Singer: The Moral Cost/Benefit Analysis of the Iraq War
Peter Singer is someone who, in my view at least, brings as much intellectual honesty to questions of morality and ethics as someone like Tacitus does to military strategy. And he (Singer) had an opinion piece in today’s LA Times that really hit home with me, touching, as it does, on many of the issues I’ve been wrestling with in the last few weeks: How many lives is this war worth? (LA Times login required; cypherpunk98/cypherpunk works). In years to come, when we look back on this war, most of us won’t be focusing on the specific strategies and tactics that were employed in the fighting. We’ll be focusing on the stuff Singer is talking about: Were we right to go in? What did we accomplish? What did it cost? Was it worth it? We have an obligation, to our future selves if to no one else, to think seriously about those questions now, while we’re still in a position to make the choices we’ll be living with later on.
Update: The Web-hostile LA Times no longer offers the article for free, but PoliticsPosts.com still does. Go Web.
