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Notes -
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.
This is a Sequence. Not to say that I'm a faithful follower of said Sequence; I'm not wholly in agreement with it and generally do not live up to it even to the extent I want to.
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