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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30730 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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Whilst letting people you could have helped die because it's easier or cheaper is abominable cowardice that betrays that self same metaphysical order.

I can help many poor Africans by selling all my worldly possessions and donating to some charitable cause. This implies that my failure to do so is abominable cowardice on my part, and in fact that everyone except such Africans is engaged in abominable cowardice.

You have no duty to care for proverbial poor Africans. This isn't true of the countrymen a national healthcare system is sworn to protect.

The people being offered death are citizens and in some cases direct wards of the State, sovereignty implies a moral duty to care for your subjects under even purely utilitarian conceptions of it.

Someone is clearly responsible for this particular senseless waste of human life.

This can be true of your proverbial Africans as well, but without a specified scenario it's impossible to tell. That said the problem is unlikely to be one of cowardice in that continent rather than more blatant forms of tyranny, incompetence and corruption, in my experience. Canada has no such excuses.

I think "letting them die" is the wrong term. What is happening here is the state is "actively killing them."

No? I struggle to see how you even came to that conclusion. Would the opposite also be the case? Anyone not spending everything they have on Africans can kill anyone that's costing them money?

You The OP said that "... letting people you could have helped die because it's easier or cheaper is abominable cowardice."

I have failed to help such Africans, and I've failed to help them because it was easier and cheaper to not do so. Some of them will die because of this.

So it follows that I am engaged in abominable cowardice.

If that's the standard for cowardice, rest assured I'm standing by your side and competing to become an even bigger one. I never claimed to be omnibenevolent, merely a net positive of the same. I feel no shame about the matter either!

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