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I have to admire the jump straight to reductio ad absurdum when I professed to believe in any kind of principle at all.
You all have been great sports, truly. I know I’m coming off as aggressive but I truly don’t know how to argue any other way. I love you all and I love this place!
Well yeah, it's a bad principle. Dereliction of duty should be punished.
“Slavery is okay if I really care about what should be done” is not an acceptable substitute for my principle.
The bar is finding where the actor in question agreed affirmatively to imprisonment if he fails to act to a certain standard. That will change my mind!
You throw around the word “duty,” so it shouldn’t be hard to find terms of the duty.
I think you're using the word "slavery" in a nonstandard way. The fact that someone will be punished for inaction doesn't imply that they are therefore owned by another individual.
I don't understand why you're demanding that an actor must affirmatively agree to do something in order to face punishment for failing to do so. This isn't how we treat crimes of commission ("well we found Bob standing over Carol's corpse holding a bloody knife – but he never explicitly agreed not to murder anyone, so legally our hands are tied"), so why should it be the case for crimes of omission? This sounds like some sovereign citizen nonsense: the laws of the country in which you reside apply to you, whether you approve of them or not.
If Alice knows that Bob is planning to kill Carol and does nothing to prevent it (say, reporting him to the police), that obviously implies that Carol's murder could have been prevented had Alice acted. The fact that she didn't personally stab Carol doesn't make her any less party to the crime. The fact that she never explicitly agreed to report any instances in which she had foreknowledge of a murder doesn't either.
We will never semantically recover from the plantation slavery of Africans in the Old South. What you’re referring to is the noncentral fallacy coined by Scott Alexander, and I’m not committing it here.
Can you articulate what you find morally wrong with slavery? (Hint: it’s not wrong just because someone was paid for by another.) If you can, would you be able to apply it to examples outside of cotton-picking?
If you refuse to acknowledge the difference between killing and not-killing, we’re at an impasse.
It is wrong for one human being to own another human being. That is, in fact, the central meaning of slavery, so I'm not committing the non-central fallacy as you claim. You brought up the comparison to plantation slavery in the antebellum South, not me.
I acknowledge the difference between "killing" and "doing nothing to prevent a killing that you knew was going to happen". I do not think they are equally heinous, and neither does the law (accessory to murder before the fact will never be punished as harshly as murder).
What's wrong with owning another human? Some abstract affront to his dignity? Is the case against slavery that weak in your mind?
Implies criminality of 1) knowledge per se or 2) inaction per se or 3) some magical combo of the two that somehow through synergy creates an obligation to act on pains of imprisonment. I don't recognize this. It's logically flimsy and your argument is empty pathos all the way down.
What is your objection to slavery then, if not the ownership of one man by another?
And what is so hard to understand about the fact that harm can result from action and inaction, and hence that knowingly permitting harm to occur is a crime just as much as causing harm oneself? This isn't pathos, this isn't appeal to emotion, this isn't even an argument from legality, this is just – physics, really. If you concede that punishing evildoers (by which I mean people who commit crimes of commission) is a good idea because it incentivises people not to do evil, that logically implies that it's also a good idea to punish people who commit crimes of omission, for exactly the same reason.
You seem to be operating from some kind of bizarre slave morality perspective, in which harm can only result because of action, whereas people who do nothing are morally pure. This is, to put it mildly, bollocks. Failing to toss a rope to a drowning child is almost as much of a moral indictment of you as pushing her in to the water.
You're saying that my argument "implies criminality of inaction" in what I assume is meant to be a derisive tone, like that's a facially absurd claim to make. But it's factually true that certain kinds of inaction are criminal offenses in many jurisdictions, and your refusal to recognise this doesn't make it any less true, or doesn't mean it doesn't apply to you. If you think these kinds of inactions shouldn't be considered crimes, fair enough, but don't pretend they aren't and scoff at me for pointing out that they are.
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