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PaperclipPerfector  20d ago (text post)   30959 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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Yes, I'm suggesting that if "Do unto others" justifies murdering a man's wife because your wife died (Which is changing the facts, so its not even what happened here!) then it justifies murdering a man's neighbor because your neighbor died.

My whole point is when you bring in third parties who DON'T have blame for the outcome, now you're the one 'doing unto others' by bringing innocent parties into it.

And that demolishes your moral standing, whatever it was.

A man's wife and children directly benefit from his actions, and are an extension of him in a way that his neighbor is not.

You are saying they are unrelated third parties, I'm saying that's not true, but the neighbor actually is an unrelated third party, so your comparison is simply false. If I accepted your premises, I'd accept your conclusions, but your premises are nonsensical.

A man's wife and children directly benefit from his actions, and are an extension of him in a way that his neighbor is not.

I want you to be specific. How much 'benefit' does one have to receive for the connection to be close enough to justify a revenge killing. If the neighbor borrowers his mower, is that enough? If he lent some money to the neighbor and allowed him to afford life-saving surgery, is that enough?

You're adding epicycles. It used to be just "do unto others," but now you're adding in "Do unto others, and do unto those who benefited from those others." I'm happy to chase this to whatever extremes you like, but understand that it will probably lead me to conclude that under your moral code, it is acceptable to kill you.

This is basically a slightly more sophisticated Gangland mentality. "You send one of ours to the hospital, we send one of yours to the morgue." At least in gangland everyone is (sort of) willingly participating.

You are saying they are unrelated third parties

Bullshit. I said they are innocent third parties, having committed no action worthy of blame, and certainly not death. 'Related' parties is a completely different question, and a harder one.

And that goes double for the kids, who almost certainly has no conception of why their father would be considered bad.

your premises are nonsensical.

Please, state what you believe my 'premises' to be.

I'm not going to engage in your silliness of conflating a man's wife and children, his own family, his own issue, and the woman with which he has chosen to perpetuate his line, with the person who happens to own the property next to his. It's a farce, and I'm uninterested in your hypotheticals trying to equate the two. There is no equivalence.

I'm not adding epicycles, I'm defining others more broadly than discrete individuals, but rather as families, then tribes, then nations.

Your premises are that only individuals are responsible for their own actions, and those actions can be neatly separated and contained to solely that person. I think that's obviously wrong. Your other premise is that a man's wife is no more related to him than a man's neighbor, a premise that is as obviously incorrect as it is misleading.

Your premises are that only individuals are responsible for their own actions, and those actions can be neatly separated and contained to solely that person.

Yes.

And in order to be coherent you'd have to believe this too.

Otherwise, why do we hold the CEO responsible for his actions, rather than acknowledge that he is only acting amongst a massive network of incentives and players responding to endless numbers of variables.

Or we can tie everyone into the web of consequences and spread the blame around.

Your other premise is that a man's wife is no more related to him than a man's neighbor, a premise that is as obviously incorrect as it is misleading.

Close. You're playing a bit lose with the term 'related' in this case.

Genetically speaking the neither the wife nor the neighbor are probably very closely 'related' to him.

Romantically speaking the wife is clearly closer.

Geographically speaking the neighbor isn't much further.

Its just not clear to me why the nature of the wife's relationship to him somehow endows her with blame, or what-have-you, while the neighbor is excluded from blame?

They are more like "a separate person and a separate moral considerance" than "this man's property that it's okay to hurt and remove to hurt him", that's the argument.

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