Judicial Burqa in the trial of Rachel Corrie's killing by Israeli soldiers

The Israeli soldier at the controls of a bulldozer that crushed to death 23-year-old Rachel Corrie in Gaza in March 2003 is due to give evidence tomorrow in the civil lawsuit brought by the American activist's family.
However the judge hearing the case in Haifa has ruled that, for security reasons, the soldier can testify anonymously from behind a screen, denying Cindy and Craig Corrie the opportunity to face the man who directly caused their daughter's death.

That's ironic because ethics inspired by judaic religious tradition focuses on the face as a metaphor for humanity and a central point in the moral sentiment.

UPDATE: AT the trial today october 21st, YB, the veiled soldier who was at the command of the bulldozer that killed Rachel Corrie, told the court that calling an ambulance to help someone who was hit by his bulldozer 'was not his level of command'...

In the company of moral philosophers

I am not blogging much these days. I am reading a lot for my teaching, mostly moral philosophy.

We are always liable to error in making particular moral judgments, sometimes intellectual errors such as going beyond the evidence or relying upon some unsubstantiated generalization, sometimes moral errors such as being over-influenced by our liking and disliking of particular individuals or projecting on to a situation some unrecognized phantasy or exhibiting either insensitivity to or sentimentality about suffering. And our intellectual errors are often rooted in moral errors. We need therefore to have tested our capacity for moral deliberation or judgment in this or that type of situation by subjecting our arguments and judgments systematically to the critical scrutiny of reliable others, of co-workers, family, friends. Such others, of course, are not themselves always reliable and some may influence us in ways that strengthen the propensity to error. So to have confidence in our deliberations and judgments we need social relationships of a certain kind, forms of social association in and through which our deliberations and practical judgments are subjected to extended and systematic critical questioning.(p.191)

Alasdair MacIntyre, 2006. Ethics and Politics, Selected Essays, vol.2, Cambridge University Press.

Reading this passage from MacIntyre, it strikes me that our society has just achieved the contrary. We don't value any rational critique of our actions and thinking, we value exactly the contrary, and in doing so we are loosing moral ground...