Gary asked:

What, if anything do we owe the starving world?

How if at all is killing in war time different from other forms of killing?

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To owe something to anyone we would necessarily be in debt. Hence we could pose your question
as, are we in debt to the starving world? The answer is yes if we are in some way responsible for their
plight. Perhaps you are referring to the relationship of the affluent western world to the starving
millions of Africa? If the western world is responsible for the plight of the starving millions in Africa,
then it owes them some recompense. There is no doubt that in the past Africa was exploited by the
west. The disgusting and unforgivable slave traders ruined families and communities, kidnapping
large numbers of fit men and women to be sold into slavery, leaving behind the elderly and the very
young to cope with food provision, and to survive as best they could. Before and since the slave trade
western countries have exploited large parts of Africa, taking their mineral wealth, occupying their
land and making Africans slaves in their own countries. Many parts of Africa have never recovered
from these impositions, particularly where the west has eventually pulled out and left behind chaos
and disaster.

Some African countries are up to their necks in growing financial debt to the affluent west, with no
way of paying off those debts and relieving themselves of the massive interest burdens, their
economies have been crippled. When drought, disease and disaster strikes, they have no means of
coping with the situation and are left relying on aid, which is often too little too late. Do we owe the
starving anything? Decide for yourself; perhaps you can say that wemight not owe them much but
our ancestors certainly do, however we have been left with the bill. Anyway I don't agree with the
universal we,the blame and the debt should be placed at the door of those directly responsible, i.e.
the exploiters.

Your question about killing in wartime is interesting but highly complex. There are many forms of
killing, but I trust you mean the killing of one human being by another. There is also a range of these;
there is murder, which is against the law of the land, there are executions, carried out through the law
of the land, euthanasia, described as mercy killing, killings on road and rail, sometimes described as
manslaughter, and so on. However, I take your point, killing in war seems to be something separate
and in a category of its own. Killing enemy soldiers is the legitimate if deplorable business of war.
However, over the ages this has also become true of civilians also.

Killing in war is very different to the types of killing mentioned above, simply because war is a conflict
between nations. The causes are usually political, the instigators usually politicians or the leaders of
nations. However the instigators themselves do not get involved in the actual killing. It is the job of the
instigators to instill into those who are going to do the killing a sense of duty, and moral acceptability
of what they are persuaded to do. Religion has often been used to provide the moral grounds for their
activity. In both world wars God was on the side of the allies, but, so far as the enemy was
concerned, he was on their side.

Language is used as a powerful tool in both rhetoric and propaganda : nowhere is Wittgenstein's
original maxim, 'don't ask for the meaning of a word, ask for its use' more in evidence. Words used to
great effect for conditioning purposes are duty, morality, God, right, self defence, hatred, threat,
enemy, sacrifice, cowardice, cause, loyalty, patriotism, and so on, each having many connotations,
but limited to a specific use for maximum impact. Thus killing in wars becomes a duty, a moral right, a
form of self defence, an indication of loyalty to the cause, destruction of the enemy, a just cause, etc.

I was fortunate, I missed the actual fighting of the second world war by a whisker, but I was in the
army of occupation in Germany just after the fighting ceased. We were, however, still in great danger,
and I found myself in one or two hazardous situations, but I was never obligedto kill anyone, whether
I could have or not is another question. Another conditioning word is target,'and I had been trained to
shoot at targets, in wartime something moving two hundred yards ahead of you is a target, you can
then substitute 'I have killed someone' for, 'I have hit the target,' less personal and more comfortable
to the conscience. However the bayonet and the handgun at close range, well that is a different story,
and the term 'self defence' now comes into play. "It's 'im or you lad," the nco's would shout, "make
sure it's 'im." There are no debates on how you come to be facing "'im" in the first place, and are not
instead at home weeding your garden. Also you have never met "' im" in your life before, how can he
be your enemy? Simply because someone has told you he is, logic and rational thinking go out of the
window in wartime.

Bomber crews dropped their bombs on targets, these targets eventually became towns and cities, in
the case of the allies, bombing was switched from the munitions factories to the populace which
produced the tanks and guns, claimed to be legitimate to bring the war to an early end, simply a
different target. There was also a sense of revenge for the indiscriminate bombing by the enemy of
not only British towns and cities but towns and cities across Europe. As war progresses less and less
attention is paid to loss of human life, which somehow becomes an accepted consequence of what is
happening, and numbers of deaths become meaningless as representative of lost human lives; ten
thousand here, twenty thousand there, at least forty thousand British and allied soldiers were lost on
the first day of the battle of the Somme in the first world war. Eventually only bare figures are quoted,
no one refers to x thousand people/soldiers, but simply x thousand. Towns, cities, ships, planes,
factories, etc. all become targets, the fact that people are inside them somehow becomes a side
issue.

Are wars ever just? Well that is another question for debate; however when we consider the atrocities
committed by the Nazis and the Japanese before and during the second world war, and what might
have happened if no one had stood up to them, leaves me believing that there was some justice in
that conflict. The first world war was a different story and the meaningless carnage of that conflict for
no gain will, to me, always remain a stain on the sanity of the human race.

John Brandon

1. It seems to me that a Kantian ethics — based on the Categorical Imperative — requires us to treat
everyone (including ourselves) equally, and so to give away our goods until we are as poor as the
poorest. Our duties towards others are identical, and depend only on the situation in which they find
themselves, not who they are. Utilitarian ethics — that the right thing to do is whatever leads to the
greatest happiness of the greatest number — also points in the same direction.

This is a hard demand to live up to, and I don't think that any but (maybe) a small handful of people
even seriously try to do so. It has the unwelcome implication that we owe no special care to our family
and friends. For this reason, many philosophers (especially those of a feminist bent) think that we
need an ethical theory that recognises the moral worth of caring and community. Aristotle's virtue
ethics is often cited as such a theory.

One interesting area where this has practical applications is in the study of moral development.
Lawrence Kohlberg set up, on the basis of a long term study of moral development, a six stage model
of such development, where the highest stage is adherence to moral principles (very like Kant's
theory). Unfortunately, he did all his empirical work on boys. When Carol Gilligan tried to replicate this
work with a group of girls, she found that the girls did not reach Stage 6, coming instead to a moral
stance that emphasised caring for others, which Kohlberg had called Stage 4. So, it seemed, boys
were, on average, more moral than girls. Given, amongst other things, the relative numbers of males
and females in jails, this seems bizarre. (See Gilligan's excellent and easy to read book "In a Different
Voice" for more details).

Note that any ethics of care that emphasises our own kin and community too much runs the danger of
warranting ignoring those we don't know, which many find equally distasteful.

2. As a pacifist, I don't believe there is any significant moral difference. There may be circumstances
that justify killing in peacetime (e.g. self defence), and they may also justify a killing in wartime.
However, one deliberately puts oneself in a position where one is likely to invoke self defence in a
war, so this may mitigate against one's justification.

If, on the other hand, you believe there is such a thing as a just war, then killing may be justified in
pursuit of a just war. Just War Theory usually invokes two conditions: that the war is fought in a just
cause (e.g. to prevent a greater evil), and that the war is prosecuted using just methods.

Tim Sprod