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Shout-out to the Nashville officers - Jeffrey Mathes, Rex Engelbert, Michael Collazo, Ryan Cagle, and Zachary Plese - who were true heroes. They went in without hesitation, clearly ready to stop the shooter or die trying, and they earned the Medal of Valor for it. The body-cam footage is amazing. The way Mathes enters is exactly the kind of bravery all men should aspire to. But that's kind of the thing, isn't it? Is the binary really criminal or national hero?
That doesn't seem quite right to me. When someone is given the chance to be a hero and doesn't take it, they should feel deep shame. If it's part of their job, they should be removed from positions that expose them to situations requiring valor, or they should lose their job altogether. But convicting them of a crime seems too far. With this though, if being a hero is not the expectation you are not treated as a hero for just having the job. I have similar feelings about "public-servants".
No, this guy was a police officer. If he didn't want to risk his life in that situation he shouldn't have become a cop- there's tons of other careers available. Notably, they don't involve carrying guns.
No, it should never be a crime to fail to act. Otherwise would be literal slavery, simple as. Justify your knee-jerk vengeful reaction to dead children all you want. Yes conscription is wrong too.
I don't care how much training he had. Don't care that he was on premises. I could have training myself. I could have been passing by myself. Don't care who was signing his paychecks.
It should never be a crime to not act.
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.
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