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| Re: Orange Is the New Black actress vs. Homophobic moron preacher on uptown (M) train (1322407) | |||
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Re: Orange Is the New Black actress vs. Homophobic moron preacher on uptown (M) train |
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Posted by Nilet on Thu Nov 6 00:53:14 2014, in response to Re: Orange Is the New Black actress vs. Homophobic moron preacher on uptown (M) train, posted by New Flyer #857 on Wed Nov 5 19:02:30 2014. It's a sort of social contract approach built on a utilitarianism kernel.Everyone wants to be happy (though everyone has a different definition of what that means). As such, the set of policies and actions that maximise total happiness are, on average, better for everyone. That's the basic idea of utilitarianism. On its own that leads to a few odd outcomes— sadism can be self-justifying as long as I hurt you less than I enjoy doing it. Most of this can be corrected by weighting the prevention of suffering higher than obtaining positive enjoyment, and by completely devaluing happiness derived from the suffering of others. Pure utilitarianism is also largely amnesic, meaning that it can't account for past actions and treats the happiness of a murderer as no less important than the happiness of a hero. This problem can be mitigated by mandating reciprocity— cause suffering, and your own happiness is devalued by that amount or a little more, allowing specific crimes to be addressed appropriately. Unfortunately, solving those theoretical problems doesn't address the practical problem of quantifying happiness, which is probably impossible— suffering is fairly easy to define since physical pain, sickness, emotional abuse, and so forth tend to be fairly universal, but happiness is different for everybody. However, this problem can be addressed by simplifying the moral system, sacrificing a little bit of efficacy for a lot of practicality. Specifically, replace "happiness" with "opportunity to pursue happiness." That means physical and political freedom, control over one's life to the extent practical, functional societal infrastructure, the ability to earn a decent living (or receive a reasonably comfortable living if unable to work) and so forth. Once everyone has been granted the opportunity to pursue happiness, it becomes an individual affair no longer subject to the domain of a moral system. Once the basics of a moral system are established, I'd add a few caveats to better prepare it for the complexities of the real world. First, I'd add an affirmative obligation to reduce unfairness as well as suffering, where "unfairness" occurs when two people have different abilities to pursue happiness or avoid suffering and this discrepancy is the result of blind luck uninfluenced by personal choices. If I got the promotion because I worked late and you took ten days off every month, that's not unfair but if I got the promotion because I'm white and you're black, that is unfair. If I get better job offers because I worked hard in college while you partied, that's not unfair but if I get better job offers because I was born in New York while you were born in Harare, that is unfair. If I'm rich and you're poor because I invented a cheap home teleport machine while you ate ding dongs and played video games, that's not unfair but if I'm rich and you're poor because my grandfather invented a cheap home teleport machine and your grandfather ate ding dongs and played video games, that is unfair. If I'm (reasonably) rich and you're poor because I work a decent job and you're severely disabled, that's also unfair (assuming the disability wasn't self-inflicted) and while it may be harder to mitigate, it should still be mitigated to the extent we are able. Second, I'd add a clause imposing an affirmative obligation to recognise that while we're all influenced by our environment, we are wonderfully plastic creatures which means that the appropriate response to transgressions against other people in violation of morality is to attempt to impose proper behaviour upon the transgressor— while this may require punishment (and in practice almost always will), a punishment itself is not "justice." The vast majority of criminals have a motive which can be removed through more effective means than simply trying to build enough prisons to offer a contrary motive. If someone is starving, giving him food will deter crime a lot more than threatening prison for stealing some. If someone believes that a god told him to kill people, teaching him that this god doesn't exist would be far more likely to deter him than threatening him with a prison he believes he'll never serve in anyway. A rapist is far more likely to be deterred by a culture which says women are not his property and attacking them is not acceptable than by a prison he can be fairly certain he'll never be sent to. Naturally, reform efforts will not always be successful— the starving man will likely forgo crime if he can earn a living legally, and the rapist might be scared off by a culture willing to put him in prison if it becomes necessary, but a would-be suicide bomber is unlikely to be deterred by evidence that his god doesn't exist and will dismiss anyone presenting such as a heretic, and some of people commit crimes entirely because of sadism or sociopathy not amenable to reform efforts or even on impulse without any reason at all. However, that the reform approach will not always be successful is not reason to permanently shun criminals. Third, I'd add a clause asserting the inherent supremacy of fact over fiction— that is, genuinely believing in a falsehood despite the facts being readily available is considered inherently harmful to a very small extent, resulting in a very small devaluation to the happiness of the willfully ignorant, thus justifying a few minor impositions even without direct harm arising from the ignorance. (That is, if you believe people only use 10% of their brains, you deserve the "suffering" you incur when people declare that you must only use 10% of your brain if you believe that malarky.) So under this moral system, the death penalty is immoral because (a) it violates the mandate to attempt to reform criminals, and (b) it violates the mandate to decrease unfairness and the prohibition on causing suffering when innocent people are wrongfully executed, which is guaranteed to happen because no court system nor any method for determining guilt will ever be perfect enough to prevent all wrongful convictions. As for why it's "best," well it means that statistically you'd be happiest overall for all values of "you," but that's kind of like asking why democracy is the "best" form of government— in theory, there is an optimal system much better than any other but we won't ever know what it is and this system offers a generally optimal balance of benefits and practicality given our limited knowledge and capabilities— that is, a balance between how much we'd like the outcome if everyone followed the system perfectly and how likely it is we'd get anywhere near that level of perfection. The perfect-outcome scenario is what I'd call perfect— everyone happier than any other system would allow. The likelihood of success probably isn't too great but it's a lot better than many other proposed systems— the obligations imposed may require cultural change on a large scale but nothing that violates essential human nature, and it's reasonably failure-tolerant; individual violations are self-correcting within the system and systemic violations don't cause complete failures, since an oppressed group being denied legal rights and moral consideration doesn't prevent the system from maximising the happiness of the oppressing group, nor does it prevent the system from maximising the happiness of an oppressed group to the extent possible given the oppression when that oppression is less severe than the complete denial of moral consideration. So why do you oppose the death penalty? What moral system do you use? |
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