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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.
Sure, possibly. But the rest of your argument doesn't automatically follow--
But that's my whole argument! You might well get the same punishment, it might well still be bad, but my entire argument with OP is that we see recklessness or negligence as being just as bad as intentional harm and I argued that did not appear to be true.
If you are conceding that, then that is the totality of my point. I don't have a further argument beyond that.
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