Steve Gimbel of Philosopher’s Playground is guest blogging at the excellent Lawyers, Guns and Money. His first post is calling bullshit on the admin response to Haditha, and well worth reading for that, but I want to draw attention to this (emphasis mine):

Acting in an ethically proper sense is a two step process. Step 1: determine what is the right thing to do in the situation. Step 2: do it. In most cases step 1 is trivially easy; it is step 2 — having the moral courage to stand up and do what is right, even when it is not expedient –that is most frequently the tricky one. […]
But there are a few questions for which step 1 is not only non-trivial, it is incredibly difficult. This is where you bring out philosophers to set the table by clarifying the issue and then everyone joins in to engage in the moral side of deliberative democracy or what I like to call “civil fucking discourse”: it’s civil in that it is an open-minded, good faith attempt to find truth, but it is not civil in that it is a knock-down, drag-out, intellectual cage match where all ideas are welcome in the ring regardless of where they sit on the political/religious/ideological spectrum.

“Civil fucking discourse”. I love it. I think the blogosphere has found its motto.