Exordia

by Seth Dickinson

You cannot just reach out into the world and alter it at your whim. Not one man: not alone. Not without oversight, and accountability, and people to say No, the cost is too high. It is intrinsically and absolutely wrong to set aside the duties of ethics because you believe that you, you alone, are smart enough to violate them. Everyone thinks that, at first. Everyone thinks they have good reason. Was Clayton better suited to choose the shape of the world than Cheney? Than Rumsfeld? Sure. He’s smarter than them, for whatever that’s worth. Obama is smarter than Bush, more careful about blowback, more appealing to the Nobel Prize set. But he’s still killing a lot of innocent people. He still authorized signature strikes in Yemen: killing people whose identities are unknown but whose behavior seems suspicious. Was that Clayton’s idea too? You have to have a code. You have to have limits. You can retaliate for harm done, yes. You can guard what grows from those who would devour it. But you can’t compute how the world should be and then kill your way toward that design. There is a very basic distinction between trying to constrain and repair the evil of others, and actually doing evil in service of some unrealized, uncertain, maybe-illusory plan.