OK: I have a number of thoughts here:
I'm with Juleswin that I might well refrain from risking my life, for anybody, if the odds of my death were high (Even possibly less than 50%.) That's a pragmatic stance, not an ethical one, and I doubt I'd sit there and do math to figure out the odds of survival before stepping in in a given case.
But that's not really how I interpreted the OP. The OP is not really about risking your life, or at least, not the way I saw it. The OP is really about the "Obama supporter"... essentially, is the Obama supporter somehow less worth helping than a Ron Paul supporter.
My answer would be "regardless, helping people is a good thing to do."
Then someone will throw out police, politicians, Bernake, or the like. Now, the key difference there is that the people in question actually ARE aggressors, rather than just supporting aggression. Which makes my decision a little tougher. Holding evil thoughts is rightly not a capital crime. Saying evil things, again, not a capital crime. Actively trying to control other people's lives, a little more debatable. The question for me in these types of cases would be (assuming I thought it through this much, which I might not) would have to be "Are this person's actions evil enough that I think they 'deserve' death?" The 'deserve' cannot be in a theological sense, for we all deserve death by that definition, but in a political sense; in other words, are this person's actions at least as evil as one civilian murdering one other civilian. If so, I wouldn't support saving the person. If not, I would support saving them, even if I might not do it because of personal risk or whatever. Since merely thinking or saying that statism is good is nowhere near the level of murdering one person, I believe such a person (Obama supporter) does warrant being helped, even if I might not do it for personal reasons (ie. High risk to life.)
As for the Iraq War, I don't see how this is in any way comparable. The way I see it, there are at least four reasons that immediately come to mind as to why the Iraq War is immoral:
1. Civilians were killed
2. Money was stolen from the American people to fund the war.
3. As the US government waged the war claiming to represent the entire American nation, it has placed the war and any anger that may come from that war on the backs of the American people.
4. The US government is itself evil and murderous, and so does not have a leg to stand on when it claims that Iraq's government is evil and warrants being overthrown for whatever reason.
While a private militia could perhaps overthrow the Iraqi government without the second, third, and fourth problems, I think the first one kind of is what it is, and so for that reason alone I don't see any way such a war could be waged ethically by a private corporation. On top of that, IF the Iraqi people want the government they have, who are we as outsiders to tell them any different? This point isn't necessarily obvious to me the way the other four points are, so I didn't list it, but I'd welcome any critiques anyone has on that point. But even with that point, there are at least four reasons the US war in Iraq was wrong.
I don't see any similar ethical issues with shooting a robber who is robbing someone's store, unless the OP has himself robbed stores and is on the run from the law for doing so (which would fall under #4.) Otherwise, I don't really see the issue.
I'm not opposed to all intervention, and I think good reasons for that non-opposition have been explained already. I am at least in some sense opposed to any government intervention because of point #2, and certainly all foreign intervention by government because of all four of the above points, but if you just use the word "intervention" at a basic level, sometimes its right and sometimes its not (And no, I'm not going to criticize anyone who calls them self a "noninterventionist" if they are obviously referring to government intervention, I simply make this clarification here because in this thread "intervention" has been used to refer to personal as well as governmental intervention.)
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Originally Posted by jllundqu
Even though I live too far away to be there in a time of need.
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