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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31620 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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I would definitely prefer to live in a country with the reasonable amount of Risk-Care assessment that (per the view in my post) encourages saving millions of lives from a torturous death. If someone disagrees I am completely unbothered — what can I do but express my argument? This discussion is not about the most efficient practical form of procuring the legal remedy in the courts, it’s higher order than that. To me, wanting to do maximal evil to a person that wants to effectively minimize maximal harm (and torturous death) does sound like a perverse and antisocial worldview. But maybe you can get a society up and running on such principles. I would listen to someone argue that this leads to the best results, despite my doubt.

The laziest nontrivial argument to do whatever it takes to stay torture-free is that we are in a society that at least tries its darndest to maintain a pretense of shunning deliberate torture even if it is for the greater good, and all the most recent ones that did not maintain this pretense seem pretty terrible to live in.

I do concede that wanting to have all those who advocate living by the sword die by the sword and only then abolish swords is somewhat gratuitously brutal, and I'd personally be quite contented with merely locking up anyone who was involved in introducing torture. (Note that this is not to say I want to lock anyone up for arguing for it, as long as it is not implemented. That would run up against other principles.)

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