Glenn Greenwald on Getting UBL

Here.

I link to his post and mention it because I disagree with it. No time for a long discussion now (grading finals...), but this seems to me to be an instance of one of the two ways to go wrong attitudinally with regard to the case at hand.

First, and of course, one might go wrong by reveling in the blood and brutality of the event per se. One might enjoy it as one would enjoy cat burning or gladiatorial games.

But, second, one might go wrong by taking no satisfaction at all in justice being done, by focusing on the violence of the event per se to the exclusion of other, more salient moral aspects of it.

One well-known character is the conservative Neanderthal who tends to err in roughly the first direction. Another is the effete liberal pacifist (or quasi-pacifist) who errs in the other. (Actually, it's something more like vengeance that they focus on, I suppose.)

To some events there seems to be a fairly narrow range of reasonable reactions. Say, to 9/11 itself. To other events, I think there is a fairly broad range of reasonable reactions. I'm inclined to think that the killing of bin Laden falls into the latter category.

Finally, one error that leftier liberals like Greenwald tend to make is to see all actions of this type in future-oriented and consequentialist terms. How many wars will this prevent?, he asks. That's not only the wrong question, but the wrong question by a long, long shot. Justice is frequently backward-looking, not forward-looking, and is not always about achieving the most pleasant future outcomes. Down that road, IMHO, lies an irrational dehumanization of the world, a denial about what is most important about us.

But these are complicated issues that (a) I don't have time to say anything really cogent about here, and (b) don't really lie in my area of expertise. So, as usual, take the above as thinking out loud and little more.