is it right to CELBRATE ?

Is Rejoicing Morally Justified?
Still, some Americans are wrestling with the rightness and wrongness of the party-like responses. A popular status update on Facebook today is a quote attributed to Mark Twain: "I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure."
On a practical level, some people are concerned that such public displays of elation — similar to those following a sports victory or a political election — will create more animosity and even greater danger. "This closes a chapter, but the most sobering aspect of this is that this is not the end," Jack Cloonan, a former FBI special agent, told The Huffington Post. "The reasons they hate us have not subsided, and this could reinvigorate things."
And the question remains: Is there moral philosophical justification for rejoicing over the demise of someone like bin Laden?
"Most people believe that the killing we do in war is justified as the only way to disable an enemy whose cause we believe to be unjust," says Christine Korsgaard, a philosophy professor at Harvard University. "And although it is more controversial, many people believe, or at least feel, that those who kill deserve to die as retribution for their crimes.
"But if we confuse the desire to defeat an enemy with the desire for retribution against a criminal, we risk forming attitudes that are unjustified and ugly — the attitude that our enemy's death is not merely a means to disabling him, but is in itself a kind of a victory for us, or perhaps even the attitude that our enemy deserves death because he is our enemy."
It is important, Korsgaard says, "not to confuse the desire for retribution with the desire to defeat an enemy. But because terrorism partakes of both crime and war, it is perfectly natural, and perhaps legitimate, to have both of these attitudes towards Osama bin Laden: to think that we had to disable him, and to think that he deserved to die."
The two sentiments should be kept apart, she says. "If we have any feeling of victory or triumph in the case, it should be because we have succeeded in disabling him — not because he is dead."



http://www.npr.org/2011/05/02/135927693/is-it-wrong-to-celebrate-bin-ladens-death