SHOOTING DOWN CIVILIAN AIRCRAFT: ILLEGAL, IMMORAL AND JUST PLANE STUPID
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper discusses whether it should be legal for a state to shoot down a civilian plane, converted by terrorists into a deadly suicide missile. Is it justifiable to kill innocent airline passengers to save lives on the ground? Can ‘human arithmetic’ be a legal calculus? To decide how a liberal democracy should respond to a repeat of September 11, the author examines several relevant registers of law, and attempts to discern helpful principles in murky cases of past interceptions of military and civilian aircraft. After concluding that law can provide no definitive answer, and, indeed, has shied away from sodoing, he turns to morality, tending to find her more phlegmatic in this distasteful inquiry. At the outset, it should be noted that the suggestion here is not that threatening passenger aircraft should never be shot out of the sky; rather, that such resorts should be legally prohibited. That is, in certain circumstances, interception of a civil flight might well be the best thing to do, the most laudable action, yet remain a wrong, a lesser evil, punishable in law. In other words, in extreme cases, the shooting of a plane may be morally justified, but it should not be legally excused - this does not entail that morality and law sourly part company; rather that they develop and refine their understanding; that the rule of law and integrity of society may be preserved, if not restored, by the seemingly Draconic punishment of heroes. It is hoped that the quarrying of a specific situation might extract valuable lessons of broader use. The author’s preference here is to leave these more general lessons unexpressed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".