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Silas comments on Belief as Attire - Less Wrong
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I thought this site would be the last place I'd see criticism of the "suicide bomber as cowardly" notion. Under some definitions, sure, doing something you expect to result in your death, in pursuit of a higher goal, necessarily counts as courage. However, it would be justifiable to say they are intellectually cowardly. That is, rather than advance their ideas through persuasion, and suffer the risk that they may be proven wrong and have to update their worldview; rather than face a world where their worldview is losing, they "abandoned" the world and killed a lot of their intellectual adversaries.
It is an escape. There is, after all, no "refutation" for "I'm right because I'm blowing up myself and you".
It's for the same reason one might apply the "coward" label to a divorced, jealous husband, who tries to "get back" at his ex-wife by killing her or their child. He, too, exposes himself to immense risk (incarceration, or if they defend themselves). He too, is pursuing a broader goal. Yet in that case, my calling him a coward is not an artifact of my disagreement with his claim that he has legitimate grievances -- in fact, I might very well be on his side (i.e., that the courts did not properly adjudicate his claim).
So yes, it might be the "American" thing to say terrorists are cowardly -- but that doesn't make the claimant biased or wrong.
Is that what extremist Americans mean when they say cowardly?
Welcome to Less Wrong! Feel free to introduce yourself on that thread. Don't hesitate to browse the recommendations from the About page or start in on the Sequences. Kaj_Sotala also posted a first and a second list of favorite posts, which are also quite good.
Your point is a good one - I don't know if you read The Bottom Line (or Rationalization, the followup), but they make a similar point in a well-phrased way you might enjoy.
No, that's probably just belief as attire. My point is just that reasonable interpretations of "Suicide bombers are cowardly" allow the statement to be true, even if people don't mean the true version, or if they came to that conclusion for the wrong reason.
Except that based on videos and letters left behind, the hijackers considered Americans to be not just intellectual adversaries, but wartime ones. I believe the majority of the hijackers cited American military presence in the Middle East and military and economic support of Israel to that effect.
So what were the specific arguments they used when persuading acolytes of the great satan that their position has more merit? Or was it confined to "BOOM!"?
My point is that using violence to silence intellectual adversaries is very different from using violence against a perceived wartime enemy.
Their ideology might be intellectually cowardly. But sacrificing your own life in battle against a perceived enemy is not a cowardly act. When people call the attacks cowardly, they're talking about the attacks themselves, not the worldview of the attackers.
I think most non-LWers who refer to the attacks as cowardly mean that they were conducted against unresisting, nonmilitary, targets. The people killed couldn't fight back (or at least weren't expected to fight back), and attacking someone who isn't expected to fight back is widely seen as cowardly.
In this case, of course, other aspects of the operation were hazardous to the terrorists even if they didn't expect anyone to fight back, but I believe most people who consider the attack as cowardly are treating these aspects separately.
I think actually you're a bit confused about the difference between instrumental virtues, like courage, and inherent virtues, like benevolence. (Which list "rationality" goes on is actually a tricky one for me. In a certain sense, Stalin seems terrifyingly rational.)
I guess we could talk about "intellectual courage" versus "physical courage" or something like that, and your argument is that these men were not intellectually courageous. But usually when people say "courage" simpliciter, they mean a willingness to act in spite of a high risk of pain and death. And this the hijackers definitely had!
Indeed, there's something truly terrifying about the Al Qaeda hijackers: They were mostly right about their moral values. They were altruistic, courageous, devoted to duty. It's only this very small deviation---"maximize deference to Islam" instead of "maximize human happiness"---that made them do such terrible things.
This also meshes with what we know about the Milgram and Zimbardo experiments; quite ordinary people, if convinced that they are acting toward a higher moral purpose, will often do horrific things. The average Nazi was not a psychopath, not a madman; he believed that what he was doing was right. And this should be the most chilling fact of all.
I suspect that the Muslim hijackers, in a strange way, thought they were maximizing human happiness by removing Americans from the world.
I think it more likely they thought they were doing the will of Allah. Happiness? Happiness is for pigs.
Well that explains the no bacon and pork rule.
I used to assume (possibly through overapplied principle of charity) that the accusations of cowardice had to do with their "escaping" the consequences of their actions by dying, especially if they anticipated heaven.
Specifically, I wonder how comparatively scared they'd have been at the prospect of: