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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.
Most of your posts here amount to calling someone a pussy, using more words. Stop it.
I honestly don't think that's the relevant label. I think the guy comes off as very provincial and inexperienced. My whole point is that I suspect he's never been in a situation where being a pussy vs being brave would even come up, to an extremely unusual degree.
I'm suggesting he check his privilege, while actually bothering to explain why that's relevant. But there's no reason to continue belaboring the point.
TBQH, I was actually one of the volunteers rating some of your posts in this thread, and one of them (four upstream from the one I'm replying to now) I did actually rate as "deserves a warning". Not so much because of the amount of heat (which was quite high), but because you went cross-thread to keep after CBNOS. There's this bit explicitly in the rules:
...which is intended to reduce yelling matches via giving an escape valve when somebody can't be civil anymore. I use that valve now and then, which is part of why I have zero warnings here. When you go cross-thread to keep after someone, you're jamming that valve.
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While I agree with
and think that criticising Bukele is kind of gauche under the circumstances, it seems like you haven’t read NOS’s post at all. He is the one arguing for ‘the ends don’t justify the means’ non-consequentialism whereas you seem to be arguing that dropping the murder rate by 99% justifies an awful lot.
I understood his argument as being upset about anything beyond the absolute bare minimum quantity of harm being done in the prevention of a greater evil, via the trite rationalist framework of "bad things are bad, and I'm free to criticize everyone else for being less perfect than my pacifistic ivory tower ideals". Maybe he's not the kind of person who doesn't want to punish criminals because of a shallow "people experiencing bad things is bad!" moral understanding... but that's certainly the impression I was getting, especially with him citing Thing of Things like it's a fucking Gospel.
And you know what? We can have that conversation. But you have to be able to justify the claims of unnecessary cruelty, and have to make at least some effort to weigh the pros and cons, and to account for cultural differences, too. And unfortunately, bro seems to be incapable of even attempting a serious effort at that. It comes off like an Eloi asking why the El Salvadoran's just don't notlet bad things happen. It's the "let them eat cake" of criminal theory.
Yes. And I can support that stance under any moral framework you like, from consequentialism to virtue ethics. But the secondary part is that there doesn't actually seem to be an "awful lot" to justify. People in this thread keep going off about EL SALVADORAN TORTURE PRISON, but none of the people I've asked have offered any evidence that's it's even particularly bad as far as prisons go. Hell, they haven't offered any evidence at all. And my own brief searching seems to suggest that the prison in question is less brutal than a normal American prison, because the prisoners are kept so locked down that they can't brutalize each other. There was a multi-day meltdown over the presumption that Garcia was being tortured and probably murdered... and he just met with a Senator and seemed pretty comfortable and fine, and didn't seem to have complaints of that nature.
So... maybe some people should grow up and at least try to justify any of the horseshit they're peddling. Alternatively, I'm free to point out that they sound like spoiled children.
I understood his argument to be:
The latter sounds essentially deontological to me, even though it’s dressed up in standard consequentialism.
I’m okay with a principle of ‘be especially wary of your reasoning if you find yourself justifying atrocities - look at all the tyrants who did the same’. But Bukele seems almost uniquely bad as a case study for this principle given that he was 100% successful in achieving an unarguably good goal and as you say I’m not aware of his doing anything immensely terrible.
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