Suppose you were a juror at a murder trial. In his opening address, the defence lawyer says, "My client is not guilty of this crime. Certainly he pulled the trigger on a gun he knew to be working properly, loaded, chambered, and off safety. Yes, the gun was pointing directly at the victim at point blank range, but my client did not kill this man. The bullet did. In fact, it wasn't even the bullet, but rather a hole opening in the victim's head allowing his brains to dribble out onto the carpet. It is this hole-in-the-head who is the real perpetrator here, as such, the hole should be on trial."
This argument is of course completely nonsensical. If a person knows that effect Z will very very likely succeed cause A, and then proceeds with A, that person is morally responsible for Z, irrespective of how many other letters in the alphabet are involved in between. Why am I using this first blog entry to lecture on a simple and non-controversial point of basic morality?
Well, if the reader grows tired of hypothetical and abstract examples of this concept consider this. Suppose there was a country with vast uranium reserves, and a conviction that they should only be used for peaceful purposes. Let's for the sake of argument call this country "Australia." Suppose further there was another country with very limited reserves, and both an active nuclear weapons program, and a civil nuclear power program. Let us call this country "India." Now suppose India had publicly stated, on many occasions, that they would like to devote all of their domestic reserves to bomb making and rely on imported uranium for their civil program, in effect using the extra material to displace more of their original into military applications. Economists by the way, call this well studied process of resource displacement fungibility. Enter Australia's foreign minister (let's call him "Dame Edna"). Dame Edna says that Australia has decided to sell its uranium to India, on the condition that not one Australian atom becomes part of an Indian bomb, or even becomes involved in fission reactors on military warships. I assume that Dame Edna is aware of fungibility, and is not an idiot (actually not a foregone conclusion), but his justification of the new policy makes as much sense as the defence lawyer's "not guilty" plea. Any way you look at it, Australia is now actively supplying India with uranium for bombs.
Now, helping India acquire weapons of mass destruction is perhaps a defensible position. After all, India is a stable, liberal democracy, which has never been caught proliferating. It has justifiable concerns about its nuclear armed neighbor and semi-enemy Pakistan. Perhaps we should be having a debate about preferentially arming our good friends against our not-so-good friends, with weapons so terrible neither side dares to use them. I, like many before me, believe there is a reason this doctrine had the acronym MAD, but at least there is an argument to be made. What isn't acceptable however is the debate poisoning bile that passes for politics in this country, where our leaders try to convince us that 2 and 2 isn't 4, just because they add then subtract a 3 in the middle of the calculation.
