What would you say to someone who replied “Many punches would have hurt me deeply 15 years ago but hardly any can now because I’ve studied martial arts. It is within my power to feel zero pain from any blow you might deliver. People really can change their physical capabilities to take less physical pain if they want to.”?
There is play there, but the ability to your ability to change your body is really not remotely close to your ability to change your mind.
It seems to follow that the “bright line” between physical and psychological harm is a quantitative difference.
More precisely, it’s not that people are able to “choose not to be harmed” by psychological influences but unable to do so for physical ones, but rather that people are more able to choose not to be harmed by psychological than physical influences.
Based on that I conclude that the important factor here is how much ability the sufferer has to protect themselves from suffering, and what the cost to them of doing so would be. Whether the suffering is physical or psychological or neither is at best a stand-in for that; it is not important in and of itself.
Obliterating the “bright line” you want to draw here (as you claim yvain does) and replacing it with a consideration for ability to protect oneself does not justify “answering an argument with a bullet.”
Sure, if in a particular case we’re for some reason unable to come up with a better estimate of how much ability the sufferer had to protect themselves, we can select a prior based on a clumsy metric like “you can protect yourself from psychological harm but not physical harm.”
For example, if I know nothing more about a particular conflict than that person A was talking to person B and person B shot person A in response, I have a pretty high confidence that person B reacted inappropriately.
But I don’t have to embrace a misleading sharp line between physical and psychological harm in order to reach that conclusion.
For example, if I know nothing more about a particular conflict than that person A was talking to person B and person B shot person A in response, I have a pretty high confidence that person B reacted inappropriately.
But what it it’s one person A who is committed to drawing cartoons which offend a
billion muslims. He flatly refuses to stop over an extended period of time. Eventually one (or more) of them kills A..
Did the killer(s) act inappropriately in this case? It looks efficient under Yvain’s calculus, doesn’t it?
So, I’ll emphasize that the point that you quote was tangential to this, and had to do with the implications of reasoning under conditions of incomplete information.
But, to answer your question: I don’t endorse murder as an appropriate response to offense.
Why not? Well, one simple reason is that I would rather live in a culture where people offend one another without recourse than a culture where people kill one another without sanction over idiosyncratic grounds for offense, were those the only choices (which, of course, they aren’t).
That said, if you could convince me that no, actually, we’d all be better off if we established the cultural convention that killing people for drawing offensive cartoons was acceptable, I would (reluctantly) change my position. I can’t imagine how you could actually convince me of that in the real world, though.
Moreover, it seems to me that this sort of consequentialist reasoning for what is and is not an appropriate response is entirely consistent with Yvain’s post, and I don’t expect that he will disagree with my conclusion. (Though I’d be interested if he did.)
And, just to be clear about this, the difference between physical and psychological harm that you started out arguing the importance of is completely orthogonal to my reasoning here. If instead of killing A, the hypothetical muslims put A in a sensory-deprivation tank until A goes irreversibly mad, my answer doesn’t significantly change. (Does yours?)
Digressing a little… note that when the grounds for offense are sufficiently endorsed by the mainstream culture, we have a way of no longer calling it “murder”… or, if we do, we create special categories to distinguish it from, you know, real murder. For example, there exist municipalities where, if I walk in on my wife having sex with another man and kill him in response, this is considered different from if I walk in on my wife serving ice cream and kill him in response… and this is completely independent of my personal feelings about sex and ice cream.
Conversely, when an act offends enough of us, or offends powerful enough individuals, we often criminalize it… whereupon we respond to it by deputizing state agents to forcibly restrain the person and deprive them of safety, comfort, and liberty (and, in extreme cases, life).
All of which is to say that this business of responding to “merely psychological” offenses with “physical” retaliation is not solely the province of putative extremists from a different culture than my own. Not that you were stating otherwise, but I often find it helpful to explicitly remind myself of that.
Would you be willing to support/expand on that claim further? I have low confidence since I haven’t spent a whole lot of time thinking about it, but this runs counter to my intuition.
There is play there, but the ability to your ability to change your body is really not remotely close to your ability to change your mind.
It seems to follow that the “bright line” between physical and psychological harm is a quantitative difference.
More precisely, it’s not that people are able to “choose not to be harmed” by psychological influences but unable to do so for physical ones, but rather that people are more able to choose not to be harmed by psychological than physical influences.
Based on that I conclude that the important factor here is how much ability the sufferer has to protect themselves from suffering, and what the cost to them of doing so would be. Whether the suffering is physical or psychological or neither is at best a stand-in for that; it is not important in and of itself.
Obliterating the “bright line” you want to draw here (as you claim yvain does) and replacing it with a consideration for ability to protect oneself does not justify “answering an argument with a bullet.”
Sure, if in a particular case we’re for some reason unable to come up with a better estimate of how much ability the sufferer had to protect themselves, we can select a prior based on a clumsy metric like “you can protect yourself from psychological harm but not physical harm.”
For example, if I know nothing more about a particular conflict than that person A was talking to person B and person B shot person A in response, I have a pretty high confidence that person B reacted inappropriately.
But I don’t have to embrace a misleading sharp line between physical and psychological harm in order to reach that conclusion.
But what it it’s one person A who is committed to drawing cartoons which offend a billion muslims. He flatly refuses to stop over an extended period of time. Eventually one (or more) of them kills A..
Did the killer(s) act inappropriately in this case? It looks efficient under Yvain’s calculus, doesn’t it?
So, I’ll emphasize that the point that you quote was tangential to this, and had to do with the implications of reasoning under conditions of incomplete information.
But, to answer your question: I don’t endorse murder as an appropriate response to offense.
Why not? Well, one simple reason is that I would rather live in a culture where people offend one another without recourse than a culture where people kill one another without sanction over idiosyncratic grounds for offense, were those the only choices (which, of course, they aren’t).
That said, if you could convince me that no, actually, we’d all be better off if we established the cultural convention that killing people for drawing offensive cartoons was acceptable, I would (reluctantly) change my position. I can’t imagine how you could actually convince me of that in the real world, though.
Moreover, it seems to me that this sort of consequentialist reasoning for what is and is not an appropriate response is entirely consistent with Yvain’s post, and I don’t expect that he will disagree with my conclusion. (Though I’d be interested if he did.)
And, just to be clear about this, the difference between physical and psychological harm that you started out arguing the importance of is completely orthogonal to my reasoning here. If instead of killing A, the hypothetical muslims put A in a sensory-deprivation tank until A goes irreversibly mad, my answer doesn’t significantly change. (Does yours?)
Digressing a little… note that when the grounds for offense are sufficiently endorsed by the mainstream culture, we have a way of no longer calling it “murder”… or, if we do, we create special categories to distinguish it from, you know, real murder. For example, there exist municipalities where, if I walk in on my wife having sex with another man and kill him in response, this is considered different from if I walk in on my wife serving ice cream and kill him in response… and this is completely independent of my personal feelings about sex and ice cream.
Conversely, when an act offends enough of us, or offends powerful enough individuals, we often criminalize it… whereupon we respond to it by deputizing state agents to forcibly restrain the person and deprive them of safety, comfort, and liberty (and, in extreme cases, life).
All of which is to say that this business of responding to “merely psychological” offenses with “physical” retaliation is not solely the province of putative extremists from a different culture than my own. Not that you were stating otherwise, but I often find it helpful to explicitly remind myself of that.
I think this is very nicely put, and is sort of what I was thinking when I commented, but couldn’t articulate. Thanks!
Would you be willing to support/expand on that claim further? I have low confidence since I haven’t spent a whole lot of time thinking about it, but this runs counter to my intuition.