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Arglebargle III posted:On the other hand, is killing or otherwise victimizing people wrong in the first place? There are so many of them; too many really. Obviously I don't want to be raped and/or murdered, but from an objective standpoint what's the net effect of, say, some random kid being violently and painfully killed? What's the environmental externality this potential person would have inflicted on the world? What would he really have accomplished in a lifetime of gorging on cheap calories, mindless consumerism and unfulfilling relationships? What if, god forbid, he or she should have children? And, in the long run, and with the impenetrable loneliness of the human condition, does it matter what pains or indignities this putative person suffered in his or her moments or hours of being dispatched? Not in any tangible sense. Maybe we should rethink the harm, or indeed the value of the "monsters, ax murders, and pedophiles" of society. This line of reasoning appears self-defeating. The reasons you give for why we might entertain the idea that human lives have zero or negative value (consumption of finite resources, pollution, contribution to environmental destruction) are only considered bad because of their deleterious effects on human life. If we don't care about human lives then there's no more reason to be sad about climate change than there is to be sad about the oxygen crisis that once exterminated 99% of life on earth. If I agree with you that humans have no value, then I have no reason to care about the destruction of human civilization, but that's the only reason you've offered that I should agree with you.
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Mar 21, 2015 17:01
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Rakosi posted:I don't see many costs to myself or society if I did it, so why wouldn't it be okay? Yeah vigilanteism by private citizens who feel certain about who the criminal elements are sure doesn't have any disturbing history in the United States, nope!
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Mar 22, 2015 07:46
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Rakosi posted:Murder is only unlawful killing. If the state legalized it it wouldn't be murder, but putting that aside I'm interested why you would care at all about the welfare of someone like in my hypothetical situation. I get the feeling that if the roles were reversed and it was you that had your kid killed, raped and then eaten you wouldn't be so quick to say, categorically, "murder is wrong". Even if I would react violently to someone who hurt my kid, that doesn't prove that my impulses were proportional and just, nor does it validate torture. There's a reason we put decisions about guilt and sentencing up to parties who aren't directly involved, because going with the gut feelings of relatives of the victims doesn't make for a consistent and fair legal system. For example, what if dad wants to beat the guy to death but mom doesn't? What now, just go with the impulse of the most violent victim? Let everyone have a turn? What if brother is just a psychopath and wants a legal excuse to torture someone to death?
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Mar 22, 2015 07:57
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Rakosi posted:Ad hominem much? I don't have any dreams of that at all; it was a hypothetical situation and I was being honest about my likely reaction, and whether or not people not in that position would have a right to criticize. I don't much care about the right to criticize. We do have the right to stop people from committing torture out of personal vendettas though!
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Mar 22, 2015 09:20
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Who What Now posted:And I'll never understand the lust people like you have for murdering as many innocents as it takes so long as sometimes you also happen to kill someone guilty every once in awhile. He's not wrong. Exterminate all humans, it's the only sure way to stop human-on-human rape. Man up and end rape, you sissy liberal. Mandy Thompson posted:Strictly speaking we're not suppose to sentence people at all unless they are thoroughly proven though, even if its for shoplifting or burglary. Alternate interpretation: Blue Raider is saying we should suspend the death penalty until we overhaul the court system and guarantee that no one is convicted who isn't thoroughly proven to have committed the crime, which is obviously not the case in our justice system today considering that exonerations happen. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Mar 23, 2015 |
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Mar 23, 2015 05:44
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Blue Raider posted:execution should only be administered in retroactively provable situations. something that can be on record. dna, film, something that 100% incontrovertibly can be proven at any subsequent time. no witnesses, no firearm forensics, no et cetera Okay so not in the US justice system then, which has a pretty terrible track record at not executing innocent people, got it.
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Mar 23, 2015 06:44
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Why does society need closure? I'm not directly harmed because a murder happened somewhere, what do I get out of the suffering of the criminal? Pleasure in watching suffering? And who determines how much suffering is enough to give closure for the relatives of a murder victim? Do we leave it up to them?
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Mar 23, 2015 07:26
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wateroverfire posted:We could! Or we couldn't! If we can't choose in any meaningful sense than it's about the same, isn't it? We're no morally better or worse, no more or less culpable for the outcomes of our policy, no matter which way we go. But if we can choose than so can the hypothetical transgressors and that presents a problem because it means they too have to be held to account for their actions, and not only us. This doesn't follow. Whether determinism is true or not, we can still say things about what courses of actions lead to what outcomes. "Not touching a hot stove will prevent you from feeling pain." "Accepting/rejecting retributive justice will lead to less suffering." You don't necessarily need to make a moral judgment about people to talk about how to encourage or discourage certain behaviors. We don't generally say a toddler is moral or immoral for trying to stick a fork in an electrical outlet, but we still take steps to discourage them from doing it all the same. Even if we accept determinism and believe that people aren't morally culpable for their actions, it's still meaningful to talk about the external incentives that can discourage criminal actions.
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Mar 23, 2015 07:55
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wateroverfire posted:It's worth considering that your ancestors are mostly people who didn't think letting poo poo slide was the healthier way to go, when they could do something about it, and as a result of that they secured a world now guarded for you by other people who are most definitely not willing to let poo poo slide in which you can serenely philosophize about cultivating a sanitary mind. This is an appeal to tradition and it's pretty bad reasoning, which I would have thought would be obvious.
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Mar 23, 2015 08:00
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I don't know man, even if it were proven unambiguously that humans are biological machines with no meaningful agency, I expect I would continue to eat breakfast, wipe my rear end, and care about whether my loved ones were raped. Even with actual machines that we know are deterministic and have programmed, we can talk about how effective their program is at achieving the purpose for which it was written. If you and I already agree on the goal of minimizing suffering, then it absolutely makes sense to talk about the effectiveness of various strategies.
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Mar 23, 2015 08:15
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wateroverfire posted:It's an appeal to widen your perspective. You have the privilege of honing your moral purity because other people are very specifically willing to be bloody minded on your behalf. We live in a state of nature you don't have to experience because others have done it for you, and are doing it for you right now. Well okay, but any current policy can be defended on those same grounds: you have the privilege of honing your moral purity because other people are willing to X on your behalf. You don't have to experience the consequences of not-X because others are doing X for you and are doing X right now. Not very sound logic if you can swap out your policy with anything that is happening and get the same results. Hell, a Stalinist could argue the same way: you have the privilege of honing your moral purity because you benefit from the benevolence of Very Serious People who already shot the bourgeois.
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Mar 23, 2015 08:34
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wateroverfire posted:Congrats on feeling morally superior from your naive perspective of extreme privilege, I guess? It's great that you are safe and secure enough to take a poo poo on society without any consciousness of how, yes, things you're not comfortable with are actually required in order to preserve that for you and not vestigal barbarism we've somehow outgrown. You realize that most of the industrialized world has abolished the death penalty, right? If you're going to argue that abolition is for naive babies who don't Know What It Takes to protect society like Very Serious People do, you're going to have to show that's actually the case.  Whoa ho ho there, almost all of Europe, you've taken a poo poo all over your society. Maybe you should be more like Saudi Arabia, Iran and, North Korea! What, specifically, are these bad things that Europeans and Canadians have to "check their privilege" about, and can you show a correlation between them and states that have abolished the death penalty? VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 01:48 on Mar 24, 2015 |
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Mar 24, 2015 01:12
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