Yeah, that’s not actually true. It also requires evil men (or women, but for whatever reason it usually seems to be mostly men) to do something, and personally I am more inclined to blame them for it.
Anyway, I’m not sure what your point is. That our hypothetical reasonable leftie who puts up with extremist talk and maybe, later, violence from not-so-reasonable lefties hasn’t acted optimally for the general good? Sure, I agree. What of it?
We are not talking about blame. We are talking about cause-effect relationships.
My comment was more a quip and less a point, but I’m curious about LW’s thoughts about the degree to which passivity absolves you from responsibility :-/
curious about LW’s thoughts about the degree to which passivity absolves you from responsibility
I don’t think passivity as such has much to do with it. I think responsibility is diluted when the thing you did-or-didn’t-do had its effect only by many thousands of other people likewise doing-or-not-doing it. If A threatens to assassinate the President and B1...B1000 all fail to report him to the FBI despite seeing the threat, and then he does it—well, then B1 through B1000 all bear some responsibility, but I suggest at most about 0.1% as much as A does. I’m inclined to think rather less than 0.1% as much.
(But of course how much responsibility should be assigned to any given person for any given thing is a complicated question in complicated cases, and surely there’s no One True Right Answer.)
I’m not thinking of things like reporting a possible assassin to the FBI, I’m thinking of things like living in a country with a, let’s say, morally reprehensible leadership. Say, Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany. And you’re a regular person, you just go to your job every day, you don’t shoot anyone or personally interrogate enemies of the state. Of course, you do go to the party meetings, but then everyone does. To what degree are you complicit in the doings of your state?
I do not imply that there is One True Right Answer.
Technically, a certain fraction of population is born as psychopaths. Sure, we can blame them, but we shouldn’t act surprised by their existence. In some sense it is probably good to think about them similarly as we think about natural disasters (if natural disasters would be endowed with human-level intelligence, e.g. a lightning bolt would first explore the environment, and then hit exactly the least protected place to cause maximal damage).
Apologies for being off-topic, but it seems to me that this is a frequently underestimated thing.
Yeah, that’s not actually true. It also requires evil men (or women, but for whatever reason it usually seems to be mostly men) to do something, and personally I am more inclined to blame them for it.
Anyway, I’m not sure what your point is. That our hypothetical reasonable leftie who puts up with extremist talk and maybe, later, violence from not-so-reasonable lefties hasn’t acted optimally for the general good? Sure, I agree. What of it?
We are not talking about blame. We are talking about cause-effect relationships.
My comment was more a quip and less a point, but I’m curious about LW’s thoughts about the degree to which passivity absolves you from responsibility :-/
I don’t think passivity as such has much to do with it. I think responsibility is diluted when the thing you did-or-didn’t-do had its effect only by many thousands of other people likewise doing-or-not-doing it. If A threatens to assassinate the President and B1...B1000 all fail to report him to the FBI despite seeing the threat, and then he does it—well, then B1 through B1000 all bear some responsibility, but I suggest at most about 0.1% as much as A does. I’m inclined to think rather less than 0.1% as much.
(But of course how much responsibility should be assigned to any given person for any given thing is a complicated question in complicated cases, and surely there’s no One True Right Answer.)
I’m not thinking of things like reporting a possible assassin to the FBI, I’m thinking of things like living in a country with a, let’s say, morally reprehensible leadership. Say, Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany. And you’re a regular person, you just go to your job every day, you don’t shoot anyone or personally interrogate enemies of the state. Of course, you do go to the party meetings, but then everyone does. To what degree are you complicit in the doings of your state?
I do not imply that there is One True Right Answer.
Sirrah, you astonish me.
Sometimes I astonish myself.
Technically, a certain fraction of population is born as psychopaths. Sure, we can blame them, but we shouldn’t act surprised by their existence. In some sense it is probably good to think about them similarly as we think about natural disasters (if natural disasters would be endowed with human-level intelligence, e.g. a lightning bolt would first explore the environment, and then hit exactly the least protected place to cause maximal damage).
Apologies for being off-topic, but it seems to me that this is a frequently underestimated thing.