WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
It's difficult to answer your question without self-doxxing. Certainly I live somewhere rather smaller and accordingly homeless-saturated than Chicago. The kind of encounter I described is more on the order of a few times a month. It's also worth noting that this is something I do when shopping for groceries or the like, i.e. when I have time to myself; I don't tend to travel on foot when it comes to getting to & off work. I'm talking about the kinds of people you'll find lurking as near to the supermarket as supermarket security will allow, and the like. People at bus stops. Very, very occasionally, people who knock at my door.
But in any case, yes, obviously this doesn't work if you encounter ten beggars every single day. The point of the anecdote is not "never walk past a homeless person" but "never walk past a homeless person just because you screen out their existence as a neutral fact of the universe". If you can't help then you can't help; I wouldn't personally help every single neighbor on my street if every house but mine got rubbled overnight, either.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
Certainly I've considered it. I would, on the whole, be surprised if there were very many whose preferences along those lines were innate to such a precise degree that nothing else - not violent sports, not hardcore BDSM - could sate their desires. Especially, in terms of the Glorious Transhumanist Future, once we bring VR into it. Now of course, again as per Scott's "short end of a trade-off" concept, I'm not saying that fulfilling those specific preferences for that tiny fringe of humanity should be a priority. But in terms of envisioning the utopia at the end of the rainbow, then yes, I do think a world in which we contrive some way for them to live out their violent fantasies, or something close to them, without actually hurting anyone is preferable to a world in which we simply keep them denied because we deem their desires Wrong.
Anyway, I don't think we were especially talking about the fulfillment of unvirtuous desires, necessarily. I think pusher_robot was saying that the unvirtuous shouldn't get common-sense nice things even if they want them, while I think the unvirtuous should indeed get nice houses and good food and safety and so on (at least once everybody else has got them).
How do you know what they hoped for and what went through your minds?
Obviously I can only guess. Though for what it's worth I didn't necessarily mean to imply that the target of such small acts of kindness are thinking of the situation in the same terms I am, so the only real guess about the recipient's unknowable mind-state is that they didn't expect that they'd meet someone willing to spend double-digit sums on them out of the blue rather than chickenfeed, and I don't think this is an unreasonable or overly romanticized assumption.
In terms of emotionless fact, the interaction I am describing (and it's an abstracted summary of many, not a direct account of a single one) is "homeless guy approaches me/addresses me as I'm walking around town, asking for a bit of cash; I reply in more than one-word sentences and ask them what, in fact, they need, possibly telling them I was on my way to a nearby store if relevant; over a few sentences they actually come up with something that they'd need that is easy for me to purchase, I purchase it and hand it to them". I don't see what's so hard to believe about that. If you just think that the person I give stuff to must be thinking something more like "har, har, what a sucker" than "yay fundamental human brotherhood, I'd do the same for you if our positions were revesed", well, sure, some of them at least, but I don't really care. The fact that they got the stuff still means I made their day better, which is what I wanted to achieve. If you believe that beggars wouldn't make such reasonable requests in response to the open-ended offer… again, sure, some of them shoot for the moon, but I don't blame them. And by and large, beggars can't be choosers is an expression for a reason; I've never met one who when I replied that "an iPhone" is maybe out of my price range here, failed to back down to a more achievable idea.
but I do it by doing things for friends and family and actual neighbors
Oh, I do that too, which is in fact the answer to "why, specifically, a neighbor" - because the level to which I care about and help my neighbors is something that is already an established pattern of behavior I can default to.
it's only the antisocial who are excluded from the benefits of society, which is just.
I do not feel the same. I believe very heartily that a world in which everyone has everything they want is superior to one in which only the virtuous do (although I'm comfortable with prioritizing the virtuous if it's necessary to prioritize someone, a la this SSC post).
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
Ah. Hm. Well look, regarding what @WhiningCoil meant and whether my interpretation was uncharitable/a strawman, what he wrote was:
If we abandon people to the consequences of their choices, or heaven forbid their children, then that's nearly the same as putting them on a train to the nearest extermination camp. No, instead the moral thing to do is to feed, clothe and house them and allow them to have as many kids as they want, and just keep giving them more and more and more forever because resources aren't finite.
I had interpreted his tongue-in-cheek restatement of the progressive point of view as two distinct clauses, separated by the comma and the "and". That is,
[A: feed, clothe and house them and allow them to have as many kids as they want], and [B: just keep giving them more and more and more forever because resources aren't finite]
That is, I took it to be the case that "because resources aren't finite" was only meant to 'go' with the "keep giving more and more forever" bit, and as such, was not intended as a justification or modifier for the basic "feed, clothe and house them" bit. Whereas from the way you italicized "because resources are finite" in your second bullet-point restatement, you clearly interpreted "because resources are(n't) finite" as applying to the whole of the sentence. If I misunderstood WC's syntax here, it was a sincere miscommunication, not strawmanning; and I thought that it was grounds for me to dispute the first half of the sentence, the 'A' clause about the basic feeding-clothing-and-housing, without getting into the weeds of whether or not we should "keep giving them more and more forever" on top of that. I take the point that my reading was perhaps uncharitable, though again, if so, it was an honest mistake.
I deny that "with no caveats" was a lie, though. I did not say "without justification". By "caveats" I meant something of the form "except for [X amount of extremely narrow basic-needs social welfare or whatever]", not a justification for the zero-charity policy. As far as I can see there are no caveats in WhiningCoil's posts, in the sense of stated exceptions to his preferred no-free-stuff policy.
For clarity's sake: so there were occasions on which you were debating what action to take, you imagined what the hypothetical version of you in a universe with infinite resources would do, and that motivated you to take a particular action? I'm not asking you to doxx yourself, but you could be a little bit more specific? I'm genuinely curious.
Not precisely. What I meant was that, having in advance taken the time to ask myself what an ideal world would look like, in general, I am able in any given situation to readily compare things-as-they-are to what-the-world-ought-to-be. In any given situation this gives me a strong, almost aching sense of the sheer tragedy of the status quo, and yet at the same time gives me a specific target to aim at, motivating me to do what I can to close the gap in a given narrow area where I do have influence. I don't sit there picturing specific sci-fi scenarios as I'm considering a particular crisis/misfortune, it's just a constant background awareness, kind of like that LW post by Yudkowsky about the badly-designed fire alarm as a constant reminder of "it's not Eliezer Yudkowsky who's wrong, the rest of the planet is mad". Nor am I specifically asking myself what frictionless-transhuman-Wanderer would do about a given problem, so much as what frictionless-transhuman-Wanderer's reality would look like that the problem never arose in the first place, and what that implies about what aspects of the actual status quo should be regarded as problems to be solved. Often this is a more abstract process than imagining specific circumstances, of course; the "worldbuilding" exercise is more a way to crystallize my opinions on things.
But it does give me a sense of… well, let's take a very abstract, pedestrian, non-doxxy example, because again, there are things I volunteer at, work I've done, that are too specific to get into without getting too close to Googlable for comfort. But suppose if I walk past a homeless person, I don't move on like they're something dirty I don't want to step into. Because I don't think of poverty and homelessness as some great inevitability that we just have to live with. A world with zero homelessness and starvation is not just conceivable but something I have conceived, something that lives always within my heart. I look at the beggar and my immediate sentiment is, in a world that had its shit together this guy would be my neighbor. Not a close friend, necessarily, but a neighbor, someone on my street. What would I do for a neighbor who'd abruptly lost his home or all his savings or something? Certainly I wouldn't make myself a beggar and give him everything I've got, but I wouldn't walk past him while avoiding his gaze. I wouldn't just give him a token coin or two, either. No, the least I could decently do is simply ask him straight if there's anything I can do. So (provided the guy is sober enough for conversation) I do! I ask what I can do for him, not in the tone of a patronizing, self-conscious Minister To The Needy but in a familiar, neighborly, casual sort of way. I break out of that arch, let-this-moment-be-over-ASAP vibe that even people who give to the homeless tend to have when dealing with them. And typically they'll tell me, and it'll be something that for someone in my income bracket is perfectly reasonable, something I might have spent on an impulse-purchase myself, something I wouldn't give a second thought to. A warm meal, a new backpack.
And it's a small thing, but it's a small thing that they didn't dare hope for when they strapped in for another cold afternoon spent standing around on a street corner pleading silently for a pittance, and suddenly it's there in their hands. There's just no feeling like this, the feeling that just for a moment something fundamentally wrong with the world has been healed, that just for a minute the guy and I both get to live in the world that has its head screwed on right, the world where mutual assistance is a self-evident "sure thing, man. here, I hope you'll enjoy it" deal rather than something to be begged for, bled for, or even granted in a jarringly mechanical way by some centralized bureaucratic process trying to make up for the crushing Molochness of everything. It's such a wonderful feeling, and it has nothing to do with some self-flagellating death-drive - indeed my approach to existence puts paid to that. I don't feel ashamed or guilty for the nice things I get to enjoy, because I know in my bones that in the Good Universe That We Should All Be Living In If There Was A God Worth A Rat's Ass, I also have all those nice things, and enjoy them uncomplicatedly. There are just more people beside me who enjoy all the same things, because we all should. And if we told the denizens of the World That Should Be about our dear old shithole where half the planet lacks those Nice Things, I know with perfect clarity that the last thing they'd want is for those lucky 'survivors' to feel bad about enjoying what others 'lost' relative to the perfect world.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
I don't want nobody to have candles. I want a candle too! But I've spend the last 40 years of my life paying for candles for other people, and bafflingly, have been unable to afford one myself.
I think this is misconstruing the candle metaphor as I used it. "Buying a candle" isn't "buying housing/shelter/food/etc.", it's "helping people". The candles-smell-nice insight I am trying to communicate is that I want people to be helped, it's something I enjoy, something I want more of in my experience-of-the-world. It is a positive good that I essentially purchase by giving my time or money to those in need, and this is something which I feel was absent from your framing, the sense of "good things happening to other people" being something you want, for their own sake.
(Mark that I am not talking about a Catholic-indulgences-style purchase of personal self-respect through the act of self-sacrifice. I mean that the knowledge that somewhere out there some people are better off than they were before is itself an experience I value, one which I would value in much the same way whether the improvement in their circumstances is my own costly doing, or something that spontaneously happened to them without my input. It's just that sometimes, if you want something done…)
What I called ghoulishness was specifically the absence of such a 'conscience-sense': a state of mind where you don't care whether Tiny Tim lives or dies; where being told that Tiny Tim has made a miraculous recovery would be no different for you than hearing he's just croaked. I think a non-ghoul wants Tiny Tim to live in a positive sense; that they will be disappointed if they conclude that they can't afford to make that happen, or that there's nothing they can do. I want a world with happy non-dead Tiny Tims in it, in very much the same way that I want to live in a luxurious mansion and I want to make love to the girl of my dreams and I want my grandpa to not be dead. (Some of these are more achievable than others.)
People vary in how they'll handle trade-offs between those wants, of course. But most conventionally "selfish" people simply have a tendency to put their personal wants over their universal wants (i.e. non-subject-dependent preferences about world-states i.e. moral values) as opposed to lacking universal wants altogether. Ghoulishness is a somewhat different thing, a unilateral absence rather than an imbalance. I'm not actually sure whether you're ghoulish! When I spoke about a "nagging suspicion", I wasn't being euphemistic or sarcastic.
Lets drop the candle metaphor for one minute. (…)
I wish I had a more helpful reply to the personal venting than the following, because I truly appreciate you stepping back and unburdening yourself of all that background. Ultimately I can only give you sympathy and tell you that as far as I'm concerned your suffering is valid and should be a genuine concern for people with decision-making power. I don't consider what you and your local community have endured to be some sort of acceptable sacrifice in the name of improving the life circumstances of others; I think that's a very dangerous game to play with lives other than your own, particularly if you happen to be a government. I want you to be safe and housed and happy, and evidently you're only hitting 1/3.
And… that's bad. We might disagree, separately from all these value questions, on what policies would be best to resolve this - we might disagree on the extent to which the government should be willing to hurt people you regard as foreign back again in order to make it up to you if that should turn out to be necessary (though I don't think it would be!). But I do agree that it's bad.
I fully sympathize with your sense of outrage at the country having been so badly mismanaged that it got to the point where people have life-experiences like yours. I just don't think "including a term for doing-good-for-other-people-for-its-own-sake in the budget" is where the mistake is.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
First of all, I do want thank you for the elaborate reply, and especially for quoting past posts of mine. Maybe it's strange to thank someone for remembering past points you made just so that they can continue to disagree with them but I do find it earnestly validating, and a credit to this forum as a discussion space, to be able to have a debate with that level of engagement, without having to start every argument from scratch.
I don't think anyone here is at risk for advocating the latter position
Well, what can I say? This started with WhiningCoil deriding the very idea of clothing, feeding and housing the disadvantaged, with no caveats. For all your attempts to justify and soften his statement, that fact does not fill me with the same confidence. By no means do I think such people - "ghouls" in my fanciful terminology above - are a majority here, even among the more far-right posters. But they do exist. I know this because they frequently boast about their ghoulishness, sneering about universalist altruism being a pathological, contemptible, or just literally incomprehensible impulse whenever the opportunity arises. I'm not trying to start a witch-hunt - when you say that's not where you stand I'm happy to believe you! I'm just gesturing at all the people wearing big conspicuous pointy hats and handing out entry vouchers for the next satanic mass.
I'm sure I can't be alone in thinking this insistence that we go through the motions (…) I think your belief that imagining hypothetical utopias is the thing that prevents you from endorsing the democide of starving Ethiopians is both untrue from a psychological perspective and tremendously self-serving.
I think perhaps you've slightly misunderstood what I was advocating. I didn't mean that in any given dilemma you should literally stop and ask yourself "what would Jesusmy omnipotent transhuman future self with infinite resources do?". I think the Utopia-designing is a useful implementation of the kind of abstract thinking you have to do to formulate principles - to create a framework of moral philosophy, coin a system of values, whatever you want to call it. Indeed, the post you linked clarifies that I think this is something you should do when engaged in formulating principles, not what you should do every time you want to solve a specific policy question. Arguments I participate in on this forum just keep coming back to this kind of thought experiment partly because I don't have the benefit of an already-established share moral framework with the people I argue with even when we're talking about policy; and partly because a lot of those arguments are questions of moral philosophy where we fight about principles, not pragmatic policy debates, owing to us all being a bunch of geeks who enjoy abstract thinking in our off-time, not policy wonks with actual object-level debates to really sink our teeth into in a systematic way.
I would also object strongly to the claim that it's "self-serving". I have found this kind of thinking a useful steering mechanism for my conscience, and it has driven me on many occasions to do good in the world in material ways that cost me, but which, looking back, I'm proud of. That doesn't preclude you thinking that I'm an anomaly and the average person shouldn't do it because they'll get lost in their pie-in-the-sky utopias at the expense of actually doing good - but (for what it's worth to say it on an anonymous forum with no verifiability) I am not a champagne socialist cooped up in my ivory tower.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
I didn't intend to. I would happily defend the claim that as a sheer gut-level question of empathy, a vast majority of people would in fact consider it mean to stop someone who wants children from having them.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
Is the answer to "how much do I have to give to the poor and unfortunate to be considered not selfishly evil" also zero?
I think it is - it's the answer to "how much would I want the poor and unfortunate to get, in a vacuum where it's no skin off mine or anybody else's nose" that should be >0.
No. I'm not giving you one because that's not the topic of this conversation. The topic of this conversation was confirming whether you are a ghoul, and, provided that you did indeed turn out to be a bona fide ghoul, trying to make you understand that this is unusual.
(It's by no means impossible or worthless to engage in political discussions with ghouls, nor to peacefully cohabit with ghouls. Ghouls certainly deserve to be happy like everybody else. But very bad things happen when ghoulishness is obfuscated to the extent that half the population start accepting policy agendas set by ghouls and taking only things ghouls value into account, without noticing the missing "benevolence" term in the calculations.)
Let me put it like this. You seem set on never ever buying nice scented candles. Indeed, you seem to think that scented candles are a plague upon mankind, no one should buy them, and their manufacturing should be banned.
And when I query you on why you dislike candles so much, you cry out: "oh, so I should spend $3600 a month on candles, should I? I should let my family starve because all I buy is candles? I should act as though I have an unlimited bank account to be spent on candles, is that it?!"
"Well, no," I reply. "I'm not asking you to spend everything you've got on candles, let alone more than you've got. I just find the extent of your opposition to candles worrying. It'd be one thing to say that, having limited resources, there are other things you'd rather spend your money on instead; but you remain unwilling to address why it would seem so outrageous to you for a person to purchase even a couple of candles; why you think the very act makes them the unknowing slaves of Big Candle."
"Then give me a cold hard figure!" you say again. "Tell me exactly how many candles you think I should make room in my budget for! Or there's no point in engaging with you"
This is where we are now. So please try to understand: I am not arguing for a particular policy on candle-buying, here. I am trying to get to the bottom of your absolute hostility to candles as a concept. I am chasing down a nagging feeling that maybe there's something odd about your nose that makes you find the smell of scented candles disgusting rather than pleasant and soothing. The amount of candles bought is not in question. I know you claim that it is, because you argue "my opposition to candles is just a perfectly rational wariness of the slippery slope where if I start buying one candle a year, pretty soon I'll be bankrupting myself with unlimited candle purchases", but this is not how someone with a normal reaction to the smell of candles - someone who recognized that all else being equal a scented candle is a nice thing to have - would think about that question at all, even one who ultimately decides against that particular expense in a given situation.
I think "wanting everyone on Earth, regardless of their personal characteristics, to have basic safety and comfort" is a normal human preference to have, similar to "scented candles smell nice", and that a person who is not a ghoul is interested in making room in their budget for getting us closer to that as a matter of course. I think leftists like me would be prepared to have all sorts of grown-up conversations about trade-offs and practicalities with people who share that basic desire to do good for its own sake as one of their values (not, I repeat, necessarily the only thing they value), but that this is rendered more difficult by the nagging suspicion that some of the people trying to work their way into those conversations on the pretense that they're talking about the practicalities of trading various goals against one another are, in fact, ghouls.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
Well, do you think that giving them as much as actually possible in our world with finite resources would be all fine and dandy? Somehow I didn't get that impression, and that makes the hyperbole a petty snipe irrelevant to the argument.
I can respect that line of argument! But I think you're giving WhiningCoil too much credit. What he said (in a mocking, ironic way) was "the moral thing to do is to feed, clothe and house them". I don't think there is any non-strained reading of his post that rounds out to "it would of course be good to actually feed, clothe and house them, the problem is that programs meant to achieve these things will instead have various unintended negative consequences".
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
My concern is that WhiningCoil does not recognize that all else being equal it is always good, rather than neutral, for sentient beings to have nice things. What trade-offs one is prepared to countenance in the name of acquiring nice things to give to sentient beings is an entirely different question and not the topic of this thread. Many libertarians take the line of "yes, it is good to give to the poor, it's just that it's also wrong to steal, and one doesn't cancel out the other" and I have no beef with that.
Eh, some people are so mentally disabled that I've seen academic philosophers in ethics (certainly left-leaning) seriously consider whether they are capable of even consenting to sex (IIRC, concluding that some of them likely are not)
Sure. But that is not an argument about moral weight - it is not a claim that the mentally disabled deserve the joy of parenthood less than geniuses, that it is all, else being equal, less regrettable for them to be deprived of it than for a clever person to be deprived of it. That is what I find ghoulish. What you describe are arguments about whether certain mentally disabled individuals are even mentally capable of tasting that particular joy. "Can dogs safely eat chocolate?" is an entirely different question from "Provided you had a dog that could eat chocolate with no ill effects and liked it, would it be better to give a bar of chocolate to the dog than not to?".
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
Is a volunteer at an animal rescue center a slave to injured puppies? "Should" and "must" are different words, and you're somehow managing to miss the entire concept of morality - indeed, the entire concept of kindness and helpfulness - by confusing them. There are such things as supererogatory moral goods. There are, too, such things as moral duties which it is incumbent on every man to fulfill but which for various practical reasons always go wrong if you try to mandate them by law. Saying "all human beings deserve happiness" is not the same statement as "you have a duty to wear yourself down to the bone to make all human beings happy" and it is a completely different statement from "the state should be an unconstrained human-happiness-maximizer". "Charity is good" is not a call for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
No, instead the moral thing to do is to feed, clothe and house them and allow them to have as many kids as they want
Yes, it is. This is true regardless of whether you have an IQ-aware society. "No human should ever go hungry, cold and homeless, nor be barred from the joy of raising a family; all else being equal it is always more ethical to help a sentient being get these things if it wants them than not to" should be the common-sense baseline of human kindness, and has nothing to do with true meritocratic hiring vs obfuscating credentialism. People like you who think "some people are dumber than others" is equivalent with "dumb people don't deserve to be happy and safe" is precisely what leftists are afraid of when they try to bury any discourse about the biological basis of IQ and you are making their point for them with this kind of cartoonish psychopathy.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
Well, no. But that still makes coffee_enjoyer's argument that the Iranian government is "approximately sane" circular. They only get in their current situation by starting out sincerely mad (i.e. religious fanatics). Religious fanaticism is not a policy they adopted out of rational self-interest in the face of military threats that existed of their own accord; their preexisting religious fanaticism, rather, is the reason they became the target of such threats at all. Whether their fanaticism has "perks" which help it deal with the threats that the fanaticism has brought down upon them is neither here nor there.
None of this necessitates that there was ever a possible world where they spontaneously purge themselves of that mindset and negate the threats. (I do of course think there are relatively plausible timelines where Iran got increasingly secular and liberal in the 20th century instead of the pendulum swinging back - certainly they are more plausible than a timeline where 90s America spontaneously develops a love of sharia law - but that is not the point.)
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
Iran and Israel have adverse geopolitical interests.
How so?
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
From a purely consequential standpoint
I wasn't talking about a consequential standpoint at all, or indeed a moral plain. I meant that in plain, pragmatic terms, what happened was "Iran became ruled by fanatics who believe it is their holy duties to crush the Jews -> Israel viewed Iran as a threat -> the imams have a credible case that it's now necessary to keep the religious fervor up so that they have enough soldiers in case it comes to open existential war" - as distinct from "Israel becomes a threat to Iran for no articulate reason -> its government ponders a logical solution to this -> it decides to become a fanatical theocracy in order to motivate its soldiers in the event that it comes to open existential war".
In other words, I'm not saying that the US - or Israel - have some sort of inviolable taboo against antagonizing enlightenment-values democracies - I'm saying that their motives for antagonizing Iran in particular are downstream of the nature of the current regime and prevailing and ideology making it come across as a threat to the US and Israel. Therefore, in that particular case, removing those factors would have negated the basis for the tensions that Iran lives in fear of today.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
But at least half of this is circular. Iran would not need to worry about being crushed by Israel and the US if they credibly overhauled themselves into an enlightenment-values democracy: Iran is viewed as a threat by the US and Israel because they're antisemitic religious fundamentalists. That only leaves 1) and 2), and even then 2) is somewhat defanged in that if Iran were not a fanatical dictatorship, fewer intelligent people would leave.
Sure, none of this means that Iran would suddenly be welcomed by the West with open arms overnight if it stopped being a Muslim dictatorship now. It may be that they've backed themselves into a sharia-shaped corner. But sanity alone cannot have gotten them in the position they are now, even if there are rational reasons to remain tyrannical fanatics once they've started behaving like tyrannical fanatics.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
I didn't say it was abnormal, just rather less than saintly.
A terrorist is someone who uses violence for political ends
I disagree: never mind rioters, this would make every soldier or insurrectionist a "terrorist". The clue's in the name: the salient quality of terrorism is that it involves acts of extreme violence specifically intended to create fear in a wider populace. Breaking your way into the White House, killing everyone, then declaring yourself Emperor of America by right of conquest: definitely political, definitely violent, but not terrorism. Killing a thousand innocent randos across the country, then broadcasting a message in which you demand to be handed control of the country in exchange for the randomized killing to stop: terrorism.
Terrorism is a special kind of evil because it is an attempt by a weaker party to make up for its handicap by fighting maximally dirty, and we want to disincentivize that kind of thing even harder than regular political violence. I'd even go so far as to argue that terrorism needn't necessarily be political (the demands could be anything, really), though apolitical terrorism is certainly non-central.
The claim that Good was a "domestic terrorist" is actually plausible in principle. Had she 100% deliberately intended to run over an ICE officer with her car, and had her intent behind doing so been "this will scare other ICE agents out of doing their jobs for fear of the same thing happening to them", that would qualify as terrorism. I don't believe she was thinking anything like this, mind you. But it would be a perfectly conventional example of the class, car or no car.
though it's a grace she would have been very unlikely to offer back if she'd killed him instead.
Maybe. But if law enforcement are going to be lawfully empowered to kill people when necessary, in a way that ordinary people are not - and they know that this is part of their job when they sign up - then I am going to hold them to higher standards in how they conduct themselves on such occasions than a random felon.
When he very likely doesn't even know if she's dead or hurt?
But IMO that makes it worse. He doesn't know if she's dead, but he certainly knows he tried to kill her. His first priority "should" have been to in fact check if he'd actually killed her, or if perhaps she was injured in such a way that calling for urgent medical attention would be of some use, etc. Likewise, the idea that he said it partly because she'd been acting obnoxious before is not exculpatory in the least.
The entire argument for the killing being justified is that it was an attempt at self-preservation in the face of her presenting a sudden, unexpected, immediate threat to life in a way he could not have foreseen, and had only his instincts to fall back on. For interpersonal irritation at her earlier behavior to still have been a factor on his mind post-gunshot is mildly concerning for that narrative; it raises once again the possibility that he did in fact shoot her at least partly because he was mad at her. Which I don't believe is actually true, but it certainly doesn't help his case - that is, if you believe the sympathetic self-defense version of why he shot her then "obviously, if you expect him to shoot her, you expect him to curse her out as well" doesn't add up, because we're then talking about aaaaah-car-coming-at-me as the rationale for the shooting, not Mrs-Good-is-annoying-and-I'm-mad-at-her.
Basically I would like to think that if I was in the situation "someone is irritating me > suddenly out of nowhere they seem to attack me > I reflexively fight back > now I blink and they're dead", the kind of profanity that'd come to my lips would be more along the lines of "oh shit" than "what an obnoxious fuck". That Ross's mind-state trended more towards the latter tilts me ever-so-faintly in the direction of suspecting that he does not regard the act of killing with all the gravity it warrants. That's all.
Again, all it alters is my respect for Ross as a person, which isn't really here or there to anything, in the grand scheme of things. I'm not claiming anything more than "it makes him feel like a noticeably less likable person to me", and I don't see how that's absurd.
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
I mean again, I'm not saying the words, in any context, would warrant any kind of punishment. I'm only speaking of personal sympathy and judgment here. But to that very subjective extent, I don't think "if the shooting was warranted then any nasty words were warranted" follows. Taking a human life is a grave thing, even when it becomes necessary, and respect for the dead is an important part of civilized humanity. If you've just killed somebody, and the threat is passed, then you should ideally be somber, even contemplative; you should take time to make the gravity of what you have done sink in deep, even - indeed, especially - if you are confident that your actions were just. Insulting your victim beyond the grave like an action-movie thug is just not decent. I don't think insulting someone you've just killed is ever warranted, however justified the killing.
(Whether it is forgivable is a very different question, and again, to the extent that Ross(?) may have blurted it out because he was still in shock from her seemingly trying to kill him, it's an understandable emotional reaction much more than it is a moral lapse.)
As I said, I selected the buying-stuff-for-homeless-people thing because it's the most generic, anonymizing example of what I was talking about, not because it's the only thing I do in the world. It's an example of an attitude, not a claim about the be-all-end-all of ethical behavior.
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