Moreover, if we insist that good, moral* people think about making decisions in this way, this leads to more of the decisions being made by evil, immoral people.
Given the way real-world humans behave, incentives work as a blunt instrument. You can’t incentivize only rational decisions without incentivizing irrational decisions that are somewhat similar in form. Incentivizing the 90% chance of saving 500 over the 100% chance of saving 400 would make the right choice more likely in that specific situation, but would also incentivize wrong choices (for instance, taking a 10% chance of 500 people dying in order to implement something that you are really certain would have good effects, when that certainty is unwarranted). You can’t change human psychology to make the incentive work only on rational choices, so we’re overall better off without the incentive.
From the outside view, a randomly picked choice to kill or hurt a large number of people, when made by actual humans, will turn out all wrong and unjustifiable in retrospect, say, 90% of the time. If we’re talking about torture as opposed to just killing enemies, it’s literally only there to create a lasting climate of terror and alienation (in the society being “reshaped” and “reformed”) while giving an outlet to the kind of psychopaths who end up running the repressive machine. So it would make sense to have a very very strong prior against this kind of thing, AKA moral injunction.
Again, if we’re considering counterfactuals along great timespans, we ARE considering counterfactuals along great timespans. Equally. If the counterfactual to a world where Pinochet didn’t take power is a long and bloody civil war, the counterfactual to a world where Pinochets are hated and considered indefensible… is a lot more Pinochets. (Whom we also just served with a much more widely accepted excuse for their horrific acts.)
To work at all, moral injunctions need to rely on blanket statements. Would you rather have “Thou shalt not kill”, or “Thou shalt not kill unless thou sees a really good reason to and it’s totally for the greater good”?
To work at all, moral injunctions need to rely on blanket statements.
As a rule, which is to say as a rule with exceptions. Rules are generally needed because it is not generally possible to accurately figure out consequences. But sometimes it is, in which case it is OK to suspend the rule. As a rule.
Exactly what I’ve been thinking of. But, as a meta-meta-rule, no-one should generally be the judge in one’s own case, i.e. to simply assert that it’s OK to suspend some particular rules for some particular act just because one has predicted some particular consequences.
There’s the problem of enforcement mechanisms, of course.
the counterfactual to a world where Pinochets are hated and considered indefensible… is a lot more Pinochets.
If someone approves of Pinochet, this is unlikely to be a convincing argument to them. Especially if they view warlord types as inevitably occurring during social evolution or something like that.
To work at all, moral injunctions need to rely on blanket statements.
You’ve not argued for this, most of us can imagine situations under which it’s acceptable to kill but we still have a reasonably strong disinclination to avoid killing people.
You walk into the lobby of a hotel during a major political convention. There’s a gun laying on the table next to you, apparently left by the only other occupant of the lobby, who hasn’t noticed you—a guy who is now assembling a gun from a backpack and readying magazines; he’s muttering rather loudly to himself about how many bullets he can put into a senator who is giving a keynote speech this afternoon. “Thou shalt not kill” or “Greater good”?
What would you want somebody else to do in that position?
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.
What would you want somebody else to do in that position?
When I first hastily glanced at your comment, I thought it’d meant that you wished the assassin had believed in “Thou shalt not kill” principle, and that it was the “Greater good” concept that was motivating him.
Likewise any desire to stop the assassin without actually knowing anything about the politics of the senator in question will have to originate more directly from the “Thou shalt not kill” principle, not from the “Greater Good” principle. To not have the former principle at all would have to mean that I’d need to calculate at that exact moment what the “greater good” in the situation actually is, and by the time the calculation is complete, the assassin would have gone about his business and I’d be unable to stop him.
Hence rule utilitarianism, the thing to do when possessing a mind of finite capabilities...
I want to stop the assassin because I don’t want to live in a world where people can just assassinate those they don’t like. As I have no practical way of creating a world where “good” assassins are permitted but “bad” ones are not, the only choice is all assassinations or none. The only way that the politics of the senator would matter is if the senator is so bad that assassinating him is overall a good thing even considering that this increases the overall acceptability of assassination. This scenario is impossible barring very unlikely scenarios (which I will ignore, because of Pascal’s Mugging). So I don’t need to do any calculations at the time.
As I have no practical way of creating a world where “good” assassins are permitted but “bad” ones are not, the only choice is all assassinations or none.
Digressing somewhat… how confident are you of that?
Or, put another way… how much less plausible is this than creating a society where “good” armed-agents-patrolling-residential-areas-to-punish-rulebreakers are permitted but “bad” ones are not, or where “good” armed-groups-capable-of-large-scale-interventions are permitted but “bad” ones are not?
Because a lot of people seem confident that police forces and armies in the real world are practical approximate implementations of those targets. And, sure, I probably can’t go out and start my own police force or army, but it’s clear that such things do get started somehow or other. Similarly, a society where “good” assassins are permitted but “bad” ones are not doesn’t seem unachievable.
I meant, of course, a world where “good” assassins resembling the type described in the post exist and “bad” ones resembling the type in the post exist. I wasn’t intending to rule out killing enemy leaders in war.
I’m not sure that changes my question. Does the situation change if the guy in the lobby identifies with a population with which the senator’s nation is at war?
In other words, Jiro is implicitly defining assassination as violence that improperly escalates a conflict from one where violence is not justified to one where violence is permissible. Under such a definition, the US didn’t assassinate Yamamoto, it simply targeted him specifically for killing.
It seems plausible to me that this definition cuts the world at its joints, but there could be edge cases I haven’t considered.
That’s not my answer. My answer is that the checks and balances inherent in having a democratic government make it permissible for the government to decide to kill people under circumstances where I would not want to let random individuals go around killing people. (This doesn’t mean that I approve of all government killing—just that I approve of a wider range of government killing than killing by individuals.)
Whether you want to say that for the government to kill someone in a war counts as assassination is just a question of semantics.
If the guy in the lobby identifies with a population with which the senator’s nation is at war, and he is aiming at the senator as part of a campaign orchestrated by that population’s government, then yes, the situation does change. (That doesn’t mean I’d approve of the killing, just that the specific reason I gave above for not approving doesn’t apply. There might still be other reasons.)
...and we’re implicitly assuming that ArisKatsaris’ example is of an individual engaging in improper escalation… e.g., that the senator being targeted is not herself engaging in violence (in which case shooting her might be OK), but rather in some less-intense form of conflict (such as rational debate, on your account) to which violence is not a justifiable response?
OK, fair enough.
I’m not really on board with your definitions of “rational debate” or “assassin”, but I’m not sure it matters, so I’m happy to leave that to one side.
And I endorse some notion of proportional response, certainly, though the details are tricky.
This looks as if it’s in agreement with my own position above—but the tone of your comment felt like a disagreement, so has one of us misunderstood something, or did I simply suffer from momentary tone-deafness?.
If we make the right choice as or more difficult to live with than wrong ones, we’re not doing a very good job incentivizing people to take it.
Moreover, if we insist that good, moral* people think about making decisions in this way, this leads to more of the decisions being made by evil, immoral people.
*for all values of “good” and “moral”.
Given the way real-world humans behave, incentives work as a blunt instrument. You can’t incentivize only rational decisions without incentivizing irrational decisions that are somewhat similar in form. Incentivizing the 90% chance of saving 500 over the 100% chance of saving 400 would make the right choice more likely in that specific situation, but would also incentivize wrong choices (for instance, taking a 10% chance of 500 people dying in order to implement something that you are really certain would have good effects, when that certainty is unwarranted). You can’t change human psychology to make the incentive work only on rational choices, so we’re overall better off without the incentive.
From the outside view, a randomly picked choice to kill or hurt a large number of people, when made by actual humans, will turn out all wrong and unjustifiable in retrospect, say, 90% of the time. If we’re talking about torture as opposed to just killing enemies, it’s literally only there to create a lasting climate of terror and alienation (in the society being “reshaped” and “reformed”) while giving an outlet to the kind of psychopaths who end up running the repressive machine. So it would make sense to have a very very strong prior against this kind of thing, AKA moral injunction.
Again, if we’re considering counterfactuals along great timespans, we ARE considering counterfactuals along great timespans. Equally. If the counterfactual to a world where Pinochet didn’t take power is a long and bloody civil war, the counterfactual to a world where Pinochets are hated and considered indefensible… is a lot more Pinochets. (Whom we also just served with a much more widely accepted excuse for their horrific acts.)
To work at all, moral injunctions need to rely on blanket statements. Would you rather have “Thou shalt not kill”, or “Thou shalt not kill unless thou sees a really good reason to and it’s totally for the greater good”?
As a rule, which is to say as a rule with exceptions. Rules are generally needed because it is not generally possible to accurately figure out consequences. But sometimes it is, in which case it is OK to suspend the rule. As a rule.
Exactly what I’ve been thinking of. But, as a meta-meta-rule, no-one should generally be the judge in one’s own case, i.e. to simply assert that it’s OK to suspend some particular rules for some particular act just because one has predicted some particular consequences.
There’s the problem of enforcement mechanisms, of course.
If someone approves of Pinochet, this is unlikely to be a convincing argument to them. Especially if they view warlord types as inevitably occurring during social evolution or something like that.
You’ve not argued for this, most of us can imagine situations under which it’s acceptable to kill but we still have a reasonably strong disinclination to avoid killing people.
You walk into the lobby of a hotel during a major political convention. There’s a gun laying on the table next to you, apparently left by the only other occupant of the lobby, who hasn’t noticed you—a guy who is now assembling a gun from a backpack and readying magazines; he’s muttering rather loudly to himself about how many bullets he can put into a senator who is giving a keynote speech this afternoon. “Thou shalt not kill” or “Greater good”?
What would you want somebody else to do in that position?
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.
When I first hastily glanced at your comment, I thought it’d meant that you wished the assassin had believed in “Thou shalt not kill” principle, and that it was the “Greater good” concept that was motivating him.
Likewise any desire to stop the assassin without actually knowing anything about the politics of the senator in question will have to originate more directly from the “Thou shalt not kill” principle, not from the “Greater Good” principle. To not have the former principle at all would have to mean that I’d need to calculate at that exact moment what the “greater good” in the situation actually is, and by the time the calculation is complete, the assassin would have gone about his business and I’d be unable to stop him.
Hence rule utilitarianism, the thing to do when possessing a mind of finite capabilities...
I want to stop the assassin because I don’t want to live in a world where people can just assassinate those they don’t like. As I have no practical way of creating a world where “good” assassins are permitted but “bad” ones are not, the only choice is all assassinations or none. The only way that the politics of the senator would matter is if the senator is so bad that assassinating him is overall a good thing even considering that this increases the overall acceptability of assassination. This scenario is impossible barring very unlikely scenarios (which I will ignore, because of Pascal’s Mugging). So I don’t need to do any calculations at the time.
Digressing somewhat… how confident are you of that?
Or, put another way… how much less plausible is this than creating a society where “good” armed-agents-patrolling-residential-areas-to-punish-rulebreakers are permitted but “bad” ones are not, or where “good” armed-groups-capable-of-large-scale-interventions are permitted but “bad” ones are not?
Because a lot of people seem confident that police forces and armies in the real world are practical approximate implementations of those targets. And, sure, I probably can’t go out and start my own police force or army, but it’s clear that such things do get started somehow or other. Similarly, a society where “good” assassins are permitted but “bad” ones are not doesn’t seem unachievable.
I meant, of course, a world where “good” assassins resembling the type described in the post exist and “bad” ones resembling the type in the post exist. I wasn’t intending to rule out killing enemy leaders in war.
I’m not sure that changes my question. Does the situation change if the guy in the lobby identifies with a population with which the senator’s nation is at war?
I’m not Jiro, but I think the best answer involves creating a scale of intensity of a conflict, and then drawing a line such that rational debate is never an intense enough conflict to justify violence. (by definition of rational debate).
In other words, Jiro is implicitly defining assassination as violence that improperly escalates a conflict from one where violence is not justified to one where violence is permissible. Under such a definition, the US didn’t assassinate Yamamoto, it simply targeted him specifically for killing.
It seems plausible to me that this definition cuts the world at its joints, but there could be edge cases I haven’t considered.
That’s not my answer. My answer is that the checks and balances inherent in having a democratic government make it permissible for the government to decide to kill people under circumstances where I would not want to let random individuals go around killing people. (This doesn’t mean that I approve of all government killing—just that I approve of a wider range of government killing than killing by individuals.)
Whether you want to say that for the government to kill someone in a war counts as assassination is just a question of semantics.
If the guy in the lobby identifies with a population with which the senator’s nation is at war, and he is aiming at the senator as part of a campaign orchestrated by that population’s government, then yes, the situation does change. (That doesn’t mean I’d approve of the killing, just that the specific reason I gave above for not approving doesn’t apply. There might still be other reasons.)
...and we’re implicitly assuming that ArisKatsaris’ example is of an individual engaging in improper escalation… e.g., that the senator being targeted is not herself engaging in violence (in which case shooting her might be OK), but rather in some less-intense form of conflict (such as rational debate, on your account) to which violence is not a justifiable response?
OK, fair enough.
I’m not really on board with your definitions of “rational debate” or “assassin”, but I’m not sure it matters, so I’m happy to leave that to one side.
And I endorse some notion of proportional response, certainly, though the details are tricky.
This looks as if it’s in agreement with my own position above—but the tone of your comment felt like a disagreement, so has one of us misunderstood something, or did I simply suffer from momentary tone-deafness?.
I would want them to alert hotel security and/or call the police.
Why does the guy need to assemble a second gun if he already had one, and how do you make one out of a backpack?
He needs to have a second gun ready so that he can get as many shots off as possible before having to reload.
He isn’t assembling the gun out of a backpack, but from a backpack: specifically, from gun parts which are inside the backpack.
Apparently at least one of my questions was a stupid question, but thank you anyway.