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I don't think you have to even have to reference structures like ethics and morality when it comes to this issue. You should have a basic level of empathy for other people no matter what messed up stuff they've done purely because it's better for you than hubris, hatred, anger, and indifference. Treating other people as inhuman or beneath contempt is an utterly toxic attitude that can affect your social life, emotional security, and life outlook in huge and terrible ways. Have you ever met a person who seemed bound and determined to be spiteful and miserable no matter what happens? It's not pretty. Especially if they are older and have already been doing it a while, since at that point they are often in a nearly inescapable cognitive rut and have run off everyone that ever gave half a poo poo or more about them. The human mind is a self-reinforcing machine and reinforcing hatred or indifference toward your fellow humans has personal as well as societal drawbacks.
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Mar 26, 2015 21:27
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Wild Horses posted:That sounds fine and all and then you realise its actually rapists we are talking about. No matter of morality talk is gonna change that they're human garbage. Being a perfect human being is quite hard. Rape is particularly detestable, but we are all guilty of crimes that prove us to be less than the absolute paragons of morality. It's not unthinkable that you have knowingly hosed over people in similar if not nearly as heinous ways. For example, you've presumably already been through puberty and have lied to and taken advantage of your parents in numerous ways. Those are the people you owe more to than anyone else on the entire planet, you loving monster. But that's ok because bad people like you are people too. Just because you are capable of betrayal does not mean that you are not also capable of loyalty. And just because you hosed someone over doesn't mean you can't love or otherwise care for them. People do bad poo poo in their lives but are also capable of goodness. It's a story as old as humanity. It's so intertwined in our existence that it might as well be defined as humanity itself.
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Mar 26, 2015 22:11
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wateroverfire posted:It seems like you're unwilling to hold anyone accountable for what they do and that seems really weird to me. Many people will experience fear or hunger. Only a few will use them as an excuse to do something terrible. And many of those that do won't be particularly afraid, or hungry, or horny, or subject to whatever other IRRESISTABLE URGE you feel they couldn't possibly deal with in any other way. They know when they've done wrong and they don't care or believe they're justified in their choices. There's something to be said for personal accountability but this quote betrays a very simplistic and naive notion of how we make decisions. The Stanford Prison experiment collapsed into chaos not because the guards gave into their urges to abuse their authority, but because peoples' decisions are informed by their environment. Ergo a violent environment produces more violent decisions. In fiction, evil often has no ontological inertia. When the bad guy is killed his spooky tower immediately falls down and the people of the story can start getting back to living in peace and decency. This isn't how it really works. Once you've been stuck in a lovely situation, the impulse is to continue acting upon that shittiness. Longstanding ethnic conflicts that no one can stop no matter what aren't that way because the ethnicities involved are horrible violent barbarians. The decisions of the people involved are merely being informed by the conflicts. There is certainly a subset of people who will willfully do wrong for their own gain and never feel a drop of remorse but true sociopathy is rare. Much more common are the wrongs committed in the act of going with the flow whether it's conscious or not.
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Mar 27, 2015 16:55
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Mandy Thompson posted:When I think of people in jail, I think of this Richard Pryor routine. Agreed, you don't protect the monsters among us for their own sake, you do it for yourself and everyone else's sake. Decency ultimately leads to more decency and barbarity to more barbarity. It's important to act like every human being is decent and is deserving of dignity because that's a lie we're still in the process of making true. In the state of nature there is no such thing as dignity. The idea that one should minimize suffering and not gently caress with people too much is an entirely contrived one, you'll never see a lion not kill a rival male's cub because it would feel positively AWFUL about it. It is easily possible for humans to act as brutishly as it is in their nature to act. When we do, everyone is worse off. When we rise above that base nature, everyone benefits. The link is direct and causal as much as it might not look like it: look at WWII specifically or war in general for examples of how an entire society can slide back toward barbarism and subsistence living because of the willingness of a minority of its population to do whatever it takes. Europe was bombed nearly into the ground. The greater part of an entire generation was slaughtered. We literally nuked two whole cities. Say what you want about necessity, as an American I can at least partially buy that line, but it's still loving horrifying to think about. On the one hand, we now have powers that are so great they require us to act civilized 100% of the time or else we can literally destroy ourselves. On the other hand we are not yet so advanced morally that we can afford to backslide. To quote Sagan: The Sagan posted:In our tenure on this planet we've accumulated dangerous evolutionary baggage — propensities for aggression and ritual, submission to leaders, hostility to outsiders — all of which puts our survival in some doubt. But we've also acquired compassion for others, love for our children and desire to learn from history and experience, and a great soaring passionate intelligence — the clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity. Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet Earth. As much as we'd like to think so, when it comes to decency we are not talking about a game that's been won yet. As Sagan notes, the ultimate result is still in doubt. Its comfy to think of ourselves as the paragons of civilized behavior but there is still plenty of room for a more socially enlightened civilization of the future to look upon some of our current habits as just as unfortunate, uncivilized, and self-defeating as things like feeding people to the lions or crucifictions.
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Apr 2, 2015 16:45
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