Ah...you made me realise I missed a really important point: the importance of respecting other people's autonomy, and the fact that the more indirect your experience/relationship to something is, the less well you understand it and the less effectively you can change it.
Which adds up to: all things being equal, if you're going to expend a certain amount of energy it's probably more ethical and more effective to change your own behaviour than to change anyone else's.
So, to return to the good samaritan example, not attacking people > helping an attack victim > actively pursuing attackers. Are you arguing that it is better not to help attack victims or am I missing your point? I can understand not pursuing the attackers, while I disagree I can kind of see the logic (and I believe in pluralism and all that :)), but if someone is asking you for help and you can help them then I think it's immoral not to.
I mean with the example of American foreign policy, I think the main issue is that they a)Actively do a lot of harmful things overseas (pursuing destructive trade policies for example) and b)Don't respect other countries autonomy even when they're "helping" ("liberating" Iraq against their will, for example)
So step one is definitely for them to stop that. But I don't think it's bad for them to support the requests for aid from countries with problems they're not able to solve themselves (after an earthquake say. Or as a result of previous American foreign policy)
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Which adds up to: all things being equal, if you're going to expend a certain amount of energy it's probably more ethical and more effective to change your own behaviour than to change anyone else's.
So, to return to the good samaritan example, not attacking people > helping an attack victim > actively pursuing attackers. Are you arguing that it is better not to help attack victims or am I missing your point? I can understand not pursuing the attackers, while I disagree I can kind of see the logic (and I believe in pluralism and all that :)), but if someone is asking you for help and you can help them then I think it's immoral not to.
I mean with the example of American foreign policy, I think the main issue is that they
a)Actively do a lot of harmful things overseas (pursuing destructive trade policies for example) and
b)Don't respect other countries autonomy even when they're "helping" ("liberating" Iraq against their will, for example)
So step one is definitely for them to stop that. But I don't think it's bad for them to support the requests for aid from countries with problems they're not able to solve themselves (after an earthquake say. Or as a result of previous American foreign policy)