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This doesn't make you a bad person, but
certainly doesn't make you a good one.
I also live in an area rife with these problems and I sympathize, and think that the state needs to do better at dealing with it. At the same time I wouldn't be fine with "literally any solution", there's got to be red lines about their treatment somewhere. I'm curious where exactly you'd draw the line, and how much you'd want the state to spend on it.
I meant what I said. I have trouble imagining any plausible solution that any modern state has taken to this problem that I would object to as long as it resulted in people not camping in the park, throwing trash on the ground, and yelling obscenities at passersby in the public square. I might have preferences about solutions, but it's hard to imagine proposals that I would consider worse than the status quo on this front. Singaporean harshness would be fine by me. Softhearted liberal utopian visions would also be fine by me. Huge public spending would be fine by me if it actually removes the problem. As long as the problem is solved, I am not that concerned with the exact solution.
There should be no surprise about why people would think you're a "bad person" then. Explicit lack of caring about others is kind of what makes one a "bad person".
I am also not okay with the status quo either, but I think there is some minimum level of support that must be provided (or possible to achieve) before you violate people's autonomy willy-nilly.
(my preferred solution is low-quality, cheap housing, that doesn't have to be right in the most expensive locations for some freaking reason. If you make that available that justifies a lot more force when removing people from public, as they actually have somewhere to go.)
But it’s not ‘ others ‘ - it’s pieces of shit.
He doesn’t hate his gay or black or Jewish or Polish or Haitian neighbor, nor presumably any of these, or other, peoples.
He doesn’t care about the pieces of shit.
That doesn’t make him a bad person, it actually makes you a bad person for judging him based on him disliking criminality.
You think another person should feel like you do because of culture, or god, or morals, or something else.
But you’re actually trying to scold him for caring about living a peaceful and crime free existence.
That’s my take from your posts anyway.
"Love thine enemy."
I know not everyone is a christian. But aside from the fact that everyone should be, it's just good game theory. A society that has made a pact to be utilitarian still has all the justification it needs to prevent bad individual behavior, but at the same time doesn't risk arbitrarily turning its instruments of judgement against someone without regard for their preferences just because they're doing something someone else doesn't like. But to defect against that is to ask people to in turn defect against you. And as proof for the danger of that, I'd point out that that's what the OP was literally doing against these "pieces of shit"-- presumably, reacting to some prior defection. I know, in turn, that no society can survive unilateral total disarmament... but disarmament need not be total, merely proportional. Spending less of your effort caring about bad people is still better than spending none of your effort.
Plus, it's just good virtue signaling. If a man will give his son a fish, that says little about what he'll give a beggar. But if a man will give a beggar a fish, he must be generous indeed to his sons! I would rather be friends with a generous man than a stingy one, and will therefore work harder to make it into the good graces of the latter man. That's the (nonreligious) essence of being a good person: the ability to gain long-term benefits from your reputation!
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If he had expressed basically any level of care, even a small amount I wouldn't have kept beating the dead horse here.
I also don't like these people! I also want the worst offenders removed from public spaces! Prison, involuntary commitment, etc are all valid tools here.
I think harm to them can absolutely be justified for the greater good of peaceful society.
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Again, I am not surprised by that view.
To focus on the substance though, I think this is exactly where the whole impasse is coming from:
I don't agree with that at all. The extent of care that an individual deserves is contingent on their behavior, it isn't just automatically owed to everyone. Related but probably tangential here is that I also don't think I owe care to all humans around the globe and my level of care is higher or lower based on relative levels of closeness to me. For my wife, infinite care. For the guy yelling obscenities at people on the street, very little care. For the terrorist or brutal murderer, anti-care and explicit wishes for the state to terminate their existence.
On a personal level prioritization of care is right and good. What kind of world would be be in if it was morally wrong to care more about your wife!
Buying jewellery for your wife instead giving change to the crackheads on the street! Sure perfectly fine! I never give change out, I too prioritize myself and very much dislike the incentives that giving change creates.
Shooting the yelling crazy guy on sight because your children heard him say the F-word? Obviously obviously wrong. You'd call the cops on someone who did that.
There's a bar between those two extremes somewhere, if you set it low enough, even for the street crazies, that makes you a bad person. It would actually help if you specified where exactly you'd put it.
(I also think my argument here is giving the impression that my bar is very high, but it's absolutely not. I think the tolerance level is currently too high, and should be lowered, but you just can't drop it to the floor).
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I’m curious, if you were to estimate the level of care you owe to the following people on a scale of 10 (as a brother) to -10 (omnicidal maniac), what would it be? (assuming you’re a white American)
Another white American
A white European living in Europe
A Hispanic mestizo legally living in the US
A Hispanic mestizo living in Mexico
An Ethiopian Christian
A Saudi Muslim
A black American who has been convicted of two counts of petty vandalism and one count of shoplifting
A white American who has been convicted of three counts of felony assault and one count of attempted murder
A Simbari tribesman who practices traditional pederasty rites
A black American pedophile with a preference for young white boys
That I am obligated to owe? 10. Always 10. God is pretty explicit about this.
That I am physically capable of owing without supernatural intervention?
... admittedly less than ten in all respects.
But I don't think ranking people by how much you "owe" them makes sense. If you're going to rank people, rank them by your ability to help them. If you have a glass of water and a man is about to die of heat stroke, you should give it to him regardless of which of these men he is. You should also take the chance to restrain him, if he is likely to harm innocents, but in any case should help him survive. If you have a glass of water and ten thirsty man, give it to the man for whom it maximizes the chance of survival (plus survival chance multiplied by net good the man will do over his life, to the best of your ability to estimate second-and-third-order effects.) You should help your wife, or a member of your community, over a total stranger, not because the stranger is a distinct, worse class of human, but because you are more capable of helping your wife or community member. Your help goes further, and does more good in the world. But again, that's a matter of maximizing good, not about people being entitled to different levels of brotherhood.
...and that's why I give some, but not all of the money I allocate for charity to the GiveWell foundation. It's a very cost-effective way to do lots of good, but I'm also uniquely capable of targeting "good" when it's aimed toward buying gifts for my family, or drinks for my friends, or donating to my own local parish.
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TIL. Also, WTF.
Though from what I can gather it's not strictly pederasty because the initiations rituals and the rites of passage don't involve an adult male. It's older boys abusing and raping younger boys.
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Assuming that these are all generic representations of people that I have not met personally and have no additional ties to:
The reason for the low valuations on the generic "these are all fine" groups at the top is that I just don't think I owe very much to distant countryman in general. My high levels of care are reserved for people that I have much closer ties to. I wish no ill on the Ethiopian Christian or Saudi Muslim, it's just not my problem how things work out for them in their faraway land.
The negative rankings are somewhat challenging owing to the fact that whatever anti-care is owed diminishes with distance, so some of these numbers reflect distaste rather than a willingness to do anything.
I don't put any meaningful emphasis on race as an element of care. Individual behavior exceeds racial preferences for me in effectively all cases.
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I'm not OP but I think I understand his take. It's a question of priority; it's not that I really don't care what happens to these people, but I think what happens to these people is less important than them being removed from public spaces.
Remove them first, then we'll discuss what compassionate solution we can find to make their lives better. As opposed to the standard western liberal answer that if we improve their lives first the problem will itself disappear from the public square, which has time and time again failed to bear out as the affected people actively resist and sabotage efforts to improve their lives.
If you want to think less of me because I prioritize my comfort and peace in public spaces over these strangers' wellbeing, then go right ahead, but I do also believe that there's complex feedback loops where tolerance of public disfunction leads to more disfunction, so I do still want what's best for my fellow human beings.
I worded it like that because the OP worded his comment like it was surprising people think these opinions are seen as "bad person" opinions. I think if you say "this group of people is annoying, I want them removed by the state and and don't care what happens to them" you've eliminated any possibility of having yourself seen as good, at best you're amoral. You need to at least give some thought to the well-being of these people, who in some cases are in their situation through only minor fault of their own.
When you say "Remove them first" I think you need to specify more precisely what that involves. There are absolutely moral lines you can cross. If you just get them to "move along" they just switch locations and annoy a different group of people. If you want to throw them all in prison you should keep in mind the cost (both moral and financial) of doing so.
That's not to say I think the desire is wrong at all! I also want these people removed, and I also don't think the standard western liberal approach is working. I think you need to provide some level of reasonable alternative before forcing people out of public spaces. I think that alternative does not exist in many places, due to housing and healthcare costs, and we are therefore forced to endure the ruin of our public spaces.
I think the correct approach is some combination of:
Of course I have preferences as to what I think it involves, but what I mean by it and what I assume OP meant is that all solutions that removes these people from the street are superior to those that let them there, including some that cross moral lines (for instance, some mild forms of supervised forced labor), and excepting only, for me at least, the most extreme ones (such as killing them).
I do broadly agree with your plan but I'm afraid that without a lot of "drawing the rest of the owl" it wouldn't necessarily resolve the issue, as some countries have actually managed to provide cheap housing to push its undesirables into, and the result is unpoliceable ghettos (see: French suburbs) that erupt into large-scale violence regularly. And as disfunctional as French immigration can be at times, the people that end up in the banlieues are still likely an order of magnitude more functional than raving park yellers.
If you're going to make this argument I you can't elide those details and still argue in good faith.
Actually spelling out at least the broad outlines like you did is good, it gives some sane limits and allows us to discuss actual tradeoffs.
This is exactly how I read what OP wrote, and it's obviously abhorrent if you allow solutions like "shoot on sight", or "Vagrant? Straight to the mines, no appeal".
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No, I'm not surprised by it, I am accustomed to it and acknowledging that I am simply at an impasse with people that differ on this. We have irreconcilable moral intuitions and I'm articulating where I think that comes to a head.
Yeah, obviously I just disagree with this. I consider myself a good person, most people I know consider me a good person, and many other people that both think I'm a good person and see themselves that way agree with my perspective on this matter. I actually don't see my opponents on the issue as intrinsically bad, I understand them to be softhearted people that are unwilling to accept mean solutions to problems. The exception to that would be people that seem to revel in things sucking, that suggest that there's something wrong with people that don't want bums camping in parks, but I actually think this is a pretty small minority view even if it's overrepresented on social media.
Much of what I'm pointing at here is what I see as an actual, real difference in preferences though. You're back to the root cause end of things here with the implication being that the individual I'm referring to is either mentally ill or homeless. As mentioned, that wasn't clear to me at all, and I have certainly encountered individuals that are just aggressive assholes that enjoy bullying other people in public spaces; they would stop if they were forced to stop, this isn't some uncontrollable tic or a product of them not having a nice enough abode in which to blow off steam. I'm fairly confident that there are already statutes that could be enforced against this, there is just a cultural norm of not doing so in blue cities, so everyone gets to enjoy the serenade of belligerence.
Sorry I wasn't clear, I'm actually not trying to focus on the root cause, I agree that focusing on the causes doesn't help in the short term.
I'm agreeing that you should be mean and force people out, but that you're not a good person if you don't have a limit on how mean to be.
I don't doubt people think you're a good person, but until you're going to say what your limit is, there's no way to judge. If you limit was all the way to "shoot on sight" that's bad - if it's "we can't move them until we have median-quality housing for them free of charge" that's unrealistically generous.
My line is somewhere around "they should have free housing options somewhat better than the hell-on-earth shelters that currently exist", then you can force them out.
Are yours actually that bad, and not simply because the homeless people themselves are shitty? I ask because I’ve heard plenty of complaints about the ones in my area, but when I’ve asked what the specific problems are, they tend to boil down to
And of course
For most critics, this last-named is the greatest offense of them all. Of course, suggesting that the complainers considering funding a secular alternative just makes them irate.
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The western liberal answer is that if these people and the nuisance they represent are removed, any motivation to solve their problems will immediately disappear. IMO this is probably correct.
Yes, and that's fine. Their problems are theirs to solve.
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Maybe, that's possible.
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