Psy-Kosh: I think of locating responsibility as a convention. My favorite convention is to locate responsibility in the actor who carries out the deed deemed “bad.” For example, suppose that I got mugged last night while walking home. My actions and choices were factors in the mugging, but we locate responsibility squarely within the attacker. Even if another person instructed him to attack me, I still locate responsibility in the attacker, because it was his decision to do it. However, I might assign a separate crime to his boss for the specific act of instructing (but not for the act of attacking). The reason that I prefer this convention is that it seems elegant, and it simplifies tasks like writing laws and formulating personal life-approaches. It is not that I think it is “right” in some universal sense. I view the attitudes adopted by societies similarly—as conventions of varying usefulness.
Hopefully: I call Lenin “bad,” not to influence anything, but because I mean to say that he really is bad relative to a defined set of assumptions. This framework includes rules such as “torturing and killing is bad.” The question of where, exactly, we get rules like this, and whether they are universal or arbitrary is not one that I find particularly interesting to debate. I will briefly state that my own concept of such rules derives mostly from empathy—from being able to imagine the agony of being tortured and killed.
Psy-Kosh: I think of locating responsibility as a convention. My favorite convention is to locate responsibility in the actor who carries out the deed deemed “bad.” For example, suppose that I got mugged last night while walking home. My actions and choices were factors in the mugging, but we locate responsibility squarely within the attacker. Even if another person instructed him to attack me, I still locate responsibility in the attacker, because it was his decision to do it. However, I might assign a separate crime to his boss for the specific act of instructing (but not for the act of attacking). The reason that I prefer this convention is that it seems elegant, and it simplifies tasks like writing laws and formulating personal life-approaches. It is not that I think it is “right” in some universal sense. I view the attitudes adopted by societies similarly—as conventions of varying usefulness.
Hopefully: I call Lenin “bad,” not to influence anything, but because I mean to say that he really is bad relative to a defined set of assumptions. This framework includes rules such as “torturing and killing is bad.” The question of where, exactly, we get rules like this, and whether they are universal or arbitrary is not one that I find particularly interesting to debate. I will briefly state that my own concept of such rules derives mostly from empathy—from being able to imagine the agony of being tortured and killed.