Mills wrote a wonderful piece on morality, which everybody should read. It has a number of interesting points, one of which I would like to pull out. Mills writes about our capacity for error. We are often wrong. We systematically do a bad job of analyzing our own chances of success. Ask representative of Israel how probable they think permanently stopping Hamas’s rocket attacks is. Ask a Hamas representative how likely they are to entirely eliminate Israel (or whatever their goal). I suspect you will find optimism (possibly to the point of delusion) on both sides.
Now, both sides will say that the nobility of their end justifies the atrocity of their means. (I’m going to focus on Israel’s ends and means for a bit—because it’s not clear to me what Hamas’s end game plan is.) There has been a lasting and bloody conflict between Israel and Hamas, and from a purely utilitarian perspective, the deaths of a few hundred now looks more attractive than the deaths of ten thousand over the next fifty years.
Except that Israel’s best estimates of civilian casualties and probability of success are likely to be wrong. Remember the numbers tossed around before the United States invaded Iraq? I think the whole thing was going to cost $72 billion and pay for itself? Oops.
And it’s not just war where such decisions are made. It also happens in politics. If you can smear your opponent, perhaps you can attempt to justify any stretches of the truth with how much better the country will be after you are elected. But maybe your wrong about either how good you are for the country or how likely you are to get elected. It happens in law suits. If you can bog your opponent down with a lot of not-so-necessary interrogatories, perhaps they will see how costly this suit is likely to be and settle.
If we do something we recognize as bad for the greater good (“for the greater good”), we are incredibly and systematically likely to overestimate our chances of success. If we’re doing good through evil means and the good fails to materialize, we’ve just done evil. And if we have somebody working against us thwarting good with their well-intentiond-but-also-thwarted evil we get no good and double evil. This is a reason I can oppose both terrorism as a potential agent of social change and brutality as a method of stopping terror.
