WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
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
18d 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
18d 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
18d 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
18d ago
Iran and Israel have adverse geopolitical interests.
How so?
WandererintheWilderness
18d 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
18d 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
20d 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
20d 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.)
My concern is not offensiveness; my concern is excusability on the basis of survival instincts kicking in. Shooting at the threat as a split-second reaction to a belief that you are in sudden, life-threatening jeopardy is not necessarily a poor reflection on someone's character. Insulting someone you have just killed, who is no longer a threat to you and about whom, if you have any kind of conscience, you should be starting to wonder whether or not your knee-jerk survival instincts were justified - that is a more intellectual process, and as such, one that can be more readily judged. (Though less so the closer to the event, and thus, the more spontaneous/unreasoned, it was.)
WandererintheWilderness
20d ago
Fair point. Still not a great thing to say about someone you may have just shot in the head on instinct, but admittedly more excusable on sheer adrenaline grounds.
Repeating some of my positions from the other thread: I agree that the claims that Good was somehow actively malicious, or that her death is anything else than a tragedy that shouldn't have occurred, are disgraceful. However, circumstances being what they were, I do have some sympathy for Ross's position. She wasn't actually trying to run him over, and shooting her wouldn't have helped even if she had, but I am prepared to believe that in the context of a split-second life-or-death decision, he sincerely got both of these things wrong. I don't buy that this was some sort of premeditated, cold-blooded murder-by-loophole. I don't think he's guilty of murder, I'm not even sure his tragic mistake was foreseeable enough to warrant internal sanctions. If there are actions worth taking here, I would think they have more to do with revising training and procedures so this sort of thing is less likely to happen again.
Of course, I would expect a decent person in his situation - a man who shot a mother of three for what, in hindsight, he ought realize were probably spurious reasons - to be, like, torn up about it. Remorseful. To release some kind of statement, say his heart is with the kids and the widow. Which AFAIK he hasn't. And he loses still further sympathy points if it was him who said "fucking bitch", to say the last. But then again… being an asshole about having committed manslaughter doesn't make you a murderer. It would make me less likely to shake his hand and offer my sympathy for the tough hand Fate has dealt him if I should chance to meet him (as I would with, say, a driver who'd accidentally killed a pedestrian through circumstances that mostly weren't his fault); but I don't think that lack of remorse should affect his case at the judicial level. Nor do we know for a fact that he isn't privately grieving and just staying silent for legal/institutional reasons.
WandererintheWilderness
20d ago
I doubt pressing this point will get us anywhere, but "civilization" and indeed "good" don't "exist in nature" either. Why do you "think of what's good for civilization"? What is it to you whether civilization lives or dies, if you are a cold nihilistic Darwinian machine? And anyway, can't "I just think of what's good for civilization" easily be rephrased as "I just consider things which hinder the flourishing of civilization to be evil"? Either you have 'arbitrary' preferences about world-states that don't entirely depend on your own survival and genetic fitness, or you do not. If you are going to plant your flag in a concept as woolly as "civilization" then you have already accepted the idea of a value system not rooted in nature; we're simply haggling over price.
WandererintheWilderness
20d ago
I didn't ask what the average person wanted, I asked what they would consider evil. It is perfectly routine to want things which could (only?) be achieved by means which you know would be immoral. Whether or the average person wants the train to run on time, I don't think that they would consider murdering random women in order to terrify people to be an acceptable price for that.
What are some things you would consider "evil", if not this? Is there any foul deed which you think would be too far, if it could magically remove all Somalis from Minnesota and restore train schedules to their platonic ideal?
WandererintheWilderness
20d ago
Right, well, that leaves us with very little disagreement between us, if any! Fancy that on the Motte. Miracles do happen.
WandererintheWilderness
20d ago
First of all, I'd say you're definitely counting your eggs before they hatch here. It is plausible that Good's death will have the chilling effect you hope for, and anti-ICE obstructionists will vanish overnight, but we're rather far off from that being a certainty, and it could certainly go a lot of different ways.
Nor would I call murder a "new technology". People have been bashing their brothers' skulls in with jawbones since before humans developed language, often to secure the chieftain's authority. Some of us had rather hoped that we were in the process of outgrowing that sort of thing.
And I would never be so insulting to my political opponents as to say that "nobody cares" who wasn't a political ally of Good's. I do in fact believe that an overwhelming majority of human beings are generally against killing people, and especially against arbitrarily killing people to create a state of terror. This is, I repeat, an evil thing to do. Wicked. Wrong. Sinful. There may be millions of people who will buy the idea that Good actually had it coming, or that Ross's actions were otherwise justified in context; but, thankfully, I think there are very few people in America who would endorse your view that making an example of her would have been fine and dandy regardless of how much of a threat she actually posed to Ross.
WandererintheWilderness
20d ago
How do you propose to describe a woman who has performed particular ceremonies to join herself to another woman, and obtained a certain legal status as a result, which entails certain rights and obligations? I'm not totally unsympathetic to the view you espouse (pun not intended), but substituting "partner" or "lover" wouldn't fit the bill. By Good's "wife" we do not simply mean a woman she loved very much and had sex with, we mean a woman who is legally entitled to her inheritance etc. The terms are not interchangeable.
Oh, I don't take anything you say here to constitute "arguing against me", really. I was very much reacting to Opt-out's premise that it would have been a good shoot even if the specific circumstances did not objectively require lethal force specifically because it would have a chilling effect on other would-be obstructionists. That is the position which seemed to me to be ghoulish, extremist, and impractical. I happily recognize that this is not what the average defender of the shoot believes, and certainly, I would find the notion that Jonathan Ross shot Good for anything even resembling that reason to be farcically unlikely.
(As to the facts of the case: we part, slightly, in that I am somewhat less convinced than you that this was a situation where, in hindsight, lethal force was in fact warranted. Or to put it another way, it seems very likely to me that in the world where Ross doesn't shoot, no one dies at all. Of that, I am something like 70% confident. With a much lesser threshold of confidence, let's say 30%, I suspect that there are lessons to be drawn from that first observation, which, if taken to heart by LEOs going forward, may save lives should similar incidents occur. Even if I'm right about both those points, however, I still wouldn't call this a "bad shoot" in the sense that Ross should be disciplined for it. Some percentage of split-second judgemental calls will be wrong in hindsight, that doesn't make the cops in question murderers.)
WandererintheWilderness
20d ago
America doesn’t have the technology to run a process (…)
Even accepting that premise, it doesn't really matter what percentage of arrests would lead to actual convictions for obstruction. The process is the punishment. Even making suspects spend a night or two in jail before letting them off with a warning would have significant deterrent value for dilettante protestors, never mind the prospect of a court-case-shaped millstone around their neck for the next two years. If they want to obstruct lawful operations through childish inconveniences like blocking roads with their cars or shouting "SHAME!" very loud, then inconveniencing them back, only harder, seems like the proper response.
Mrs Good may not have been some innocent bystander who wound up at the protest by mistake 'on the way' to picking her children up from school - but it is AIUI seemingly absolutely true that she casually thought she could maintain a schedule that went "3 p.m. - obstruct ICE raid, 3.15 p.m. - pick the kids up from school". This is the kind of attitude that you are up against. The prospect of handcuffs and a night in the slammer would be enough to cool down many tempers.
Even if you want to be meaner - even if you absolutely insist that extrajudicial violence is needed to get the point across - things like deploying tear gas into a rioting crowd still seem like a good bet that's far more ethically justifiable, and far less likely to result in a loss of perceived legitimacy for the regime, than jumping straight to murder.
Yes, well, ask Robespierre how that went. He might find it difficult to answer without his head, but you could ask. Ruling through fear - through actual fear, as opposed to reliable justice where punishment is meted out to the guilty in a predictable and orderly way - has not historically produced stable, long-term outcomes. If you make your government out to be made up of loose cannons who just might go nuts and kill you for sneezing at them, so watch it… you will only succeed in incentivizing the population to stay out of your way in the short term while plotting their very best to remove you ASAP.
If you want to solve the obstruction problem, you can actually arrest and prosecute people for obstruction, en masse, in an orderly, lawful, consistent way. A government which gives in to the temptation to murder random dissidents pour encourager les autres loses its mandate in a way that one which simply prosecutes crimes that are actually on the books in a scrupulous way does not.
(Of course, all of this is without getting into the thing where killing random people to create a state of terror, you know, falls petty squarely within what 99% of human beings would consider evil. I don't feel like getting into that would be a useful direction for this conversation, but it bears repeating.)
WandererintheWilderness
20d ago
Perhaps they think that ICE are paper tigers - not actual Stormtroopers but wannabe-Stormtroopers who are in truth no better than schoolyard bully, and will fall apart if someone is on hand to puncture their delusions of grandeur? Perhaps they take the "white privilege" stuff a little too literally, and genuinely believe that although they have no scruples about assaulting innocent blacks and Hispanics, ICE's own white-supremacy forbid them to ever lay a finger on a white blonde?
WandererintheWilderness
21d ago
Not taking the dark road means 1% of the population deciding they don’t want something can cancel the ability of the government to do anything.
This is a very silly false dichotomy: you are assuming the conclusion that "kill Mrs Good, possibly unjustly" is the only way to curb the problem of excessive obstructive protesting, creating a binary choice between human sacrifice and anarchy run amok. In fact, I don't believe that killings intended to create mass terror are the only way to curb obstructionism, if that is what you want to do - let alone that it is the most effective one. That's the whole crux of the debate, and you just whizz past it.
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.
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