Bin Laden’s Death – Cause for Celebration?

Osama bin Laden is dead. Americans are celebrating as if it were a football victory. The rest of the world? The rest of the world isn’t exactly sure. A commando team hunted a man down on Pakistani soil, assassinated him, then took the corpse with them and, shortly thereafter, buried it at sea. Zappzarapp!* Are they allowed to do that? That question has a lot to do with whether his death is a legitimate reason to party.

In any case, in the Western world he had always been something akin to the reincarnation of evil. But that same world is also characterized by the right to a fair trial, a legal sentence and a legitimate execution — perhaps even imprisonment for life. Where is the moral legitimacy? The answer to that could fill entire libraries.

Power Comes Out of the Barrel of a Gun

We have to accept that the U.S. military was simply in a position to gun bin Laden down. That it had not only the ability as well as the firepower to do so, but that nobody could slap their fingers for it afterwards. This approach shows that policy questions may always be traced back to the question of violence. Am I in a position to do this or that? Can I do it? If so, people often assume that I’m therefore permitted to do it as well.

If I have the power, then my connection to moral principles always involves a decision. And in that connection, there’s always the question of which moral principles I should choose. In his rhetorically grandiose commentary on bin Laden’s execution, Barack Obama left absolutely no doubt that he considered the killing to be perfectly justifiable on moral grounds.

Questions of Power and Morals Can Never Be Mutually Exclusive

Since the morals conceived and formulated have such different underpinnings, they appear to be almost arbitrary. Even the contrasting interpretations of the Sermon on the Mount give a sense of that. Thus in the relationship of morals to power, it seems the tools chosen determine the legitimacy or illegitimacy of what is done depending on which side you stand. In any case, it is still only a means of power.

Like so much else, that shouldn’t be a reason for complaint nor for celebration. But anyone who doesn’t wish to spend his life in doubt, feeling his way in the dark, has to make decisions: for or against this or that moral principle or for the flexibility of one’s connection to power. Those who drove through the streets of New York with the stars and stripes flying from the window of their cars following bin Laden’s death have made that decision. And that settles the question of whether we’re allowed to celebrate bin Laden’s death: It depends which side of the moral question we chose.

* Translator’s Note: This term seems to have been taken from Polish slang to describe things that have disappeared. It is used much like the term “abracadabra” or the phrase, “Now you see it, now you don’t.”