I’m not sure where you’re going with the rest of your comment. It seems to be directed at somebody else, or else I am misreading it.

Funny, I would have said the opposite. We have always had terrorists (and even been them, at times) but shootings at schools seem a recent phenomenon.

If somebody has a motive to attack another country, our choice to discuss such motives won’t affect their choice whether to proceed. I insist we should feel free to discuss any aspect, no matter how repugnant its implications, if it leads to better understanding.

Getting back to the original topic, the saints A. knew no Geneva conventions. Designating soldiers as always fair game for wholesale slaughter can only be a purely practical choice, not a moral one. Anybody who argued against wholesale slaughter of uniformed soldiers would lose all chance of being taken seriously, but that’s a practical argument, not an honest moral one. War would be more complicated if you had to decide every time you were about to blow somebody up whether it was really called for, but why shouldn’t war be complicated?

Sure, that makes things easier for the bad guys, but (again!) that’s a practical matter. We get nowhere if we’re not honest about that.

I don’t agree that people inclined to terrorism will rationalize it no matter what. Terrorism is a means of what is now called asymmetric warfare. If you would like to gather your army and invade another country, but you are not so fortunate as to actually have an army, then you resort to terrorism. If you don’t have any motive to attack another country, then you don’t have any reason to engage in terrorism.

We will always have crazy people who shoot strangers at schools. We will not always have terrorists.

First, people inclined to terrorism will rationalize it no matter what reasoning we express, so there’s no point in muzzling ourselves.

Second, if we want to establish that terrorism (against ourselves, presumably) is morally unacceptable (and thus, presumably, worthy of worldwide support for exterminating terrorists involved, along with anybody who’s ever spoken on the phone with one), the first and most important step seems to me not to engage in it ourselves. In recent years that has proven difficult, what with U.S forces finding themselves bombing wedding parties, mowing down civilians at checkpoints, blowing up water treatment plants, and the like.

What might make terrorism against Americans, in the face of such provocations, as immoral as the provocations, is that more half of us voted (or tried to vote) against offering the opportunity to commit those provocations to the individuals directly responsible. In fact, a large majority of the victims of your typical NYC terrorist attack probably voted against them. It might demand too much to expect us to rise up in arms against them, even though that is exactly what was demanded of the Iraqi people before the invasion.

I’m not always prepared to make a hard distinction between soldiers and civilians. Killing a draftee, in particular, is hardly different from killing a civilian. If the draftee is actively shooting at you, killing him might be necessary, but that’s the same for a civilian.

It seems an important distinction whether you’re shooting at someone so that, having been shot, they can’t shoot at you any more, vs. shooting at someone so that, having been shot, their relatives and friends will be afraid and will do what you want. I think the former cannot be terrorism (despite how their family might feel about the event) while the latter certainly is. Again, uniforms don’t really make a difference.

The problem with reasoning clearly on matters like this is that if you are honest you end up accusing people on “our side” of terrorism, mass manslaughter, and worse. Often “our side” will be found to have engaged in far worse atrocities than “them”. That doesn’t excuse “them” (except insofar as what “they” do can rationally be calculated to make us, or persuade us to, stop doing it), but it does mean we are criminally remiss if we fail to prosecute those responsible on “our side”. If we do so fail, then we don’t deserve anybody’s support.

That seems to be how Germany and France see matters, and no wonder.

Has anybody really ever gone to jail for lying to kids about cigarettes, or are you speaking of what would happen if you got to choose?

If you tell people about the bomb (or if somebody else does), then, yes, it is worse to use a 30-second fuse than a 12-hour timer. If the bomb is a secret, then it doesn’t really matter.

I do agree that people who lie about cigarettes are acting immorally and deserve jail time. So they aren’t necessarily walking around loose forty years on.

Does it make sense to talk about the rights of a state? The people it is supposed to represent are accorded rights, including that of having a state act on their behalf, defending them against attacks by, if necessary, killing the attackers. In that case, though, the state is acting on a responsibility, not a right. If the state doesn’t actually represent the people, does it even have that?

Marketing doesn’t produce certain addiction, and addiction doesn’t produce certain death. However, forty years on, on the day those thousands who rolled snake-eyes do suffer agonizing deaths, the people who chose to seduce the teenagers they had been are still alive and still walking around loose. Is it worse to set off a bomb with a 30-second fuse than to set a 12-hour timer?

Certainly reasoning about intentions is difficult and error-prone, but that doesn’t mean that we can disregard them when judging the morality of an action. When murderers believe that they were obeying the orders of a voice nobody else could hear, we don’t put them in jail; we put them in an asylum.

You explicitly disregard the immediacy, but the immediacy does actually matter. It is worse for me to kill today than to kill you twenty years from now, just as it is better for me to give you $100 today than $1000 in twenty years.

Addiction is not certain death. It merely significantly increases the chances of death. Addiction to smoking can be beaten. Giving a teenager a fast sports car also significantly increases the chance of death; we frown on that, but we don’t forbid it.

Obviously, I’m not saying that getting teenagers addicted is right. I think it is wrong. (Since you bring up Joe Camel, don’t forget that that character was banned and is no longer used.) I’m just saying that I don’t believe that addicting teenagers to cigarettes is as wrong as shooting into a crowd.

I understand that you may not accept the bases of my arguments, but they do exist. I’m not reasoning arbitrarily, I’m not using euphemisms, and I’m not relying on invalid historical information. I’m saying that context matters, that intentions matter, that we can’t judge morality purely on ends.