Annotated Bibliography: A Generation That Didn T Agree

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Cedarville University DigitalCommons@Cedarville English Seminar Capstone Research Papers Department of English, Literature, and Modern Languages 5-6-2014 "A Generation That Didn't Agree": The Paramountcy of Multidimensional Moral Hierarchy in the System of a Down Discography Jesse A. Silk Cedarville University, jsilk@cedarville.edu Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/ english_seminar_capstone Part of the Music Commons Recommended Citation Silk, Jesse A., ""A Generation That Didn't Agree": The Paramountcy of Multidimensional Moral Hierarchy in the System of a Down Discography" (2014). English Seminar Capstone Research Papers. Paper 25. http://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/english_seminar_capstone/25…show more content…
Baumgartner’s eagerness for the global involvement of the defense industry is illustrated by the collective first person in the song “Attack,” in which the band sings “The cold insincerity of steel machines / have consumed our euphoria / transforming us into muted dreams / dreaming of the day that we attack” (4-8). System of a Down can validate its opposition to the military-industrial complex, whether through the support of Byrne’s circumstantial ethics or a combination of logic and awareness mixed with the emotion of the human conscience that resists Baumgartner. Though System of a Down and ethicist Paul Ramsey posit numerous differing views on warfare, Ramsey still proposes helpful clarifications that undergird the band’s claims. The band seeks to expose the fact that “the war-making power still today basically assumes that the topmost leaders estimate the cause, count the cost, and declare justified war” (Ramsey 130). Moreover, in regard to bombing, a chief concern of System of a Down’s moral commentary on violence, Ramsey asserts that “we do not need to know who and where the noncombatants are in order to know know that indiscriminate bombing exceeds the moral limits of warfare that can ever barely be justified” (144). However, while Ramsey’s delineations of war’s ethical boundaries are valuable, the band would ultimately consider them insufficient, because the question Ramsey seeks to answer, “How shall modern war be conducted justly?” is incongruous with the band’s moral epistemology. Modern warfare is an innately unjust phenomenon that

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