Richard Dawkins on “Collateral Damage”
Full article here: (Part I and Part II)
George Bush has just vetoed a bill, approved by both Houses of Congress, which would have allowed federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Apparently the President’s ethical philosophy places a higher value on American embryos than on Iraqi or Lebanese men, women and children. Don’t misunderstand ‘embryos’, by the way. We are not talking miniature babies here. The ‘embryos’ used for stem cell research are no bigger than a pinhead, and completely lacking in sentience of any kind.The illogical and hypocritical inconsistency between Bush’s stance on embryonic stem cell research on the one hand, and on slaughtered and maimed Iraqis and Lebanese on the other, is the subject of this article. It is an inconsistency that you could find only in a mind massively infected with the disease of religion.
It is possible to justify civilian casualties of war, if you can make a good ‘lesser of two evils’ case. In Donald Rumsfeld’s charming phraseology, ‘stuff happens’: civilian deaths are ‘collateral damage.’ In this article, I shall compare two kinds of collateral damage – civilians as casualties of war, and embryos as casualties of stem cell research – demonstrating the hypocrisy of those who happily condone the first while vetoing the second. It is worse than hypocrisy, because of the grotesque inequality in suffering caused by the two cases.
If there is a moral justification for collateral damage, it is inherent in the word collateral. To justify collateral damage, you must make a case that it really is an unavoidable by-product of the attainment of a greater good. And the magnitude of that greater good must exceed the magnitude of the collateral damage by some appreciable margin. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 caused enormous damage – death, burns, injury and long-term radiation effects – to innocent Japanese non-combatants. The justification offered is that it accelerated the ending of the war, thereby saving more lives than were lost. That, of course, raises the usual questions. Why the second bomb on Nagasaki? Why drop the bomb on a city at all, instead of staging a spectacular demonstration in an unpopulated area? But I leave such questions to one side. The general principle is that collateral damage is justifiable only by setting it off against a greater good. The collateral damage must be the lesser of evils, otherwise it is morally indefensible.
It is a great article by itself but I wanted to also point out the part on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His question, “Why drop the bomb on a city at all, instead of staging a spectacular demonstration in an unpopulated area?” Is one I’ve never considered before. His writing is infused with these little one-sentence insights like this that he just casts out there and leaves for you to consider. I learned more about evolution in his introduction to The Ancestor’s Tale than I ever knew before. Maybe that just shows my ignorance on the subject (which I am ashamed to say is a part of it), but I think it also serves to illustrate just how intelligent this man is. To me, the crumbs from his writing are like a feast. it inspires me to strive to reach that height.
