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Comment by sqeaky | Hacker News Reader

First, I would like to say I want to agree the USA is ethically superior, but let me show how I can see the other side.

Stepping into the murky quagmire of ethics, I could argue that the 2 to 4 million Vietnamese who died defending Vietnam from American invaders is much worse than censoring the Internet. That Internet is largely made by those same murderers and they have the largest spy agency in the world, the CIA, trying to break in and spy on seemingly everyone, so it must be filtered.

One could also argue that enforced family planning allows for centralized natural resource and pollution management. China per capita pollutes much less than the United States.

Again, I am not taking or defending these arguments, but it is easy to see that it is not clean and objectively true that one nation is always ethically superior to another.

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Sure it is.

If you (or anybody else) wants to count casualties, approximately 8 million Chinese dies in the Chinese Civil Wars. Surely the life of a Vietnamese person is not more valuable to America than a life of a Chinese person is to China.

And we also ought to include the lives of the between 15 and 45 million who starved to death in Mao's "Great Leap Forward."

It is also worth noting that China was largest foreign backer of North Vietnam, providing "both financial aid and the deployment of hundreds of thousands of military personnel in support roles" (quote from wikipedia), so it is untrue to say that the United States in uniquely culpable for the war's casualties.

You are assuming a perspective again. There are many perspectives.

For example different people will pick different ways to count. Some will distinguish between domestic and foreign, claiming that there some ethical difference. These people might claim that a government should kill its citizens that cause problems in the name of social order, and that the US is unjust and horrible because they don't kill enough dissenters.

Some will claim that lives lost in mistakes are different than lives lost in oppression and war. These people might claim that the great leap forward was good in intention, but lacked nuance in execution that could have saved many lives.

Some will claim that government and corporations should not be separated so will point the all the slave owning corporations and humans rights abusing industrialists in the USA and lump them in with the government.

All I am saying is that there are gray areas here, and that I cannot see a way to see different perspectives as objectively wrong or right. In some things there is objective right and wrong. Does Man-made CO2 change the climate, yes unambiguously no amount of perspective wiggling changes this. Is it ethical to make social that mildly harms one group to prevent a perceived larger harm to another, this seems fuzzier and innately requires something to be 'perceived' correctly.

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