Bradley Manning to be Sentenced - For the "Greater Good"?
Bradley Manning is due to be sentenced for his dissemination of what the military considers sensitive and confidential information. Manning, as you probably know, sucked a load of information out of government files and shared that info via Wikileaks with the public. Without getting into the details, he was convicted of a crime and now faces sentencing.
However you feel about Manning's actions, the debate - to the extent there is one - regarding his conviction, which now spills over into the sentencing phase seems to be whether the guy did what he did because he had an "agenda" or because he was concerned with the "greater good," that greater good being public awareness of what Manning considered questionable activities by the military in their conduct of war. Of course, all the gossip about his homosexuality and "gender ambiguity" (whatever that means) is a sideshow that naturally has taken up more of the public discussion that it ought to - but no surprise there, given the media's traditional use of salacious material to attract readers and viewers.
Putting that aside, let's say that Manning did not have some underlying agenda that motivated his actions (since we don't now and probably have no certain way of knowing this). Let's say he wanted the public to be aware of what he considers the military's immoral conduct in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two things stand out here:
1) What was the basis for his making his assessment of the military's conduct. There's very little to be found on this. What made the incidents revealed especially egregious in light of the fact that bad things happen in war?
2) How does the "greater good" justify this or any other alleged activity? This phrase, the "greater good" gets thrown around a lot these days. It strikes me as dangerous. If you mean that an activity is justified by the positive effect is might have on the greatest number of people, is this a good basis for judging the morality of an action? First of all, how would you know that the greatest number of people benefit from a particular action? Second, and more importantly, why is a benefit to the greatest number of people considered by definition to be something good - "good" being used in the moral sense?
Rather than the "greater good," the phrase the "common good" better and more accurately captures the moral component of an action intended for the benefit of a larger number of people (more than our immediate family, friends, neighbors, etc.). You hardly see the phrase "common good" used anymore. But its use was far more common when our system of laws was based on common law. Alas, that's not longer the case.
I don't have enough familiarity with the case to say anything more specific on this. But the terms of the public discussion do present some problematic issues, the biggest one being this concept of the "greater good."
Question: Whatever the sentence meted out by the judge, will that sentence be for the "greater good"?
A last point: In Manning's case, as in Edward Snowden's and similar cases of "whistleblowers," we're told that such individuals engaged in "espionage," more commonly known as spying. But don't spies give or sell secrets to country's enemies? And aren't spies typically trained in some way to gather and pass information from one government to the other? Far as I can tell, neither Manning nor Snowden were passing information directly to an enemy, nor were they trained in the way of espionage. So how does espionage come into the picture with these whistleblowers?
However you feel about Manning's actions, the debate - to the extent there is one - regarding his conviction, which now spills over into the sentencing phase seems to be whether the guy did what he did because he had an "agenda" or because he was concerned with the "greater good," that greater good being public awareness of what Manning considered questionable activities by the military in their conduct of war. Of course, all the gossip about his homosexuality and "gender ambiguity" (whatever that means) is a sideshow that naturally has taken up more of the public discussion that it ought to - but no surprise there, given the media's traditional use of salacious material to attract readers and viewers.
Putting that aside, let's say that Manning did not have some underlying agenda that motivated his actions (since we don't now and probably have no certain way of knowing this). Let's say he wanted the public to be aware of what he considers the military's immoral conduct in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two things stand out here:
1) What was the basis for his making his assessment of the military's conduct. There's very little to be found on this. What made the incidents revealed especially egregious in light of the fact that bad things happen in war?
2) How does the "greater good" justify this or any other alleged activity? This phrase, the "greater good" gets thrown around a lot these days. It strikes me as dangerous. If you mean that an activity is justified by the positive effect is might have on the greatest number of people, is this a good basis for judging the morality of an action? First of all, how would you know that the greatest number of people benefit from a particular action? Second, and more importantly, why is a benefit to the greatest number of people considered by definition to be something good - "good" being used in the moral sense?
Rather than the "greater good," the phrase the "common good" better and more accurately captures the moral component of an action intended for the benefit of a larger number of people (more than our immediate family, friends, neighbors, etc.). You hardly see the phrase "common good" used anymore. But its use was far more common when our system of laws was based on common law. Alas, that's not longer the case.
I don't have enough familiarity with the case to say anything more specific on this. But the terms of the public discussion do present some problematic issues, the biggest one being this concept of the "greater good."
Question: Whatever the sentence meted out by the judge, will that sentence be for the "greater good"?
A last point: In Manning's case, as in Edward Snowden's and similar cases of "whistleblowers," we're told that such individuals engaged in "espionage," more commonly known as spying. But don't spies give or sell secrets to country's enemies? And aren't spies typically trained in some way to gather and pass information from one government to the other? Far as I can tell, neither Manning nor Snowden were passing information directly to an enemy, nor were they trained in the way of espionage. So how does espionage come into the picture with these whistleblowers?
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