Ethics

If you're a pilot who drops a nuclear bomb on a city, do you have any moral responsibility for the action?

Comments

Why wouldn't you? If having

Why wouldn't you? If having moral responsibility requires (say) being free, you surely are free about whether to do this act -- whether to join the air force, whether to participate in this mission. Perhaps there are degrees of compulsion in play: you were drafted (faced jail if you resisted), you were assigned the mission (faced punishment if you refused). But still: you are free (we assume) to choose the punishment over the action. Perhaps the punishment is so severe that we decide you have no reasonable choice--and we require having reasonable alternatives for an action to be free--ok then: perhaps in that circumstance you might argue the pilot has no moral responsibility here. But even then, the action itself is so extreme (presumably producing the deaths of thousands or millions), we might hold the standard very high: hold the individual responsible even for accepting an extreme punishment before doing such a heinous action. (I'm assuming of course the pilot does not want to do the mission; and we could vary the case in various ways, for example make it quite compelling that the action is profoundly wrong: it was ordered by your insane or evil dictator leader, for example .....) But these are some of the kinds of considerations (I would think) that might be brought to bear on a question like this ....

hope that's useful! >..
Andrew

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