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PaperclipPerfector  27d ago (text post)   26126 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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Am I reading this wrong, or does Scott think that putting people in prison is the moral equivalent of torturing children?

Maybe not all people, but if you create rules that some people are too stupid/impulsive to ever follow and you severely punish them for it, what do you consider this morally equivalent to?

Being an IQ realist means you see these people as not much different from the losers in a hypothetical society where failing a test in college level Differential Equations dooms you to a life of misery.

After learning about how difficult it is for sub 80 IQ people to function in society, I honestly became open to the idea of some form of light slavery or second-class citizenship to prevent them from causing too much harm to themselves and others. Sounds terrible, but so did institutions before we had tent jungles and streets filled with poop and needles.

IQ realist here. When those rules are things like "thou shalt not murder" and "thou shalt not steal", I consider enforcing them by severely punishing the ones who break them to be basic human decency. If they are too impulsive and stupid to abide by such elementary moral standards, then they are not fit to live in civilized society.

sure, we can shoot murderers into the sun for all I care

but last time I visited the county jail, the primary offense was for driving with a suspended license

not saying driving with a suspended license is fine, just clearly a thing where people are being needlessly tortured because the way society is arranged doesn't suit their level of intelligence

Let's distinguish between common-sense consequences and torture. When someone has demonstrated that he cannot be trusted with liberty because he'll use it to do great harm, he must be restrained. There's room in the calculus for social censure, seizure of assets, corporal punishment, incarceration, maiming (e.g. losing a hand), exile, and execution. These can all be reasonable responses given certain assumptions.

What doesn't make sense is inflicting unnecessary suffering upon the person.

The objective here is to safeguard the functional, not be cruel to the dysfunctional for cruelty's sake.

"Do not steal, do not rape, do not murder: these are rules which every man, of every faith, can embrace. These are not polite suggestions - these are codes of behavior!"

Steve Rogers pointing, I understood that reference.

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