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Ethics training question # 214
If someone ruled a country that had vast resources, the control of which would help secure the wealth and prosperity of your own country, but that person could not be counted on to behave in ways satisfactory to you, the ethical thing to do would be:
a) Develop an international policy of respectful interdependence and sustainable development, moving toward an overall equalization of wealth and an equitable distribution of resources among all peoples of the earth.
b) Create a fictitious story that the ruler had dangerous weapons - a small fraction of the dangerous weapons you had - and argue that this made it imperative to invade and occupy the country, which, even if the fictitious story were true, would be a violation of international law.
c) Bomb the shit out of them.
Ethics training question # 307
If you are holding prisoners the ethical thing to do would be...
a) Follow the Geneva Conventions.
b) Invent some ridiculous category, such as "enemy combatants" and use it as a pretext to hold people without charges and torture them indefinitely.
c) Bomb the shit out of them
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http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jeremy_pikser/2006/06/the_ethics_of.html Jeremy Pikser is the co-writer of the film Bulworth, for which he won the LA Critics Award, as well as Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. He also wrote The Lemon Sisters and worked on the script and production of Reds. He is currently working with John Cusack and Mark Leyner on a satire about US policy in the Middle East and has just finished a screenplay about the CIA coup that overthrew the government of Guatemala in 1954. He is one of the authors of the Not in Our Name statement of conscience.