Week 2 Assignment 1 final

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Running head: IS IT MORAL TO SHOOT DOWN A HIJACKLED PLANE STUDY 1 Is it Moral to Shoot Down a Hijacked Plane Case Study Barry T. Hollister University of Arizona Global Campus PHO 208: Ethical and Moral Reasoning Professor Micheal Pelt February 13, 2023

IS IT MORAL TO SHOOT DOWN A HIJACKLED PLANE STUDY 2 Is it Moral to Shoot Down a Hijacked Plane Case Study While terrorist attacks like the one that happened on September 11th, 2001, are rare, they present us with an important ethical question and a moral controversy. This case study will examine whether it is moral to shoot down a hijacked passenger jet to prevent it from harming more people or simply is it moral to shoot down a hijacked airplane? Reflecting on philosophical texts and theories can help our understanding of philosophical theories and how they apply to our ethical questions. I will give an overview of utilitarianism, its theories, core principles, and philosophers. I will also explain and apply utilitarianism to the central moral controversy of the central ethical question in this paper. On the morning of September 11th, 2001, four passenger jets were hijacked by nineteen Islamic terrorists. American Airlines flight 11 and 77 and Unites Airlines flight 175 and 93 were targeted for hijacking. The Islamic terrorists used box cutters to attack and disable the crews of the four flights. One plane crashed into the World Trade Center North Tower, and a plane crashed into the South tower, collapsing them both. A third plane crashed into the Pentagon. The fourth plane was partially retaken by passengers and crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. The critical planner of the attack was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Khalid joined the Muslim brotherhood at 16. He went to school at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in the United States. Khalid met Osama Bin Laden in 1996 and presented the operation that would eventually become the 9/11 attacks. The plot's leaders ran the operation from Hamburg, Germany, and soon-to-be 9/11 hijackers to flying lessons in the United States. The central moral controversy of this study is one that people have had to make throughout history. In World War II, the German armed forces used an encrypted code to transmit orders and information to its forces. This encryption was dubbed the enigma code

IS IT MORAL TO SHOOT DOWN A HIJACKLED PLANE STUDY 3 (Sebag-Montefiore, Pg. 1, 2001). If the Germans knew the allies cracked the code, they would change it. Which meant the allies would allow some attacks on their forces. In their eyes, this action was the greater good because, in the end, knowing the code would eventually save more allied lives than it cost. An example provided in How Should One Live: An Introduction to ETHICS & MORAL REASONING (Thames, Ch. 3 Going Deeper, 2018) provides a valuable experiment to help grasp this moral controversy. Imagine a train is coming. You have control over the switch to change what track the train will go down. If the train travels down track A, it will run over and kill one person on the tracks. If the train travels down track B will kill ten people on the tracks. The ethical question we arrive at is whether it is moral to kill a person to save many more innocent lives. The philosophical text I will reflect on in this paper is a paragraph on utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill. The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. To give a clear view of the moral standard set up by the theory, much more requires to be said; in particular, what things it includes in the ideas of pain and pleasure; and to what extent this is left an open question. But these supplementary explanations do not affect the theory of life on which this theory of morality is grounded- namely, that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for

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