First, again, Chomsky is pretty right to be direct with Harris as re: Harris misquoting him in print. What Harris could have said was “You’re right. I’ll fix that. I’m sorry.” Since Harris didn’t say any one of these things, it would have been entirely appropriate for Chomsky to stop talking with him right then.
And again, Harris’ refusal to address his own actions doesn’t speak well for him.
Next, getting again in to the specifics:
And how do you know what state leaders’ intentions are?
Since we can’t read minds, we have to go with what they say.
Which therefore leads us inevitably to these leaders’ subjective moral justifications - because there is no firm logical way to distinguish their justifications from “intent”.
Which brings us back to Chomsky’s point, and which again shows he understands Harris’ argument better than Harris does. It makes no sense to use a state’s justifications as some sort of rule to assert that state’s actions are any more or less immoral.
Again, to Chomsky’s point: the Nazis stated intent was to help humanity. They just conveniently defined anyone who got in their way as not human. To the Nazis, the deaths of those in their way were thus some regrettable but necessary collateral damage towards the greater human value of building the Third Reich.
This shows the problem with Harris’ stated consideration of leaders’ intent.
Chomsky is not engaging in cheap points or strawmen in his pointing out of fascist states’ justifications. He is literally showing how Harris argument can be used by nations to justify their worst actions.
Yes, actions can be weighed and some can be worse than others. But I think it’s hard to overstate how wrong Harris is, to claim that intent is something that can be reliably used to separate good state actions from bad state actions.
