I thought this site would be the last place I’d see criticism of the “suicide bomber as cowardly” notion. Under some definitions, sure, doing something you expect to result in your death, in pursuit of a higher goal, necessarily counts as courage. However, it would be justifiable to say they are intellectually cowardly. That is, rather than advance their ideas through persuasion, and suffer the risk that they may be proven wrong and have to update their worldview; rather than face a world where their worldview is losing, they “abandoned” the world and killed a lot of their intellectual adversaries.
It is an escape. There is, after all, no “refutation” for “I’m right because I’m blowing up myself and you”.
It’s for the same reason one might apply the “coward” label to a divorced, jealous husband, who tries to “get back” at his ex-wife by killing her or their child. He, too, exposes himself to immense risk (incarceration, or if they defend themselves). He too, is pursuing a broader goal. Yet in that case, my calling him a coward is not an artifact of my disagreement with his claim that he has legitimate grievances—in fact, I might very well be on his side (i.e., that the courts did not properly adjudicate his claim).
So yes, it might be the “American” thing to say terrorists are cowardly—but that doesn’t make the claimant biased or wrong.
A few questions and comments:
1) What kind of dinner party was this? It’s great to expose non-rigorous beliefs, but was that the right place to show off your superiority? It seems you came off as having some inferiority complex, though obviously I wasn’t there. I know that if I’m at a party (of most types), for example, my first goal ain’t exactly to win philosophical arguments …
2) Why did you have to involve Aumann’s theorem? You caught him in a contradiction. The question of whether people can agree to disagree, at least it seems to me, is an unnecessary distraction. And for all he knows, you could just be making that up to intimidate him. And Aumann’s Theorem certainly doesn’t imply that, at any given moment, rectifying that particularly inconsistency is an optimal use of someone’s time.
3) It seems what he was really trying to say was someting along the lines of “while you could make an intelligence, its emotions would not be real the way humans’ are”. (“Submarines aren’t really swimming.”) I probably would have at least attempted to verify if that’s what he meant rather latching onto the most ridiculous meaning I could find.
4) I’ve had the same experience with people who fervently hold beliefs but don’t consider tests that could falsify them. In my case, it’s usually with people who insist that the true rate of inflation in the US is ~12%, all the time. I always ask, “so what basket of commodity futures can I buy that consistently makes 12% nominal?”