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Yeah, I've been hearing that argument for years, with Nazis vs. Commies. I never quite bought it, but nowadays I'm buying it even less.
Take another example: should Christians take the excesses of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and witch trials as cautionary tales about what can happen with too much religious zeal, or just go "haha, I guess things got out of hand, but at least their heart was in the right place"?.
WPATH people didn't "tragically end up" causing harm, it was an inevetible consequence of their progressive zeal. They were literally warned about it, and they rejected those warnings over and over.
I suppose my entire point is that trying to alleviate suffering too much can be just as bad as being a hateful bigot, and progressives have a really hard time reckoning with that.
Well thats because most people are not hard consequentialists. So doing a bad thing for good reasons and doing a bad thing for bad reasons are seen as different.
If instead of trying to murder Jews, the Nazis were trying to save them from a disease and ended up killing them by mistake, then most people would see those Nazis as morally better than our actual historical Nazis. Even if they were warned it was a risk.
So most people would not see it as being just as bad. They just fundamentally disagree with you there. Someone honestly trying to alleviate suffering is simply better than someone trying to cause suffering, even if in the end they both end up causing it. Motivations are an important part of judging moral behaviour.
And if you think about that makes sense. If i just want to honestly help Jews then there is some set of information that can persuade me I am not helping. If i mean to kill the Jews then that avenue is closed. You would have to persuade me first not to want to harm them, and then persuade me to want to help them and then try and come up with a solution that works. You are many further steps away from a positive outcome for Jewish people (assuming for the moment that is your aim).
The major issue here is that people aren't doing things to "help", they're doing it out of a narcissistic desire to defend their mental world view. That is what they really care about, material reality be damned.
They intentionally look away when their "efforts to help" produce the opposite of the their stated intentions and use all their mental prowess to justify their atrocities.
It's almost never that the bad effects couldn't have been reasonably predicted, it's that people actively avoided doing so because it threatened their self conception and world view.
I'd go as far as to say that this is one of the foundational building blocks of evil.
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Neither am I. None of my reasoning is based on consequences. At most, they're a signal that should have told you that you're going too far.
Neither of those things is true. Plenty of "well-intentioned" people axiomatically reject the possibility of being wrong. They view everything through the lens of their ideology, and nothing you say to them will make them reconsider. OTOH there are people motivated by hate, who are open to changing their mind (see: that dude befriending KKK members).
I'm just talking number of steps here. If i want to help and am not, the only thing you need to convince me of is that my action are harming and convince me of a way to help that actually helps.
If i want to harm then first you have to convince me not to want to harm, then convince me to want to help, then convince me of a way to help that actually helps. You have much more to do.
Assuming the same level of ideological commitment in both then one of those will be easier than the other. Yes how easy individuals will be to convince will of course vary but one is clearly closer on an idea space than the other.
And I guess what I'm saying is that this is a flawed way of looking at it. People don't get convinced in steps, and no one makes this sort of calculus when reacting to someone's views.
This has not been true either in my direct experience, or from observing others.
They don't do calculus, but they clearly do judge differently intuitively in my experience. People are much more likely to forgive someone with motivations they judge to be good. Accidental harm and deliberate harm are treated differently through most of our legal systems as a reflection of that.
Even the legal system, which only criminalizes a minority of 'bad behavior,' commonly treats some cases of accidental harm as equivalent to deliberate harm. In most cases, committing a prohibited harmful behavior 'recklessly' is quite sufficient for a criminal conviction. ('Negligent' behavior isn't generally criminal, but can easily be tortious.)
Translating this intuition where crime is concerned back to the more general political arena, the assertion being made is that once a certain level of evidence is available that a particular policy set is net-harmful, continuing to pursue that policy set may be viewed as 'reckless,' and therefore justifiably equivalent to 'intentional.'
In this particular case, I'm convinced that WPATH's behavior is reckless at a minimum. It may be intentional, in some cases, but I think the distinction is splitting hairs at best; recklessness is enough to make it fully condemnable.
Sure, I am not claiming reckless or negligent behavior can't be bad or even criminal. But negligent homicide or manslaughter and the like are lesser crimes than first degree homicide for a reason.
And that is because it jibes with the general rough understanding that intent matters.
I'm not arguing it can't be bad, I'm arguing that all else being equal negligence or recklessness are seen to be not quite as bad as a planned intention.
That is what the people around me seem to believe, it's what I believe and I don't think its a coincidence that our criminal justice system operates the same way.
If you want to condemn WPATH as being bad, and reckless I think thats reasonable! But we don't consider reckless and intentional to be the same. I think that is apparent in pretty much all of society.
You should have known better may well land you in trouble (and should!) but did know better and still intentionally did it is worse.
It is entirely possible to commit murder recklessly--the classical term is "depraved heart murder." Your intuition does not match criminal law, which does generally put some forms of recklessness in the same category as intentional action. There are cases where a distinction is drawn between them, but those are exceptions (attempt; crimes with the specific element "did X with the intent to do Y;" etc.), and those exceptions are due to the particulars of those crimes, not their severity.
Recklessness is approximately defined as "knew that a significant risk of harm existed, took prohibited action despite the risk." It is distinct from negligence in that the negligent person was not consciously aware of the risk at the time, while the reckless person knew and disregarded.
Sure, possibly. But the rest of your argument doesn't automatically follow--if one may be executed for an intentional murder, and also executed for a reckless murder, does it matter that "recklessness [is] not quite as bad"? Just because you've shown a distinction does not mean you've shown a categorical difference.
I don't doubt that's what you and the people around you believe. It is not true that the criminal law agrees with you--again, the default rule in criminal law is that recklessness is an equally culpable mental state to intent.
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I don't think this is true. Religious people don't treat cults and fanatics as "accidental harm". Progressives reframe harm caused by the excesses of their ideology as accidental, and my whole argument is that this is based on flawed reasoning.
Sure they do, in that they sympathize with the victims as being misled. Now of course what they see as a cult and what they see as a religion may vary from their own biases. But many of my Christian neighbors think Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons are a cult and think most of the people are being taken advantage of. See how they react to people trying to deny blood products to their kids that will kill them. We don't arrest them for attempted murder, we generally just override their decision. We clearly do in fact treat people differently where we think they are making bad choices for what they see as good reasons.
That doesn't mean we don't do anything, we have negligent homicide and the like for a reason. But we do not as a society see it as harmful as a direct planned harm.
Yeah, when the cult drives people towards self-destructive behavior. When it drives them to harm others, you see people's sympathy starting to wear thin.
And to the extent you're right you're only proving my point. This is a lot closer to how we treat real, actual, historical Nazis vs Nazism, and how I argue we should treat progressives vs. progressivism.
Yeah, it's almost like we have a taboo against imposing medical procedures without informed consent, and we only override it in extreme circumstances, let alone imprison people for refusing it. If you didn't go with one of the most milquetoast examples of a cult causing harm, it would become obvious how faulty this logic is.
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If the goal is to stop the harm, then for a person who is harming people because they want to cause harm, you only need to convince him to not want to harm the people anymore. With no desire the harm the people any more, naturally he will stop (except, I suppose, out of habit).
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