Economic Sanctions

Are you claiming there is no harm to innocents? Which would be ridiculous because turning away ships of consumer goods *can only* serve to harm innocent people.

Heres what an economic sanction looks like:
You're some mob boss, I'm some other stronger mob boss. I don't like what you're doing, so I threaten to shoot anyone who lives in your shake-down area if they try to buy food.

That's it.

 

No, because nearly all arms manufacture is either within the host country or via secret channels which you won't be able to monitor anyway.

Fewer than half the nuclear arms the USSR had before its dissolution are accounted for. These things are shipped around on the back of trucks on the blackmarket disguised as ordinary freight and you'll never find any of them. The same goes for nerve gas and biological weapons.

There are none that are morally acceptable.

Both your government and the foreign government prey on their 'citizens' for resources and labour. It's a form of slavery.

If one slave master levels guns against the slaves of another slave master, in order to coerce that other slave master, then this is even more immoral and brutal than the normal form of slavery.

 

Sanctions against whom? Unless you are putting the members of the foreign government under house arrest, and unless this is what you mean by 'economic sanction' then you are using force against innocent people.

Well first of all there's no such thing as a country. There are just a bunch of nut cases who believe such a thing exists. Physically, empirically speaking there is no such thing. Just as there is no god.

Do you realize that you are accurately describing your own 'country'?
It would be no stretch whatsoever to state that the individuals doing business as 'the US Army' constitute the largest and most aggressive terrorist organization in the world, with over 730 permanent installations in 130 countries and over two million trained terrorists?

So logically you should support sanctions on people such as yourself, in your geographical area, because of the actions of your 'leaders' and a bunch of psychopaths doing business as the IRS, and an equally psychopathic bunch doing business as 'The Pentagon'.

I suppose we're morally justified as the 'international community' to post paid killers at private ports and airports near your location now? And to prevent innocent people from traveling outside of the area under threat of being shot; a 'travel ban'?

Is this your position?

 

Well it is worth establishing there is no proof of countries, only of people who believe in countries; because the country is their collective mystical being.

If you say "Russia did this" or "America did that", this is semantically equivalent to "God did this" or "Gia did that". When it's your god vs their god, of course war will result. What other avenue is there for resolving conflicts where reason and the evidence of the senses is discarded?

I certainly appreciate where you are coming from. But I don't think the argument from effect has any merit whatsoever. Sanctions 'work' by harming the innocent to harm the guilty. If you accept the argument from effect here then you cannot accept the argument from morality.

(Well you can, but it seems like a contradictory waste of time.)

 

Violence. Where there is no commonly agreed upon means of determining the truth value of a statement the only recourse is to violence. Thats why when religious people disagree they have 500 years of bloody warfare. When scientists or rational philosophers disagree they do an experiment or have a debate, or both. They all agree that logic and empiricism (the scientific method) are the highest standards of truth, so they have a means of resolving conflict.

Well if you apply the Socratic method you could argue both positions independently, I just don't think it is a very productive thing to do. Firstly the argument from effect has been the mainstay of (classical) liberal debate for a good couple of centuries, and it has never worked. People don't fundamentally care that there will be more good stuff in the world because they are only concerned with what is moral.

So if one were to argue the case from effect, then, aside from getting caught in a web of statistics and debate over the validity of said statistics, one would eventually have to discard the argument and change to the argument from morality. But by this point it's too late, because in the eyes of your opponent you've already accepted the moral validity of the actions in so far as you are willing to debate their efficacy in the first place.

So my position is that you can argue from effect, and by all means do so. But be aware that you're not debating skilled logicians and that what you say first will influence their capacity to understand what you say later.

They shouldn't be subjective in this debate; Because if you have already established as your premise that the government is guilty, then you must refer to the individuals doing business as the government. Their victims (even their military to a large degree) are acting under a coerced situation.

In terms of what one might call black-letter ethics; if a gunman points a gun at you and says "kill that person over there or you'll die," most people would agree that the only guilty party is the gunman. That is; there is no such thing as morality where your actions are coerced. And the degree of the coercion represents the degree to which actions of an individual are amoral.