Comment by afarrell
2 years ago
> Rules like “don’t murder people” don’t ever work.
I’ve found it to be a pretty workable rule in living my actual life so far.
> such rules more exist as a pretty fiction than as an actual practice
I’m curious what life experiences you’ve had which lead you to conclude that “don’t murder people” is so inapplicable as to be fiction. Are you living near Bakhmut?
I mean, war is a trivial counter-example. You're intentionally killing people.
There's two ways to go about it. Either you ignore the rules whenever they start getting in the way, or you build huge subjective holes into them.
As an example of twisted logic this provokes, here’s one I’ve encountered in Schlosser’s Command and Control a couple of days ago:
> [Truman administration head of Joint Chiefs, General Omar] Bradley accused the Navy of being in “open rebellion” against the civilian leadership of the United States. The admirals were “Fancy Dans” and “aspiring martyrs” who just didn’t like to take orders. As for the accusation that [an “atomic blitz“] targeting [seventy] cities [hosting a plurality of the Soviet population] was immoral, Bradley responded, “As far as I am concerned, war itself is immoral.”
I can’t model or even try to imagine the mental gymnastics it takes to just stop at this—as opposed to continuing to “therefore we should not engage in it”, which is of course refuted by that (supposedly) being even more immoral, which in turn breaks the original assumption that all immoral things are equally bad.
Or I can try to have rules and values that work for the situations I reasonably expect myself to manage responsibly and I accept that they will fail in extreme cases. The example you gave was WW2, which was arguably the worst catastrophe in human history. It would be impractical for me to try to build a moral system to handle it.
Put it this way: If your friend asks you for advice on how to set up his wedding website, which of the following is good advice?
A) Use Squarespace.
B) Write an HTML & CSS file and put it on github pages.
C) Use Netlify.
D) Set up a multi-region kubernetes cluster with enough storage and capacity to stream the World Cup.
This does not follow.
You can be required to do things because of external forces that intentionally break the “moral rules” of normal society.
It can be morally wrong to kill a man, but you can still have to do it to defend yourself to survive.