Should the United States Carry Out a Military 'Style' Intervention in Mexico in Order to "Take Out" the Mexican Drug Cartels? “We (denizens of the United States or U.S.) should send the [U.S.] military to take out the cartels.” This rather confidently stated proposition permeated the airwaves of a gathering I was attending on a recent Sunday afternoon. The person in question then followed up by saying that they ‘felt sorry for the [Mexican] people’, and so ‘we’ ought to act accordingly. If I understand correctly, then the conclusion draws on a humanitarian concern. That is to say, the concern proposes “The United States stands to achieve a humanitarian consequence, if it carries out a military 'style' intervention in Mexico in order to "take out" the Mexican drug cartels.” Sans a myriad of relevant objections from historical arguments (which we shall not enter into here), there are a few assumptions made by this premise—we ought to car
Written by Jeremy Watkins-Quesada, Viva La Resistencia member ***This paper was presented at the International Conference on “Rethinking Responsibility: Agents and Structures”: John Molson School of Business, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada. KEYWORDS: collective responsibility, disassociation, genuine opposition thesis, genuine support, negative duty, old ways of thinking, evil practices, medical reasons, Leviathan 1. Introduction Juha Raikka argues against disassociation from collective responsibility based on a premise of logical inconsistency insofar as the conclusion ‘one is not guilty’ does not necessarily follow from the premise that ‘ everyone is guilty.’ Raikka builds his case on a fictionalized national, ethnic, or cultural group that participates in human sacrifices for the sake of ‘medical reasons’ or human health. [i] He concedes that this fictionalized group bears an uncanny resemblance to Western society and their proposed collective responsibility