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Ok, ES tries a different, more humane method, BUT, for every gang murder above the current base rate, one Humane Prisons Advocate gets executed. You first.
Would you accept this deal?
No. Your proposal is based on two assumptions which I reject:
the assumption that detaining gang members under the same standard as invading soldiers would significantly increase the murder rate, and
the assumption those arguing against human-rights violations are somehow responsible for anything that can be attributed to not committing them.
There are lines that one should not cross though the heavens fall, and those arguing against crossing those lines do not thereby assume culpability for the actions of others.
Zvi Mowshowitz:
MS-13 literally has a motto of "kill, steal, rape, control". Do you think they treat their sex slaves better than Bukele is treating them? When your choice is "do X, or state failure and warlords do X anyway", you need to be exceedingly-invested in not personally sinning, to a degree that I'd argue is selfish, to pick the latter. This is not to say one should not look for third options, or try to create them, but no, do not actually let the heavens fall.
Fortunately, they don't have to let the heavens fall, or let the gangs run rampant, in order to not be evil. Just treat the detained alleged gang members as POWs under standards akin to the Geneva Conventions.
Bonitas non est pessimis esse meliorem. (Being better than the worst is not goodness.)
Which is what I'm saying he ought to have done, and objected to his not doing!
You said these:
I responded to those, because they sketch out a policy which I think to be insane (i.e. "one should let the state fail rather than take the gloves off").
This is The Motte, where you're supposed to "always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed". Either defend your claim or retract it; don't deflect and yell at me for responding to what you plainly said.
I think you're misinterpreting me here. My point here was that if the only way to stop MS-13 from imprisoning sex slaves in abominable conditions is to imprison MS-13 in slightly-less-abominable conditions (which also stops a bunch of other crime), the latter option strictly dominates the former.
Fine. I will lay out my Views on the matter plainly.
As I have said elsewhere, I do not like MS-13. They are bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling, and Something Needed To Be Done About Them.
However, Mr Bukele's chosen approach was both
not necessary to solving the problem, and
not justifiable.
The former is demonstrated by the possibility of more humane methods, such as the methods I would endorse if my area were suffering similar depredations. (If someone is probably a gang member but has not been convicted beyond reasonable doubt, detain them under a regime akin to that applied to POWs [conditions no more severe than those extended to our service-members, Red Cross access to detainees to verify humane treatment, release anyone not convicted in a court of law after crisis is over].)
The latter derives from the concept of the 'ethical injunction'.
Tthere are certain things such that, under a purely act-utilitarian-consequentialist framework, the circumstances in which $THING is justified are vastly outnumbered by the circumstances in which $THING looks justified, but isn't. Thus, if from the inside view, it appears that one is faced with only the options of 'Do $THING' or '$WORSE_OUTCOME', it is nevertheless highly probable from the outside view that you are wrong.
One therefore ought not to do $THING even if it seems necessary; this in practise works out to ruat cælum. (cf. "Sacred Values Are How Ethical Injunctions Feel From The Inside", Thing of Things, April 2016.)
(There is also a game-theoretical explanation, which is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Some further thoughts:
theMotte seems like it's kind of intended as a place for people to play on simulacrum level 1, not level 2 where you're telling lies to children to make them behave in the way you've explicitly reasoned about without (yet or ever) being able to do that explicit reasoning themselves. @Amadan am I barking up the wrong tree here?
I think "prison conditions" is much less susceptible to Ozy's argument than torture, because prison conditions up to a point have at least one tradeoff that is always in play i.e. expense. Like, at one end of the Pareto frontier you are basically Auschwitz, enslaving everyone who can/will work and incinerating those who can't/won't; this is maximally cheap (indeed, potentially cheaper than free) and also horrifying (though not maximally horrifying; you're not doing "rape them to death, eat their flesh, and sew their skins into your clothing, and not in that order" because holy shit that's a lot of extra work). At the other end, jail is basically a hotel, with maintenance; this is maximally nice, but also horrifically expensive due to all the stuff that gets broken or stolen (raising the cost well above the already-substantial cost of a hotel that can actually kick people out). Nobody can currently afford the good end; if you look back in history a lot of societies couldn't afford better than the horror end (though as you look back further, you don't have incinerators or scalable oversight, so this starts to tend more toward "summary execution, (mass) unmarked grave" which AIUI was nearly omnipresent in prehistory). Thus, any "though the heavens fall" seems like an obviously contingent principle which for most values of "okay" that modern Westerners accept would, if applied to a pre-Black-Death society, not work; you'd be overthrown if you tried to implement them by a) peasants starving from your taxation and/or b) other elites trying to avoid a) in order to save their own skins, and if you somehow weren't overthrown then the law-abiding populace dies in plague from undernutrition and the criminals either escape or starve. You are thus, in a sense, always talking price, in a way that doesn't play nice with injunctions; you can argue that 2025 El Salvador is wealthy enough to comfortably pull off better conditions, or you can argue that it's importantly not at the Pareto frontier ("these conditions are worse than death; summarily executing them all would be more humane" is an example of such an argument, because summary executions are cheaper than any prison where the inmates can just sit around) - and the reason I'd not have commented there is that I literally don't know enough about the particulars to participate in either discussion about this case - but if you think there's a one-size-fits-all correct answer you're committing the just-world fallacy.
You will note that I haven't contradicted the claim that there are things worth letting the heavens (literally or metaphorically) fall to avoid, because obviously there are such things even for a first-order utilitarian; the heavens literally falling is not maximally bad, and the heavens metaphorically falling (e.g. WWIII) is generally less bad still, so it's worth WWIII to prevent the Earth being destroyed and it's worth the Earth being destroyed to prevent Allied Mastercomputer.
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This is a better argument, and if you'd been plain about this rather than engaging in hyperbole I'd not have chimed in.
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You never answered that question the other day about exactly how incredibly privileged and sheltered you are. Why do you believe that you have shared values with the murder-cult warlords who were terrorizing a nation less than a handful of years ago? Why do you think that you know better the exact line that can be drawn on exactly how rough one must be to repress the murder-cult, compared to the politician who actually accomplished that? Have you ever successfully spearheaded any kind of harm reduction effort comparable to reducing a nation's murder rate by 99%?
And once again, please explain what the purportedly inhumane conditions are. When I looked, CNN said it was "spartan rooms" and the machismo-fueled murder-cult prisoners were made to kneel while their heads were shaved, which probably didn't make them feel very good.
That wasn't so much a question as an insult.
OK. So, I'm going infer from this response that you've never personally experienced a threat in your life, and your entire understanding of evil/harm comes from reading other extravagantly comfortable, myopic nerds playing sterile word games. On top of that, you have the classic complete absence of second order thinking, and refuse to even notionally entertain utilitarian calculations with more than one variable. Non-utilitarian considerations are quantum physics in Klingon.
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What bloodless cowardice! You won't even risk yourself in a hypothetical. And yes, yes, it's very easy to proclaim bold words about though the heavens fall... when they'll be falling on someone else.
Those lines SHOULD NOT BE CROSSED. What lines? Well, a google search and CNN indicate that it's "the rooms are spartan" and "the machismo-fueled murderous warlords are subjected to minor submission displays". Your unbounded concern for their heads being shaved is truly... something.
Consider that your first rejection dismissed. For the second, you are responsible for the outcomes of your actions - including advocacy. If you advocate for a policy, you bear some moral burden for it's results. And you're, by revealed preference, not willing to even pretend to bet your life that your actions to comfort the guilty won't fall ruinously on the innocent.
I want you to take sixty actual seconds and think about your life. Have you ever been punched in the face? Ever feared for your life by the actions of another? Known serious, frightening Maslow-bottom want? Have you ever actually been face-to-face with someone willing and able to deliver grievous harm? I implore you to consider the possibility that you're actually one of the most coddled, protected and privileged creatures that has ever existed on the face of this earth. Consider that employing your ideals, stringent and untethered even by the standards of the safest and most secure society ever built, may not actually be directly applicable to a different society that was subject to widespread warring-bands raider-ism within the last Macbook development cycle.
It was very easy for Sir Terry to hold such lofty ideals in the unsurpassed safety of post-war Britain. Now that country intimidates and jails people for tweets.
Not when the hypothetical is 'you face execution for your political opinions.' If the hypothetical were 'you live in San Salvador and face the same risk as everyone else' or 'you meet me on the field of honour at dawn', one might be able to justify arguing whether it is unreasonable to refuse such a risk.
Point of order, but the hypothetical was "you have actual skin in the game, and face the risk you're so righteously demanding El Salvadoran citizens endure". After all, if your policy advocacy doesn't result in more El Salvadorans being murdered, then there's no risk to you at all!
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