT intentional.

Moral rightness or wrongness of actions, as defined by most belief systems, is not based on "intent". It's based on predictable outcomes. If I know that a predictable outcome of sending a hellfire missile into an apartment complex is that some children may burn to death, then it doesn't matter if my "intent" is to kill a terrorist rather than children. The fact that I know in advance that the children may die makes me fully morally responsible for their deaths. In most parts of the world if you kill someone while driving drunk you are held responsible for their death, even if your intent was not kill them. The fact that the outcome of your action is knowable in advance defines your moral responsibility, not your intent.

When we choose to wage a broad-based drone assassination campaign, raining death from the air, we know full well in advance that many innocent people are going to die. We are making the fully calculated decision that their deaths are an acceptable trade-off for whatever military or political objective we are trying to achieve. We are choosing to trade their lives for our goals. Just like Bin Laden did on 9-11. It doesn't matter that our "intent" is different. It's still the same "innocent lives to achieve our goals" calculation, and it's still just as immoral.