“Choosing to kill the innocent as a means to your ends is always murder.”—Elizabeth Anscombe
Misusing our inscrutable capacity for negative capability--“being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” as Keats puts it--we all too easily lose sight of this.
So doing, however, we may well find ourselves accessories to murder before and after the fact.
Here endeth the first--and perhaps it should be the only necessary--lesson: Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.*
*Matthew 6:34 KJV. An equivalent proverb in rabbinic Hebrew is reported: dyya l'tzara b'shaata,דיה לצרה בשעתה, "the suffering of [this] hour is enough for it."
Elizabeth Anscombe: British analytic philosopher (1919-2001).
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