Uh-oh...

A slightly-disturbing thought just occurred to me...

This morning locdog asked, "why shouldn't Christians bomb abortion clinics?" This got me to pondering the related question of shooting abortion doctors in their homes (something I do not advocate, just to be clear), and the reasons given to justify it...

Those who advocate shooting abortion doctors argue that these people have in the past and will in the future kill people, and I agree with that. They then argue that -- since there is no reason to believe that the abortionist will stop his/her practices -- the moral thing to do is to (permanently) prevent abortionists from continuing their trade by shooting them (again, I disagree with that).

The thought that occured to me is this: what is the essential moral difference between this argument and the argument for a "preventative war" against Saddam? As any reader of this blog knows, I favor that latter, and I've just made clear that I oppose the former. But... am I contradicting myself by doing so??? In both cases, the person potentially under attack has previously and almost certainly will again take innocent lives... what essentially differentiates the two sufficiently to allow me to hold both positions, i.e. opposition to killing abortionists and support for removing Saddam?

Help?? This idea just popped into my head as I read locdog's post, and so isn't very developed; nonetheless, I can't (yet) see an out, and I'm hoping someone else can. The non-negotiable here is shooting an abortionist... there's no way I'll change on that. But for the sake of intellectual consistency, do I need to change my position on preemptive war? I'm sure I'm missing something, because the case for the latter seems pretty clear-cut to me. But I don't yet see what it is I'm missing...

So, if anyone has any thoughts, I'd really appreciate it.

Update: a friend and knowledgeable moral philosopher was able to help me out by pointing out this distinction: in the case of the abortionist, killing him/her is wrong, but not because it is direct-killing... it's rather indirect-killing (in the moral sense). Now every case of indirect killing is not wrong... in the case of the abortionist it's wrong, but not in other cases (e.g. removing Saddam from power, which may [but not necessarily] involve killing him).

Ahh... that's better :-)