on being a good person

Jonathan Schwarz:

I learned from this article about the work of Bradley J. Strawser, a former Air Force officer and now a professor of philosophy at the Naval Postgraduate School. Strawser recently wrote as article titled "Moral Predators: The Duty to Employ Unmanned Aerial Vehicles" (PDF) in which he explained that:

I argue that there is an ethical obligation to use UAVs. ... there is a strong moral obligation to use [drones] in place of inhabited aircraft.

But is using drones the only moral obligation that we have? No. As another philosopher, Michael Novak, said in a February 10, 2003 speech at the Vatican on Just War doctrine, invading Iraq was also "a moral obligation."

Similarly, the philosopher Osama bin Laden explained in a 1996 journal article titled "Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,"

Terrorizing you, while you are carrying arms in our land, is a legitimate right and a moral obligation.

You want to be a good person, don't you? Of course you do. And now you know what you have to do.

Links to cited material are at the original.