Agreed, with a side helping of, the farther that madman gets away, the more difficult it is to do something, and the more likely it is that said 'something' will make the matter worse, owing to matters of politics, geography, and culture.
You never actually stated something must be done by any particular party until the last question. Personally I believe those more local to the situation would be best to deal with any situation first before bringing in outside help.
this, with the added observation that you don't say who's doing the something - only that something must be done (presumably by someone). Something must be done in all situations of justice. Who is best placed to do it is another question.
This is ... extremely loaded. I hope that's deliberate.
IMO, the closer to home something is, the more confident we can be that our judgements that it is wrong and that we know what to do to fix it are correct, and the further away it is, the more likely those judgements are to be misguided in some way. I also believe in the right of other countries to be sovereign in their own territory and not be policed by the country that happens to be the most powerful.
I also believe in the right of other countries to be sovereign in their own territory and not be policed by the country that happens to be the most powerful.
So genocide is fine, so long as it's legal in the country in which it occurs?
(Yes, that's an extreme example, but your statement seemed equally extreme.)
No, it's not "fine", but I don't think it's morally right for other countries to punish it, either. And, on a pragmatic level, recent world history has shown that we make things worse.
If someone else's child hits his little sister, that's wrong of him, but it would also be wrong of me (a stranger not in loco parentis) to punish him.
So how long would you watch him punch his little sister? Until her nose bleeds? Until she falls unconscious?
And _some_ recent world history has shown we make things worse. I believe that a lot of the work in the Balkans was seen as a good thing, where genocide was prevented.
See my clarification here (http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/1640141.html?thread=10046669#t10046669). I was possibly jumping to conclusions.
My point was that it would be wrong for me to *punish* the hitter; I was imagining a situation where he only did it once and I then sent him to his bedroom or spanked him or took away his PlayStation.
If he were continuing to hit his sister, then if I could, say, separate the children until their parents got back so that he couldn't hit her, then that would be a good thing to do, obviously.
But the statement isn't, "s/he should be punished," it's "something must be done." That could be as much as shooting them in the head, or as little as physically restraining him.
Something must be done, yes, but what that something is isn't covered by the question, so I don't have a problem agreeing. To me, "Something must be done" is very similar in meaning to, "this can't be allowed to go on." How you dis-allow it or stop it being done is another matter.
Unless that something just writing a blog post, writing to your MP is the something that's most likely to have an effect. This is probably true. I wonder how much of an effect it has. We need studies!
Just to clarify: I'm assuming, possibly wrongly, that the kind of intervention you're talking about is large-scale and probably violent. If that's not the case, then I change my position. For example, if there's a genocide going on and we can give the victims safe passage over here and grant them asylum, then that's a good idea; that's not policing anyone or aggravating situations we don't understand.
I wasn't saying that the answer to X was to do _worse_ things. I don't think anyone was.
And you said that if an action was happening in another country then intervening was wrong. I assumed that you mean that intervening was more wrong than whatever was happening. As "countries" are constructs created by people with no 'natural' state of being, it seems you're willing to let these lines get in the way of saving people from awful fates.
"countries" are constructs created by people with no 'natural' state of being
So are laws, human rights, marriages, etc, but I respect those too.
Like I've said already, I think we were originally at cross purposes over the kind of "saving people" being discussed. I'm all for saving people in a way that involves offering them safety as opposed to going in and using our superior might to impose our will on their persecutors and force them to behave.
So are laws, human rights, marriages, etc, but I respect those too.
All laws? Because I certainly don't.
And offering safe haven is always a good start. But when the torturers in the other country won't let people go, and are herding them into death camps, I tend to be in favour of action.
I'm with you on this ... there's sovreignty and there's humanity, and they are on different maps :-)
A country that decides that it is ok to have sausages that are less than 75% meat and chocolate and icecream that contain vegetable fat is not a case for sending in an army (well, depends on the chocolate!).
A country that decides it is ok to kill every baby darker than a certain skin tone, that's different.
And then you get the problem ... where is the moral dividing line? If a country seriously believes that life begins at conception sees a neighbouring country practicing abortion (and so, by country A's morals, is killing thousands of human lives) is it ok for Country A to invade Country B?
The first part of any genocide is declaring that some people aren't human (or aren't fully human) and that their lives are worth less than the killing groups. Whether this is done on race, skin tone, relgious belief or intelligence (and does eugenics like the forced sterilization practiced in Sweden in the first half of the 20th century on the mentally subnormal count?)
What about if country A sees women being badly treated, beaten and deprived of education and rights? Is it ok to stand by?
I am not looking for actual answers, I am merely raising the obvious point that as soon as you say it is ok to interfere in another country's affairs for a really good reason, then that opens the floodgates for people to decide their reason is really good. (e.g. to bring democracy, to bring education and sanitation, to bring "freedom", to stop the world being flooded with opium, to bring the "blessing of Christianity to the savages" etc. etc.)
Rwanda was terrible; Kosova, Bosnia the Kurds, and so many other situations equally so ... DR Congo and Zimbabwe ... where is it ok to go in, and what are acceptable justifications?
I can't answer that aside from the "if I point at it and say I think it's valid, then it's valid" level of decision making.
And then you get the problem ... where is the moral dividing line? Well, as morals are inherently subjective/intersubjective I'd say that there very much isn't a line, there's a great big blurry grey area.
If a country seriously believes that life begins at conception sees a neighbouring country practicing abortion (and so, by country A's morals, is killing thousands of human lives) is it ok for Country A to invade Country B?
Ok by who's standards?
I can't answer that aside from the "if I point at it and say I think it's valid, then it's valid" level of decision making. Me either. I'm ok with that though.
"The genocide is fine, if its legal in the country where it occurs" one is interesting:
Under Nazi law, being Jewish was essentially illegal. So was being homosexual.
After the war, the former was understood as genocide, but the latter wasn't, because - as I understand it - pre- and post- Nazi penal codes still defined homosexuality as illegal.
On this, I've often wondered what someone who was both Jewish and gay would say and where they would fit.
More generally, it's about different understandings - what is murder, rape, psychopathy etc, and are they universals?
I'm not the only one to point it out. Either it's a deliberate ploy on your part to get people to comment, or you need to spend more time thinking about providing a set of answers that actually cover the answer space.
Hint, if you have two radio buttons, then to cover the answer space, the second one has to be the reverse of the first. So for example a bad set would be What colour should Ferraris be painted A) green B) pink
and a better set of answers would be A) green, B) not green
And the actual answers should be a ticky box or similar that accepts black, red and yellow, and NOTHING ELSE (grin!) (oh, all right, maybe white)
The world can be divided into "us" and "them". "They" should help themselves rather then relying on "us". 0 (0.0%)
Nope. The world is both united and endlessly subdivided into groups from one person to family to community to religion to football team to skin colour to country to meatVSvegetarian etc. We are all individuals, we are all unique snowflakes and at the same time we are all parts of many overlapping and disjoint groups.
The world is made up of people. All people deserve our help equally.
Nope. (well, yes, at one level the world is made up of people, let's ignore all other levels in that statement!). All people deserve our help equally. Nope. My mother deserves my help much more than George W. Bush. My friends deserve my help much more than a random member of the Taliban does.
I call it circles of influece and circles of interconnectedness, but I'm sure there are better sociological terms.
If my mother needed £5,000 for a hip operation, I'd borrow the money immediately and send it to her. If some random person in California needed £5,000 for a hip operation I'd probably send nothing. If one of my fannish friends put an appeal on LJ saying that a filker in California without adequate health insurance needed £5,000 as co-pay on her hip replacement, I might donate £20.
Thus I do not believe that "we" should treat everyone equally because I am firmly committed to "I don't treat everyone in the world equally" and I'm perfectly happy with that.
I'm with you, by the way. I'm motivated by selfishness and altruism, and the "further away" someone is, the less altruism there is. There's probably an inverse square rule or something :->
I'm motivated by selfishness and altruism, and the "further away" someone is, the less altruism there is. There's probably an inverse square rule or something
the_alchemist made an interesting post about something similar this recently (unfortunately friends-locked), although her post was purely about time and space proximity, rather than social. She calls it the Proximity Rule, and says she doesn't have one.
In which case I assume she either never helps anyone at all with anything, or is constantly in a state of dire poverty as she gives away all of her time and money to help other people.
As I emphasised, she means time and space, not social; but on that scale AIUI she tried the latter and found it unsustainable, so moved to the former at the cost of being thought callous.
If there's a serial killer next door, then I will call the police and maybe attempt to engage in fisticuffs.
If there's a serial killer in Montreal, what the hell am I supposed to do? Buy a train ticket and hope that they are still in Montreal when I get there, eh? I'll just have wasted my money.
A serial killer in the States or in Switzerland is a matter for the local constabulary.
This is clearly not about Iraq, as you are using a verb in the present tense, whereas Saddam's excesses happenned fifteen years before 2003.
If people even consider the chance of "us" and "then" which is incredibly easy, then there are a whole loads of psychological mechanisms that take over. People will naturally favour the group they perceive to be a part of. Its called ingroup outgroup if you want to look further into the psychology of prejudice.
For the most part, I agree with the_magician's comment for that last question. My answer was pretty much "both". The world can be divided and they should help themselves rather than relying on us, but it is also made up of people - who, generally, deserve our help equally.
I answered something must be done to all except the last one regarding the different continents. My logic is going to be a little flawed here. First off, I'm in Australia, and the next country over is probably New Zealand, a country which would probably really really need some help in such a situation, and we'd really be obliged. The next continent over, is Asia, which is quite a different story. The thing is, there are rules between different continents - and countries if you look further out - which may suggest that they don't want our help. In which case, interference will just make things worse.
Hell, check out the war on terror between the almighty US and terror-ridden Afghanistan. Textbook.
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It's the forcefulness of the must that worries me.
I know what triggered this, so this may have shaped my answers.
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IMO, the closer to home something is, the more confident we can be that our judgements that it is wrong and that we know what to do to fix it are correct, and the further away it is, the more likely those judgements are to be misguided in some way. I also believe in the right of other countries to be sovereign in their own territory and not be policed by the country that happens to be the most powerful.
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I also believe in the right of other countries to be sovereign in their own territory and not be policed by the country that happens to be the most powerful.
So genocide is fine, so long as it's legal in the country in which it occurs?
(Yes, that's an extreme example, but your statement seemed equally extreme.)
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If someone else's child hits his little sister, that's wrong of him, but it would also be wrong of me (a stranger not in loco parentis) to punish him.
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And _some_ recent world history has shown we make things worse. I believe that a lot of the work in the Balkans was seen as a good thing, where genocide was prevented.
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My point was that it would be wrong for me to *punish* the hitter; I was imagining a situation where he only did it once and I then sent him to his bedroom or spanked him or took away his PlayStation.
If he were continuing to hit his sister, then if I could, say, separate the children until their parents got back so that he couldn't hit her, then that would be a good thing to do, obviously.
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I'm glad to see you're on the side of intervention :->
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Something must be done, yes, but what that something is isn't covered by the question, so I don't have a problem agreeing. To me, "Something must be done" is very similar in meaning to, "this can't be allowed to go on." How you dis-allow it or stop it being done is another matter.
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Given the options presented to Parliament: War in Iraq. Do nothing for several months. Which way do you want your MP to vote?
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You have to make choices in it, and they would be driven by your moral code.
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Unless that something just writing a blog post, writing to your MP is the something that's most likely to have an effect.
(Actually assassinating MPs you think will vote the other way would be more effective. And some must be done.)
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Really?
That's now how I voted.
Unless that something just writing a blog post, writing to your MP is the something that's most likely to have an effect.
This is probably true. I wonder how much of an effect it has. We need studies!
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It's possible to understand that group A in a country is using group B as a scapegoat, lining them up and shooting them, I'd assume.
Personally, I don't see why drawing lines on the ground makes it ok to rape people on one side of the line and not on the other. Seems...odd to me.
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"There are ways of trying to stop bad_action_X which are even more wrong than bad_action_X" does not imply "bad_action_X is OK".
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And you said that if an action was happening in another country then intervening was wrong. I assumed that you mean that intervening was more wrong than whatever was happening. As "countries" are constructs created by people with no 'natural' state of being, it seems you're willing to let these lines get in the way of saving people from awful fates.
But I may be misunderstanding your answers here.
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So are laws, human rights, marriages, etc, but I respect those too.
Like I've said already, I think we were originally at cross purposes over the kind of "saving people" being discussed. I'm all for saving people in a way that involves offering them safety as opposed to going in and using our superior might to impose our will on their persecutors and force them to behave.
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All laws? Because I certainly don't.
And offering safe haven is always a good start. But when the torturers in the other country won't let people go, and are herding them into death camps, I tend to be in favour of action.
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Excellent point.
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A country that decides that it is ok to have sausages that are less than 75% meat and chocolate and icecream that contain vegetable fat is not a case for sending in an army (well, depends on the chocolate!).
A country that decides it is ok to kill every baby darker than a certain skin tone, that's different.
And then you get the problem ... where is the moral dividing line? If a country seriously believes that life begins at conception sees a neighbouring country practicing abortion (and so, by country A's morals, is killing thousands of human lives) is it ok for Country A to invade Country B?
The first part of any genocide is declaring that some people aren't human (or aren't fully human) and that their lives are worth less than the killing groups. Whether this is done on race, skin tone, relgious belief or intelligence (and does eugenics like the forced sterilization practiced in Sweden in the first half of the 20th century on the mentally subnormal count?)
What about if country A sees women being badly treated, beaten and deprived of education and rights? Is it ok to stand by?
I am not looking for actual answers, I am merely raising the obvious point that as soon as you say it is ok to interfere in another country's affairs for a really good reason, then that opens the floodgates for people to decide their reason is really good. (e.g. to bring democracy, to bring education and sanitation, to bring "freedom", to stop the world being flooded with opium, to bring the "blessing of Christianity to the savages" etc. etc.)
Rwanda was terrible; Kosova, Bosnia the Kurds, and so many other situations equally so ... DR Congo and Zimbabwe ... where is it ok to go in, and what are acceptable justifications?
I can't answer that aside from the "if I point at it and say I think it's valid, then it's valid" level of decision making.
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http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/three-worlds-collide.html
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http://syndicated.livejournal.com/andyduckerlinks/608861.html
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Well, as morals are inherently subjective/intersubjective I'd say that there very much isn't a line, there's a great big blurry grey area.
If a country seriously believes that life begins at conception sees a neighbouring country practicing abortion (and so, by country A's morals, is killing thousands of human lives) is it ok for Country A to invade Country B?
Ok by who's standards?
I can't answer that aside from the "if I point at it and say I think it's valid, then it's valid" level of decision making.
Me either. I'm ok with that though.
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Under Nazi law, being Jewish was essentially illegal. So was being homosexual.
After the war, the former was understood as genocide, but the latter wasn't, because - as I understand it - pre- and post- Nazi penal codes still defined homosexuality as illegal.
On this, I've often wondered what someone who was both Jewish and gay would say and where they would fit.
More generally, it's about different understandings - what is murder, rape, psychopathy etc, and are they universals?
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bad poll
:-)
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Bad comment.
:->
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;-P
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Hint, if you have two radio buttons, then to cover the answer space, the second one has to be the reverse of the first. So for example a bad set would be
What colour should Ferraris be painted
A) green B) pink
and a better set of answers would be
A) green, B) not green
And the actual answers should be a ticky box or similar that accepts black, red and yellow, and NOTHING ELSE (grin!) (oh, all right, maybe white)
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Have you not noticed the discussion on the construction of my polls before? That's _exactly_ what they're there for.
Seriously
The world
can be divided into "us" and "them". "They" should help themselves rather then relying on "us".
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Nope. The world is both united and endlessly subdivided into groups from one person to family to community to religion to football team to skin colour to country to meatVSvegetarian etc. We are all individuals, we are all unique snowflakes and at the same time we are all parts of many overlapping and disjoint groups.
The world
is made up of people. All people deserve our help equally.
Nope. (well, yes, at one level the world is made up of people, let's ignore all other levels in that statement!). All people deserve our help equally. Nope. My mother deserves my help much more than George W. Bush. My friends deserve my help much more than a random member of the Taliban does.
I call it circles of influece and circles of interconnectedness, but I'm sure there are better sociological terms.
If my mother needed £5,000 for a hip operation, I'd borrow the money immediately and send it to her. If some random person in California needed £5,000 for a hip operation I'd probably send nothing. If one of my fannish friends put an appeal on LJ saying that a filker in California without adequate health insurance needed £5,000 as co-pay on her hip replacement, I might donate £20.
Thus I do not believe that "we" should treat everyone equally because I am firmly committed to "I don't treat everyone in the world equally" and I'm perfectly happy with that.
Re: Seriously
I can't remember the name for the circles of interconnectedness, but The Monkeysphere is the term I tend to use.
Dunbar's Number probably helps here too.
I'm with you, by the way. I'm motivated by selfishness and altruism, and the "further away" someone is, the less altruism there is. There's probably an inverse square rule or something :->
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If there's a serial killer in Montreal, what the hell am I supposed to do? Buy a train ticket and hope that they are still in Montreal when I get there, eh? I'll just have wasted my money.
A serial killer in the States or in Switzerland is a matter for the local constabulary.
This is clearly not about Iraq, as you are using a verb in the present tense, whereas Saddam's excesses happenned fifteen years before 2003.
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I answered something must be done to all except the last one regarding the different continents. My logic is going to be a little flawed here. First off, I'm in Australia, and the next country over is probably New Zealand, a country which would probably really really need some help in such a situation, and we'd really be obliged. The next continent over, is Asia, which is quite a different story. The thing is, there are rules between different continents - and countries if you look further out - which may suggest that they don't want our help. In which case, interference will just make things worse.
Hell, check out the war on terror between the almighty US and terror-ridden Afghanistan. Textbook.
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Glad to hear it. Means you're dealing with the world in a nuanced fashion :->
may suggest that they don't want our help
Who? The torturers or the people being tortured?
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