By Dr Christos Hadjiioannou
Often in philosophy we devise mental experiments through which we test various moral theories. The experiments test the limits and possibilities of both the theories themselves and the people who adopt them. They are usually moral scenarios that we have devised in our imagination. Sometimes these dilemmas are extreme and improbable, but often they are extreme and possible.
A mental experiment that often appears in various versions is the well-known train experiment: "Imagine that you have control of a railway switch that determines on which tracks a train moving without brakes will move. One rail leads to a group of 5 people chained to the track, and the other rail leads to only one chained person. If you do nothing, the train will drive off and kill the 5 people. But if you flip the switch, the train will be driven and kill the one person. What are you doing?"
What is happening in Gaza today looks like a mental experiment in the making. I am referring to the murder of thousands of children by the Israeli army. It is so extreme that reality itself could be seen as the product of an imagination that wanted to test our morality. So let us imagine that reality was imaginary, and see it as a mental experiment: "Imagine that you have entered into cooperation with a neighboring state at the expense of another neighboring state that is your common enemy, on the grounds that 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend'. Imagine that the friendly state wages a war and in six months wipes out tens of thousands of children. You have the opportunity to condemn your friendly state, and separate your position, and as a result relations cool down. What are you doing?
The answer, of course, has been given in reality, which makes the mental experiment useless. The majority of Greek Cypriot society does not separate its position, it supports the friendly state while it murders thousands of children. We will not analyse the moral theory on which this choice is justified, however it is some kind of conscious cynical-opulist attitude. So we know under what conditions and under what circumstances Greek Cypriot society is able to tolerate such a huge crime. Support for the allied state and its heinous crimes is justified on the basis of national interest and especially the need to safeguard the principle: "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". The original enemy is, of course, Turkey, and the enemy of my enemy is Israel.
Many new ethical questions arise, but I will focus on one. If Greek Cypriot society has the opportunity to condemn the murders of 15 thousand children and does not do so because the perpetrator is the enemy of my enemy, what is it capable of doing to its own enemy? My own view is that implicitly some conclusions are being drawn. When it does not condemn and tolerate something so heinous, when it is easy enough to condemn it even on principle because it wants to support the enemy of its enemy, I think that this society is also capable of committing the same crimes directly to its own enemy. If it has no moral barriers when someone else commits them, where will it find the defenses to prevent members of its own society from committing them?
One could protest and say: no, our society is not capable of doing what it tolerates its friends to do, because it has other moral demands on itself and other demands on third parties. That would be an odd position to take, though, since people usually lower the moral bar when it comes to justifying their own bad behavior, and raise it for others.
In conclusion: with the same reasoning that the majority of the Greek Cypriot society tolerates the murders of 15 thousand children as a "necessary evil" and does not rebel, it would justify something similar on the part of the Greek Cypriot society towards its own enemy. After all, anyone who disagrees and feels wronged by this conclusion, let them separate their position and come out and explain how and why they would not do so, and why they have not rebelled against their friend when he commits such a heinous crime.