WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
See my reply here. I am aware that this would be harder, and by no means guarantee the target's survival. It would, however, be more ethical, because human life is the most precious thing in the universe, and in my book you need a very high level of confidence that your own life in immediate peril before you are morally justified in taking someone else's. If he wasn't certain that Good was trying to run him over (and he couldn't be) then it would in some important sense have been fairer for him to resort to a means of incapacitating her that had less than 100% chances of being fatal if successfully executed. (Endangering her life to protect his own, i.e. shooting her in such a way that she may very well die, but which is not intended to kill her, comes with a much lower threshold.) The moral thing to do is not necessarily the easiest, fastest, nor most conducive to one's own safety.
I say again, though, that I'm talking about what a perfect actor "should" have done in an ideal frictionless-spherical-cows world, a world in which things like "the reasonable limits of police training" (and human fallibility in general) have no purchase. In the real world, as I said in the post you're replying to, I in no way blame the cop for having acted the way he did.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
I am not talking about what is legal, easiest or fastest, I am talking about what is most ethical. Nor do I imagine that there is some magic way to shoot someone while being sure that it won't kill them - but a successful headshot is guaranteed to be fatal, while torso or limbs is only possibly so. I would consider it more ethical to trade a slightly higher chance of missing for a distinctly lower chance that you will have rashly destroyed the life a human being.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
I expect that Mr A pictured the encounter as "we meet fully-clothed, size each other up, flirt and banter a bit; if the chemistry is off the charts we are already in the perfect place to take things further, if not we can take things slower or end it there".
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
If the government decided that throwing their ass in prison would cause more harm than he's causing the US economy, and as a result every American resident starts printing their own $1000 every month, this would result in total economic chaos
Granted. But surely, if there were already millions of people doing this, punishing every one of them as harshly as we would the first wise-guy to figure out this neat trick in an otherwise law-abiding society would clearly be overkill. We place harsh punishments on these kinds of deleterious-in-aggregate violations as a deterrent - to disincentivize anyone from breaking the norm, crossing the bright line. Part of why the harshness of the punishment is morally justifiable is that you are trying to game-theoretically create conditions such that ~0 people will commit the crime at all, and thus you hopefully won't have to inflict it on anyone in practice.
When Moloch has already sunk his teeth deep into the former norm, when the line is being trampled every day by millions of people, the calculus is completely different. At that point, trying to robotically apply the harsh punishment to every single person who crosses the line trivially creates far more suffering than would be strictly necessary to prevent the greater evil (because the very harsh punishment on the books was arrived at in large part as a matter of deterrence, and the deterrence angle is now moot because everybody's doing it anyway). You need to go back to the drawing board and figure out the least-painful way to right the ship ASAP, not fixate on what the deterrent punishment would have been in a world where hardly anyone crossed the line.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Common sense tells me recent arrivals with no strong ties to the community would simply throw the ankle monitor in the trash and hitch a ride out of town.
But suppose the moment the monitor goes silent and/or leaves a certain area, a manhunt is automatically called. Perhaps all citizens in a certain radius get an alert on their phones, with a picture of the guy and instructions to report him if sighted. That's obviously a very blunt way to do it, but then this isn't my job; I admit I can only gesture at the hazy shapes of solutions, here. But it just seems obvious to me that "find a guy if you knew where he was yesterday, already suspected he might run, and had arbitrary amounts of time to tag him however you wanted" should not be a problem for an efficient state apparatus at our current level of technological development. This cannot be an unsolvable problem. I didn't even go into any of the more controversial low-hanging fruit like CCTV, or making people carry mandatory ID.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Would you care to elaborate on that? It seems very hard for me to picture how a given illegal immigrant, individually, is doing any kind of "harm" to anyone at all. Sure, in some distant sense they're contributing the continuing existence of an economy in which it becomes substantially harder for a certain class of American workers to find a job, and, from there, to all sorts of unpleasant second-order effect on the economy - but that guy in particular - one illegal immigrant more or less - is not going to make a measurable difference in anybody's lived experience. Removing 500,000 illegal immigrants, yes, that gets to making a substantial difference to a lot of citizens' lives. But removing any one guy? As far as I can tell, the effect size is indistinguishable from zero. I don't just mean that the effect is very small; it's that the immediate practical consequences are so irrelevant to the broad market forces at work that that guy's disappearance is not going to reshape the economy one iota, and consequently Americans' collective quality of life will not be improved at all.
Or are you coming at this from the other end, and disagreeing about how traumatic and painful being grabbed overnight would be? That seems even stranger to me.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Killing enemy soldiers is not breaking Golden Rule.
No, but the nice thing about killing enemy soldiers is that it's almost perfectly symmetrical. You are killing them to prevent them from killing you (or your countrymen): the nature of the harm you are inflicting on them is exactly isomorphic to the evil that you are trying to prevent by doing so. In contrast, I contend that the amount of suffering inflicted on a given deportee by grabbing them overnight far exceeds the very diffuse harm that their presence on US soil inflicted on a given American. It's basically a torture-vs-dust-specks problem.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
My belief is that there are ways to enforce immigration laws that would both cause less harm to the immigrants, and be harder for activists to turn into causes celebres, that have been largely left untried. They amount, in a nutshell, to putting less energy into violence and more energy into surveillance. It should not be the case that once you've found an illegal immigrant your choices are between "lock them up right away" and "they disappear into the ether in-between court dates". There are, it seems obvious to me, technologies (social and literal) that could be employed at scale to make this kind of evasion obviously impossible and not worth attempting - freeing the authorities up to be more chill with identified illegals thereafter, which would in turn make quixotic attempts to run away less and less appealing in a virtuous cycle.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
I suppose part of it is that think of illegal-immigrant status - particularly for people who outstayed a visa, rather than coming in illegally - as… well, not not a big deal exactly, but not the kind of thing that prima facie justifies any kind of retaliatory violence. Outstaying a visa seems more comparable to filing your taxes wrong than driving without a license, and still more similar to driving without a license than to drug trafficking. It's the kind of rule-breaking where if a critical mass of people do it at a time, it begins to harm the country in aggregate, so obviously the government takes measures to prevent it - but where a given rule-breaker isn't much more morally culpable than a jaywalker or someone who forgets a stray $50 on their tax reports.
To put it another way, I recognize at a rational, central-planning level that there must be limits on immigration, but I don't feel any personal animus against someone who circumvents those limits on the margins. My gut reaction isn't "this is an evil thing to do", it's "well, that seems a bit selfish in the grand scheme of things, a more virtuous person would think about the big picture and refrain from adding another straw to the camel's back… but eh, it is not given to just anybody to instinctively think like a central planner about the diffuse economic effects of excess untaxable unskilled labor, this is just some poor shmuck cutting corners and were I in their circumstances I might have taken the same leap". By all means we should try and take broad-level measures so that the opportunities for ignoring the rules close, but, as much as is possible, we shouldn't take this out on the actual human beings involved, who aren't doing anything that emotionally resonates with me as egregiously "immoral".
All of which being said, I'm also just a strong believer in kindness/charity/the Golden Rule. Even in cases where my gut reaction to a crime is disgust or resentment (and there are such crimes, illegal immigration just isn't among them), my higher conscience still generally tells me that to the extent that such a thing can be achieved while still suitably deterring further crimes of the same type, the individuals at issue should still be treated as well as possible - should still be given as much of a shot at happiness as possible without putting innocents at a disadvantage. Presumably your underlying moral principles differ somewhat.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
They had literal years, decades even, to do this. How much time is enough?
Quoting myself from elsewhere in the thread:
I don't think human psychology is such that a mass message of this kind is fungible with a personal "you, yes you, we know who and where you are - you need to scram" notification, for much the same reason that a big sign that says 'don't step on the grass' is not as effective as a guard personally yelling 'hey, you, with the ugly sweater, get off the grass' - even though, in the latter case, many more people will comply with the verbal command than escalate to physical violence. We can wish human behavior were more rational, but you've got to work with what you've got.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
she was abrogating the state's monopoly on violence in furtherance of political goals.
Words have meanings and this is not what "terrorism" means. You would have a better case that she was guilty of insurrection - but terrorism is a specific strategy of using acts of extraordinary violence to create a climate of fear. I don't think the victim here was by any stretch of the imagination engaged in a long-term project of killing a few ICE agents pour encourager les autres. Even in the scenario where she consciously attempted to run the officer who shot her, all signs point to it having been an ordinary self-interested murder meant to enable her escape, not an attempt to make a statement.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
He could also have shot to wound (or indeed intimidate) rather than shot to kill.
Which being said, I'm very sympathetic to the "split-second fight-or-flight" circumstances and I don't think he should go to jail about it or anything, any engagement I have in this debate is at the level of "how to make sure fewer things like this happen in the future", not "here is why that particular cop is an evil monster and no reasonable person would have acted as he did".
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
The vast majority of people with the resources to make it to the USA are facing a low-moderate decrease in living standards from being removed, they're not being sent to Mordor
This is fair, and worth repeating. But my primary concern is not with the long-term decrease in living standards once they're back home - my concern is with the inordinate amount of suffering involved in grabbing someone from their home without letting them pack their bags, say goodbye to their neighbors and coworkers, figure out what to do about pets, take a last stroll around the neighborhood that was their home for [X] years, etc. It's the difference between having to move, and having your house burn down. That (and of course the threat of violence during the raids themselves) is what I referred to as "brutal". That is what strikes me as being in violation of the Golden Rule, as being unkind, cruel, inhumane about ICE raids. Not the end goal of sending the illegals back to their country of origin.
Nothing can convince me that a not-otherwise-criminal illegal immigrant morally "deserves" that kind of treatment. You can make a pragmatic argument that, in practice, this is the only way to ensure they are deported at all, because they would otherwise vanish into the night the moment the officers' eyes are off them. But that just begs the question of how we got to that situation. It should not be beyond the state's capacity to "tag" an individual once identified by law enforcement, such that if they have not left the borders within [X] days they can instantly be tracked down and arrested. I'm taking ankle monitors, hell, maybe daily check-ins of some sort. Just something so that no human being has to suffer the inordinate stress and grief of being torn from their home literally overnight without the chance to put their affairs in order - an amount of suffering which is totally out of proportion with the very diffuse amount of harm that any given not-otherwise-criminal illegal immigrant causes by their continued presence in a host country.
I don't think human psychology is such that a mass message of this kind is fungible with a personal "you, yes you, we know who and where you are - you need to scram" notification, for much the same reason that a big sign that says 'don't step on the grass' is not as effective as a guard personally yelling 'hey, you, with the ugly sweater, get off the grass' - even though, in the latter case, many more people will comply with the verbal command than escalate to physical violence. We can wish human behavior were more rational, but you've got to work with what you've got.
Regardless, I must once again return to a key point: it was not my intent to get into a debate about the practical merits of the "brutal" measures. Maybe they are necessary! Maybe they are morally justifiable! But that still leaves them quite different from "basic immigration enforcement".
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
They are also not "making people disappear without due process." They are sending people back to their home countries. (…) America is the only major country on the planet where people think that basic immigration enforcement is evil.
This strikes me as a motte and bailey - what does "basic immigration enforcement" mean? I don't object to deporting people. I object to grabbing them off the streets without warning. It's the difference between serving an eviction notice to a tenant-turned-squatter, and physically throwing them out without even letting them grab their stuff. The latter is inhumane behavior even in cases where a normal eviction notice would be legitimate and justified.
Now, maybe you want to argue that illegals are too good at evading detection, so that if immigration officers simply presented them with an order to leave within 10 days, they'd simply skip town while staying in the country - making immediate arrest the only viable recourse. Last time I got into this on this forum, we got quite deep in the weeds of this question. But even if I were to grant that the current circumstances demand these extraordinary measures, extraordinary measures is what they are, and describing them as "making people disappear" is not an unfair characterization.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
“If you try to flee, you will probably die” is probably a mindset that would result in less casualties
Could be, but the message that a whole segment of the population has absorbed is "if you are in the general vicinity of cops, you will probably die" (or at least "you will probably get beat up, and possibly die"), which doubles back to a status quo where taking your chances with escape is the lesser evil. That's why they flee in the first place.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
Jan 6 differed from what I'm talking about in that they actually broke laws. Not, I would gladly agree, to the extent that it justified the cartoonish levels of pearl-clutching or the severity of the repression - but I was specifically talking about the displays of helpless disapproval that are available to a citizen who remains committed to not breaking the law, even as they bear witness to something which they find unconscionable.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
I agree that in practice, these kinds of histrionics aren't good for much. But I'm curious how you would answer the following - suppose, for the sake of argument, that you did believe ICE under Trump are an institution of evil, that ~every ICE operation is a moral outrage. How would you behave if you were walking around your neighborhood and found yourself witness to just such an operation? If necessary, switch out ICE and immigration enforcement under Trump for any atrocity of your choice that a lawfully-elected government with diametrically opposed values and politics to your own might legalize within your lifetime, and ask yourself how you'd react to seeing that underway.
The way I see it, no one wants to be the guy who walks past the drowning child without comment. A man's conscience won't take it - for that matter, neither will his pride. He must do something - anything! The absence of such a moral instinct would actually be quite a worrying sign. Lucky for the fabric of society, for most people, that instinct is tempered by reason, so they don't jump in blindly and try to suicidally obstruct the enactment of the (perceived-to-be-)evil law all by themselves. But the outrage still has to out. So they jeer and scream and organize protests.
In other words, where you see something that needlessly escalates tense situations towards violence, I see the useful venting of energy that could otherwise boil over into far more immediate violence.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
But that's just circular. Why is insider trading "undesirable"? It's undesirable on the stock market and in sports betting because it's an unfair advantage. But that's only because part of the point of the stock market and sports betting pools is that they're meant to be fair to the people investing/betting. If we stipulate that the point of prediction markets is, exclusively, to generate maximally accurate information about the future, then there's nothing inherently wrong with it being less than maximally "fair" to betters: no one promised it would be.
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
Rov_Scam was talking about race; you are talking about religions and cultures. While it would be constitutionally more difficult to institute official restrictions on Muslims qua Muslims than to reintroduce a concept of race into law, I think it would be much more justifiable on a moral level. You can stop being Muslim, but you can't (in the ethnic sense) stop being Somali.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
If a man said that his girlfriend/wife should accept him dating others while still remaining faithful, he would get rebuked. If he said that every man should be able to build a harem in this way, he would be laughed at.
Would he? Depends how he phrases it. A man who identifies as poly, and explains this preference in 'snowflakey' "here are my personal boundaries" terms, a significant segment of the Blue Tribe would applaud his courage for being open about his orientation. Whether he would, in fact, get much action, is a potentially thornier question, but voicing this desire isn't taboo.
because it's mathematically impossible for magic robots to create an abundance of social status
Depends how lifelike the robots are. You could imagine a world where people live surrounded by a Dunbar's-number's worth of robots (or VR simulations) that they can feel superior to, and scratch the itch that way. Or indeed, where we all become the omnipotent gods of our own little subjectively-infinite pocket universes. Not to say this is necessarily the outcome I root for or anything, but, could happen, conditional on sufficiently magic magic robots.
WandererintheWilderness
21d ago
This is a perfectly reasonable take, but a completely different thing than what I meant (and took @aiislove to mean) by "UBI skeptic", ie someone who believes that even if it could be implemented as advertised, a UBI would not be good for a majority of humanity. I think, insofar as it is ever worth discussing ideals rather than short-term ends, this is an interesting conversation in its own right, separate from the object-level AGI-by-2027-vs.-moribund-AI-bubble debate which determines how soon if ever we might get the magic robots.
WandererintheWilderness
21d ago
I don't understand the concern about people "not having anything to do" if they are on UBI (…) I have great faith that everyone else can - and frankly, should - live life in a similar way that I do
Well, this is the rub. The UBI skeptic's worldview is a fundamentally aristocratic one which does not share your faith in the average individual. The UBI skeptic generally agrees that there is an intelligent, open-minded, agentic elite of individuals who can flourish when left to their own devices - he simply believes that lower-IQ or otherwise mentally disadvantaged people cannot say the same, and the happiness of a fraction of clever dilettantes is not worth leaving the Average Joe to rot his brain with 24/7 video games while shoveling nachos into his mouth.
I don't, myself, find this picture convincing, though it is a failure mode which it is worth bearing in mind. It seems to me that to the extent the horror stories about self-wireheaded proles living off the dole have some basis in fact, the individuals at issue don't actually have much in the way of the option of traveling the world instead, so they don't prove much. Moreover I think this kind of willpower-sapped listlessness should be understood as a form of clinical depression, and could likely be addressed with antidepressants if all else fails.
Still, you said you "didn't understand" the doomer viewpoint on UBI - well, here goes.
If all China's doing is trading with them, couldn't we simply try to outbid China? Why is annexing the place the only form that "do something" can take?
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