Could you have at least thought of a scenario that would deserve a response?
Because for this one to even be a dilemma, you’d have to assume that I’m some mute, non-English speaking killer android who can’t: 1) take the gun from the table and tell the guy to turn around, hands in the air, etc; 2) run outside and yell “TERRORISTS!”; 3) hit a fire alarm on the wall; 4) shoot him in the leg...
And anyways, to be even a remote parallel with Allende, this story would need to have two guys arguing and one pushing away the gun that the other offers him, launching into a tirade about how he’s a pacifist/a Christian/whatever, and would never resort to crime even to oppose tyranny. Then he pushes the other one out of the door, throws the gun after him, turns to you and tries to hand you a protest flyer. (But no, even this doesn’t quite get it across.)
If you’re not willing to kill him, you have no business doing #1. #2 would, at best, result in -somebody else- killing him—you’re just outsourcing your moral faults. #3 might just bring more targets to him. And #4 has a pretty high chance of being fatal—femoral artery and all. (Also, a leg is -hard- to shoot. I take it you’ve never shot a gun before. In that case, you have no business shooting the gun at anything but his center of mass.)
I’m not drawing a parallel with Allende, never mind that your parallel whitewashes Allende’s history (Allende would be the senator, or rather president, in this parallel, and there’d be a -crowd- of guys with guns in the lobby, guns and grenades and body armor and aerial support in case they need to bomb the hotel just to be sure, and they wouldn’t be crazy so much as enacting the last-ditch and reluctant wishes of the judiciary after the president has repeatedly broken the constitution and ignored the Supreme Court’s orders, and so on and so forth). I’m taking this to the root of our disagreement—about whether or not consequences should be considered in moral theory.
I’m not a utilitarian, incidentally. I’m somewhere between a deontologist and a virtue ethicist. (Arguments like this are the reason I’ve been drifting away from deontology towards virtue ethics. Entirely different arguments are the reason I’ll never be a utilitarian.) If you don’t think consequences matter, you need some new rules in your deontology.
If you’re not willing to kill him, you have no business doing #1. #2 would, at best, result in -somebody else- killing him—you’re just outsourcing your moral faults.
“Not willing to kill him as a first resort” isn’t the same thing as “not willing to kill him”. Holding a gun on a criminal rather than immediately shooting him doesn’t mean that I’m not willing to kill him, it means that I’m not willing to kill him if he just sits there and waits for the police to arrive. It doesn’t mean that I’m not willing to kill him if he ignores me and continues aiming at the senator, nor does it mean that I’m not willing to have the police kill him if they try to arrest him and he doesn’t cooperate.
Since the rule under consideration is “Thou shallt not kill” and the person I’m arguing with is arguing that “moral injunctions need to rely on blanket statements”, the issue isn’t “Not willing to kill him as a first resort” so much as not willing to kill him, period.
If you’re -willing- to kill him, pointing the gun at him and telling him to halt might actually be a good move. It’s the one I would likely take. If he doesn’t stop, however, and you’re unwilling to kill him, you’ve sacrificed any other alternatives in doing so. Essentially it’s a statement that you’re willing to let some number of people be killed (on average) in order to satisfy your morality.
As is said here on decision theory, you should never be in a position of wishing your morality were different.
Fair point. But “moral injunctions must be blanket statements” doesn’t imply “Any blanket statement is a workable moral injunction.” And I’m not sure if you recognize that Multihead is not required by consistency-of-argument to assert “Any blanket statement is workable.”
The example under discussion is a great example—“Don’t kill” is a unworkable rule given any significant amount of conflict at all. By contrast, the original Hebrew of the commandments translates better as “Don’t murder” which is both a blanket statement and incredibly nuanced at the same time.
To the extent that Multihead argues that the blanket statement rule requires endorsement of “Don’t kill,” then I think you are right and he is wrong. But if that is his actual position, I don’t think he is defending the most defensible variation of that family of arguments.
The point is that murder != killing because there are some killings that aren’t murder (i.e. are not wrongful).
Describing that distinction can’t really be done briefly (e.g. what is and is not self-defense). But one doesn’t need to describe the distinction to notice that the distinction exists.
Yes, but just because it’s tautological doesn’t mean it’s necessarily psychologically compelling. I can easily imagine a human for whom “don’t kill someone you shouldn’t kill” does a much worse job of deterring them from killing someone they shouldn’t kill than “don’t murder” does. If my goal is to deter such humans from killing people they shouldn’t kill, “don’t murder” is much more effective at achieving my goal.
You might think the injunction ‘don’t murder’, is really just a way of saying ‘there is such a thing as murder, which is to say, killing immorally or illegally’ or ‘we have a law about killing’.
Considering people have brought up killing people when sanctioned by a democratic government with appropriate checks and balances, perhaps it refers to “unlawful killing”? Where “lawful” requires democracy or maybe some other supposedly superhumanly ethical authority.
(Arguments like this are the reason I’ve been drifting away from deontology towards virtue ethics. Entirely different arguments are the reason I’ll never be a utilitarian.)
Really? I had assumed you were a utilitarian from your … well, probably because you were the one shutting up and multiplying in this argument, to be honest.
I must say, I’m curious; what arguments persuade you to avoid utilitarianism in favour of virtue ethics?
“Utility”, more or less. Utilitarianism is entirely theoretical; I don’t see an actual application for it in my day-to-day life. The closest I could get would be “Well, if I actually put the work into doing the calculations, this is probably what I’d do”—and given that I know what I’d want to do anyways, the “If I actually put the work into it” part seems irrelevant.
Utilitarianism is also kind of one-dimensional; sure, you could construct a multidimensional utilitarian ethics system, but you lose out on any of the potential benefits of a hierarchical value system. Virtue ethics promotes a multidimensional approach to ethics, which is more intuitive to me, and more explicitly acknowledges the subjectiveness not only of valuation, but also of trade-offs.
He described himself as an “immense fan” of Pinochet. Smells like approval. Don’t ask me why a virtue ethicist would be an immense fan of Pinochet, though. Even if it is true that his regime represented a net utility gain over most plausible counterfactuals, it’s hard to argue that the man himself was virtuous in any ordinary sense. He was a slime.
Could you have at least thought of a scenario that would deserve a response?
Because for this one to even be a dilemma, you’d have to assume that I’m some mute, non-English speaking killer android who can’t: 1) take the gun from the table and tell the guy to turn around, hands in the air, etc; 2) run outside and yell “TERRORISTS!”; 3) hit a fire alarm on the wall; 4) shoot him in the leg...
And anyways, to be even a remote parallel with Allende, this story would need to have two guys arguing and one pushing away the gun that the other offers him, launching into a tirade about how he’s a pacifist/a Christian/whatever, and would never resort to crime even to oppose tyranny. Then he pushes the other one out of the door, throws the gun after him, turns to you and tries to hand you a protest flyer. (But no, even this doesn’t quite get it across.)
Shooting people in the leg is difficult because they’re small targets that move quickly. Aiming for the torso is much more reliable.
If you’re not willing to kill him, you have no business doing #1. #2 would, at best, result in -somebody else- killing him—you’re just outsourcing your moral faults. #3 might just bring more targets to him. And #4 has a pretty high chance of being fatal—femoral artery and all. (Also, a leg is -hard- to shoot. I take it you’ve never shot a gun before. In that case, you have no business shooting the gun at anything but his center of mass.)
I’m not drawing a parallel with Allende, never mind that your parallel whitewashes Allende’s history (Allende would be the senator, or rather president, in this parallel, and there’d be a -crowd- of guys with guns in the lobby, guns and grenades and body armor and aerial support in case they need to bomb the hotel just to be sure, and they wouldn’t be crazy so much as enacting the last-ditch and reluctant wishes of the judiciary after the president has repeatedly broken the constitution and ignored the Supreme Court’s orders, and so on and so forth). I’m taking this to the root of our disagreement—about whether or not consequences should be considered in moral theory.
I’m not a utilitarian, incidentally. I’m somewhere between a deontologist and a virtue ethicist. (Arguments like this are the reason I’ve been drifting away from deontology towards virtue ethics. Entirely different arguments are the reason I’ll never be a utilitarian.) If you don’t think consequences matter, you need some new rules in your deontology.
“Not willing to kill him as a first resort” isn’t the same thing as “not willing to kill him”. Holding a gun on a criminal rather than immediately shooting him doesn’t mean that I’m not willing to kill him, it means that I’m not willing to kill him if he just sits there and waits for the police to arrive. It doesn’t mean that I’m not willing to kill him if he ignores me and continues aiming at the senator, nor does it mean that I’m not willing to have the police kill him if they try to arrest him and he doesn’t cooperate.
Since the rule under consideration is “Thou shallt not kill” and the person I’m arguing with is arguing that “moral injunctions need to rely on blanket statements”, the issue isn’t “Not willing to kill him as a first resort” so much as not willing to kill him, period.
If you’re -willing- to kill him, pointing the gun at him and telling him to halt might actually be a good move. It’s the one I would likely take. If he doesn’t stop, however, and you’re unwilling to kill him, you’ve sacrificed any other alternatives in doing so. Essentially it’s a statement that you’re willing to let some number of people be killed (on average) in order to satisfy your morality.
As is said here on decision theory, you should never be in a position of wishing your morality were different.
Fair point. But “moral injunctions must be blanket statements” doesn’t imply “Any blanket statement is a workable moral injunction.” And I’m not sure if you recognize that Multihead is not required by consistency-of-argument to assert “Any blanket statement is workable.”
The example under discussion is a great example—“Don’t kill” is a unworkable rule given any significant amount of conflict at all. By contrast, the original Hebrew of the commandments translates better as “Don’t murder” which is both a blanket statement and incredibly nuanced at the same time.
To the extent that Multihead argues that the blanket statement rule requires endorsement of “Don’t kill,” then I think you are right and he is wrong. But if that is his actual position, I don’t think he is defending the most defensible variation of that family of arguments.
Taboo murder. If it means ‘kill someone you shouldn’t kill’, then it’s tautological that you shouldn’t murder.
:-)
The point is that murder != killing because there are some killings that aren’t murder (i.e. are not wrongful).
Describing that distinction can’t really be done briefly (e.g. what is and is not self-defense). But one doesn’t need to describe the distinction to notice that the distinction exists.
Yes, but just because it’s tautological doesn’t mean it’s necessarily psychologically compelling. I can easily imagine a human for whom “don’t kill someone you shouldn’t kill” does a much worse job of deterring them from killing someone they shouldn’t kill than “don’t murder” does. If my goal is to deter such humans from killing people they shouldn’t kill, “don’t murder” is much more effective at achieving my goal.
:-)
You might think the injunction ‘don’t murder’, is really just a way of saying ‘there is such a thing as murder, which is to say, killing immorally or illegally’ or ‘we have a law about killing’.
Considering people have brought up killing people when sanctioned by a democratic government with appropriate checks and balances, perhaps it refers to “unlawful killing”? Where “lawful” requires democracy or maybe some other supposedly superhumanly ethical authority.
Not necessarily—it depends on how convincing your bluff is to the other guy.
I would say, rathert, that it depends on how convincing you’re justified in expecting your bluff to be to them.
Really? I had assumed you were a utilitarian from your … well, probably because you were the one shutting up and multiplying in this argument, to be honest.
I must say, I’m curious; what arguments persuade you to avoid utilitarianism in favour of virtue ethics?
“Utility”, more or less. Utilitarianism is entirely theoretical; I don’t see an actual application for it in my day-to-day life. The closest I could get would be “Well, if I actually put the work into doing the calculations, this is probably what I’d do”—and given that I know what I’d want to do anyways, the “If I actually put the work into it” part seems irrelevant.
Utilitarianism is also kind of one-dimensional; sure, you could construct a multidimensional utilitarian ethics system, but you lose out on any of the potential benefits of a hierarchical value system. Virtue ethics promotes a multidimensional approach to ethics, which is more intuitive to me, and more explicitly acknowledges the subjectiveness not only of valuation, but also of trade-offs.
Well, technically OrphanWilde merely said that Pinochet increased utility on net, he didn’t way he approved of him.
He described himself as an “immense fan” of Pinochet. Smells like approval. Don’t ask me why a virtue ethicist would be an immense fan of Pinochet, though. Even if it is true that his regime represented a net utility gain over most plausible counterfactuals, it’s hard to argue that the man himself was virtuous in any ordinary sense. He was a slime.