[quote=Allan from Fallbrook][quote=esmith]Of course, no mention of women and children who starve to death because of Americans’ refusal to pay ransom.[/quote]
esmith: Really? So, in your mind, this is a legitimate business enterprise? Americans should just pay the ransom, right? Because all of those pirates are simply there as family men.
This is worse than moral equivalency; this is moral infantilism. I worked counterinsurgency when I was in the Army and I’ll tell you this: Those SEALs waxing those pirates will send a very clear message and the OP captures it perfectly. In the French: “Pour encourager les autres”.
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In my mind, it is an interesting moral conundrum, the kind that Americans don’t get to face in their own country and so it gets easy to write these off to “us vs. them”. Is it legitimate and/or moral to steal from the rich in order to feed your starving wife and children?
Is it legitimate and/or moral that the captain in question makes roughly 200 times as much as an average resident of Somalia?
