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Those in charge (though perhaps not their more numerous supporters) are well aware of the unreality of the liberal world-view. But they have one thing going for them, which is power. Enough power to make it so those below them are required to either usually behave as if the liberal world-view is true, or drop to the margins of society. And this is enforced by any means required up to and including the use of the US military.
To use your example of Daniel Penny, Penny saw the reality of a situation; he saw a dangerous man acting in threatening ways, and acted to stop him. The rule (set by the sovereign) in New York is that you pretend the homeless are annoying but harmless and deserving of nothing but help, right up until they put a knife in your kidneys or shove you onto the tracks. Penny broke that rule, and thus committed treason against the sovereign. It is here you miss the utter horror of the Hobbesian view. It is true but irrelevant that sovereign authority was not actually present on the train; sovereigns cannot be omnipresent now and they could only be less so in Hobbes's time. When the sovereign authority arrived, they determined that the laws of the sovereign were broken and held Penny to account. In the Hobbesian view, is the sovereign's absolute right to act or refrain from acting in any given situation; that the sovereign did not act did not give Penny any authority. He was supposed to, by the rules of the sovereign, allow Neely to act as he did. He did not, and so committed treason against the sovereign.
How many times does that actually happen a year, how many times would some 'hero' kill out of fear that it might be about to happen if we glorified and legally exonerated such vigilantism?
There's no moral calculus which concludes 'yay for more preventative lethal vigilantism against the homeless' that doesn't innately rely on valuing those lives less than the lives of everyone else.
At least 15 shovings onto the tracks in 2023 (as of October; I don't know the final number). At least 22 in 2022. 554 total felonious assaults, excluding robberies.
Fewer.
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