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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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The only ethical way is to put responsibility on those who take part in Putin’s actions, whatever their nationality, and completely exonerate all others.

Collective responsibility is a repugnant concept.

But if collective responsibility is a given, is avoiding it a moral thing to do? To step away from politics, the head bully breaks into the principal's office and shits on the desk and the whole class is punished for not doing anything. The goths can claim they've been his victims too and avoid the punishment. Is this moral?

  • if the punishment is a finite amount of nega-utilons (buy a new desk and repair the lock), then I would consider avoiding it immoral: you are not reducing the amount of suffering in the world and your actions punish the other innocent (or equally complicit) harder

  • if the punishment scales with the number of punished (detention), then I would consider avoiding it moral: you are not increasing the suffering of those who can't escape the punishment, you are actually reducing the total suffering. Yes, the punishment itself is unfair, but you are not making it less fair: there are eight billion more people not given detention for something they didn't do

Collective responsibility is not a given, avoiding it is always an unalloyed moral good, and your question is kind of like asking what is better — to allow a criminal to beat up ten random people on the streets or murder one — then asking if it’s moral to run away from such a criminal. Of course it is; better yet is to incapacitate the criminal himself so that everyone else can go on their merry way.

Similarly in your story it’s the principal who should be fired for not being able to do his job of maintaining discipline in his school, and for taking it out on unrelated students on top of that.

The moral burden of injustice falls on the one committing it. It is the principal punishing the remaining innocent, not the innocent he lets off the hook and reallocates the punishment away from.