[Newspoetry] 3/5ths think Presidential Lying Is Acceptable...

[DL Emerick]

It's hard to get people to admit to the force of a proposition when they believe that they would then be also bound to assent to its truth.  So, instead, they often object to the proposition and deny its validity.

For instance, here:

Is it morally wrong to wage war?  Most people are conditioned to say "No."  It takes a long time for them to work through the truth of the moral axiom "Thou shall not kill", to its first and second deviations "Thou shall not cause death" and "Thou shall not murder".

Once they accept these departures from moral reason -- why then it is possible to sanction all kinds of caused deaths -- including those that happen in war from armed combat.

I like the idea of prohibiting "caused death"  -- because it looks to both "prior intent" and "act consequentiality".

Not "killing" seems to lack an intent factor -- one is culpable for any death, regardless of one's intent.  Civilly, we see this is true, for instance, when we permit wrongful death torts, even where no criminal prosecution occurs for lack of some predicate of criminality.  And, if you read the Talmud/Torah -- within a society at least -- there seems to be no killing that is not penalized, even when it is not criminalized.

The problem, there, is that the law of one society of any society ends at its borders, boundaries, edges, limits.  What law then governs relations between societies?  Nominally, we invent the superfiction of the international society, and then say that all societies are "members," perforce willy-nilly, of that global society.  And, then we say that, absent positive law, that global society has only the common law of some universal morality to follow.

We endeavor, at length, to argue that the global society is bound by the same moral laws, despite the supposed substitutional intermediation of the collectivities (societies).  That is, the same exact people who make up each local society also make up the global society.  Each society, as embodied (instituted) in some agent (such as a state) is itself everywhere under the same moral law.

Thus, there is complete moral transparency.  The only arguments are by the moral heretics who always want to legalize some form of killing, some form of death that they are willing to cause (usually in the name of this or that god or its ideology).  The criminals want to write the law so that their bad behaviors are not illegal.  And, if not illegal, then they go on to argue "our conduct is not immoral because it is not illegal".

Truly speaking, they do not grasp why morality offers a critique of the state (or of its society) that is independent of and antecedent (superior) to the laws of that State.

Oh, as for the proposition that people deny:
they do not want to judge Bush as having murdered anyone that they wouldn't have wanted to murder themselves.  Hence, hating middle-easterners, islamics, and so on, they have no desire to endorse a proposition that would indict their own conscience, first, before it impeached and convicted a President who is simply carrying out the murderous will of these hateful people.