Re: War is bad... it's still bad, right?

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Jan 20 2003 - 17:17:10 MST


Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
>(Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com>):
>>
>>War is bad.
>
> Well, yes, death is bad. And war, which involves lots of death, is
> very bad. But there are worse things, like suffering and slavery.
> And there are times when the application of deadly violence /saves/
> lives. Avoiding war is a noble sentiment. But avoiding a war that
> is needed to free an enslaved people, or avoiding a war that is
> needed to stop a genocide or a conquest, is elevating the sentiment
> above reason. And the idea that war is never necessary to do those
> things is not rationally supportable.

Yes, that's why when Bush said he was not interested in nation-building,
he lost any chance of my sympathy. The Marshall Plan is one of the few
cases I can think of where war worked historically. I'd still be very
nervous around war just on general principles, but at least it's something
where, a few past times in history, there was a positive result. There'd
be a *hope* of it being for the best.

Iraq will get a new dictator. A few years later we'll probably have the
same problem all over again. That seems to be the most common result of
modern wars. Plenty of rubble, but no liberal democracies rising out of
the ashes. Is that worth a war? It's hard to see why.

If there's a liberal democracy in Afghanistan in ten years, maybe I'll say
that something worthwhile took place there. But I'd bet on theocracy or
kleptocracy.

The only good argument I can think of in favor of invading Iraq, North
Korea, and whoever's next, is that in five years we may be playing this
little scenario over again with rogue development of nanotechnology. So
someone inside the White House decided to just say the hell with
international law and get rid of all the perennial menaces that were never
quite annoying enough to squash before. But if that were the case, I'd
expect Bush to be as polite and conciliatory as possible internationally
to minimize that fallout. This feels... I don't know. Either the US is
being really, really stupid, or someone is playing this game with really
evil goals, or I've totally failed to comprehend what's going on. I wish
I had a few years experience in international diplomacy; I might be able
to figure out what's going on then.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence


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