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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27509 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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The sanctity of human life as a bright line between good and evil is an important load bearing principle of our civilization

Are you a staunch pacifist? Do you believe that no human being can ever kill any other human being under any circumstances? Even if your answer is yes, surely you can acknowledge that nearly no other person on earth, including in any nation you consider civilized, holds this belief. The vast majority of people believe that it is completely permissible to take another human life in at least some circumstance. That means that the line you are pointing at is not actually very bright at all, and is certainly not foundational to our civilization.

I am not. However I believe killing is only appropriate in cases where other options are exhausted such as self defense and war. And that it is not something that can be applied to people who did nothing wrong.

I entirely condemn it as a means of administrating a society, which is why though I am sympathetic to the idea of a death penalty for serious crimes, I am against it in practice. The State can not be trusted with the power to kill outside of the regimented confines of necessity. Death panels do not qualify.

And yes this is foundational to Western civilization in general and English civilization in particular which both place a lot more value on individual life than their contemporaries. Which is why the English, who like their rights, have historically not been very fond of the continental style of planned society. And why communism took root in the east and not in the west, contrary to Marx's predictions.

Again, it was England that had the Bloody Code, one of the most punitive and authoritarian legal regimes in European history. Any talk of “the natural rights and liberties of Englishmen” needs to grapple with that. It turns out that actually England does have a robust history of state institutions - such as secret police - that have intervened substantially into the lives of their citizens, no different from any other European state. So, if you’re going to make an argument about why state violence against citizens is a priori wrong, rather than trying to appeal to an extremely contentious and revisionist model of English history.

There’s a difference between a war and the state deciding that one of its own must die. I don’t think the line is death qua death but the line is certainly the inalienable rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness of those citizens who live within the borders of the state. The concept of human rights is absolutely foundational to the west and I think this is the line that must be defended.

Are you suggesting that the death penalty - something eagerly practiced by every single country you would consider part of “the West” until practically yesterday, is “anti-Western”? Again, if you do, then you’re applying a definition of “Western Civilization” that didn’t exist until about forty years ago at the earliest.

It seems that you have an extremely progressive understanding of Western history, in which the West only started at the exact point in history in which your exact values became solidified. No Western person three hundred years ago cared about or believed in “human rights” in the way you’re using the phrase. Western countries were all totally fine with slavery at that point. Were they “not Western” at that point? England at least was executing thousands of people per year for even petty crimes. Was England not “Western” until it stopped doing so?

I’m suggesting that killing somebody outside of a state of war without due process (with the exception of self-defense) isn’t part of the enlightenment western tradition. It took a long time to get there, and we’re still working to get there.

Are you suggesting that the death penalty - something eagerly practiced by every single country you would consider part of “the West” until practically yesterday, is “anti-Western”? Again, if you do, then you’re applying a definition of “Western Civilization” that didn’t exist until about forty years ago at the earliest.

I don't think that they were saying that "the state should never decide that one of its own should die." It seems that we can draw distinctions between a convicted child murderer and a child, for example.

However, I agree that human rights, in the modern sense (secular nonlegal rights that one holds because of being human) is extremely recent. The traditional Western view (going back to the days of the Roman Empire) was that one's extra-legal entitlements vs. others came from God. There were other Western ethical systems that worked differently (Stoicism, Peripateticism, Epicureanism) but these weren't based on the legalistic model that Western civilizations inherited from the Ancient Hebrews.

It was certainly abolished by appealing to Western principles. Much like slavery.

There's always a distance between the principles people hold and what they actually do.

But this is precisely the shell game I’m accusing you of. “Western countries happily lived one way for hundreds of years, and then very recently they decided to do things a different way. That means the original way they did things, which lasted for much longer than the more recent thing, was never actually Western at all.”

I don't see the enlightenment as a divergence but simply a continuation of the principles that have guided western civilization since it's foundation.

I suppose we might simply disagree there.

There’s a difference between a war and the state deciding that one of its own must die

The death sentence, while slowly dying itself (or being strangled through lawfare and regulations) still exists in many Western states.

Further, there are plenty of cases where the state summarily executes people outside a state of war, try and shoot a police officer, or in the case of the UK, attempt to stab one and see how far the sanctity of life gets you.

Holding human life as sacred/uncomprisable simply doesn't work, at most you can argue that a high premium should be put on it, which is already true in the West, unless people are willfully blind to the historical state of affairs or the misfortunes of the rest of the globe.

Further, one can easily (and correctly) argue that this particular case lies at the confluence of a conflict between multiple different "rights", such as a right to medical care, a right not to be tortured, the right to die, or parental rights over their offspring. No matter how you slice it, someone's sacred ox is getting gored.

States can and will kill people, it's how they perpetuate themselves, and necessary for their very existence until we manage to eliminate violence altogether (hah).

try and shoot a police officer, or in the case of the UK, attempt to stab one and see how far the sanctity of life gets you.

Seeing how regular police officers don’t carry firearms in the UK (aside from in Northern Ireland), you’ll probably get pretty far.

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