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I didn't intend to imply you did; I apologize if it came off that way.
That was the response I expected, which is why I continued with:
So before you complain about the mote in my eye:
Undelete that and all the other outstanding questions; there's a beam in yours.
My position is that there's a level of unjustified lethal force, perhaps on the order of p=1-in-1000 risk, such that a victim reducing even similarly minimal subsequent risk is worth perhaps a q=1-in-10 risk of lethality against the aggressor. I agree that 2OOM is a high ratio. I admit it might be morally too high, or (see the split thread) it might be factually too low to apply to a beating vs a gun, or perhaps both. But I think "some ratio exists, it might even be as high as 100, and the more avoidable the aggression is the higher the ratio should be" is a more philosophically defensible position than deleting attempts to clarify a position. Fists kill people; the idea that a gun is qualitatively rather than quantitatively different is just philosophy-via-rounding-error.
Yup, there's the rounding error: (x-xtrue)/xtrue = 100%. Even the FP8 people manage to keep some operations under 10%.
So, how high a percentage of the time would such attacks have to kill people before you'd stop rounding to zero? Or conversely, how low a percentage of the time would the response have to be lethal before you started? Do brass knuckles count? That bike-lock-swinging guy from protest season? A protruding car key? Maybe it's all doomed to degenerate into hunches and culture clashes, but "don't suddenly attack people" seems so much easier to turn into a bright line rule than "you can attack them, a little lethally, and they can attack you, but nobody start doing it too too lethally, if you get me".
This is a good point. I hinted at "22 year olds are just dumb" as a reason to be wary of excessively punishing their mistakes; there but for the grace of God and all that. "Drunk people are just dumb" might not be quite as strong a reason, since here I suspect "if you're going to be violently dumb when drunk, teetotal" is the dead-body-minimizing solution, but maybe "drunk and 22" brings that solution out of reach.
Doesn't nearly everybody? Suppose the killer in this case had been pissed off enough to brandish and aim his gun before even being provoked by an attack? It would be self-defense to kill him first, no? Would we want to forbid that because it would be cutting off his life from one dumb drunk decision? And there are thousands of drunk drivers (and thousands of their victims) who die each year in the US; not individually so high in expectation but boy do the numbers add up fast. The laws of physics themselves frequently apply the death penalty to people who make one dumb drunk decision at a bar, and we don't even bother to try to suspend the sentence with breathalyzer tests at the bar parking lot exits.
Which I addressed with
You ignoring me grappling with an issue ≠ me not grappling with the issue. Motes and beams, indeed.
Yes, I understand that, and you based this on your thought experiment of a sociopath with a magic button, which I addressed and rejected (see above).
Would you have preferred 0.1 QALYs? I admit I feel like that is quibbling. Just replace my "0" with "0.1" and literally everything I say continues to follow through. The point is that the consequences of "don't escalate to guns" are far better than "do escalate to guns". Since the consequences are enormously better (e.g. 10 years of human life), I expect an argument for why escalation is commendable (or should be legal) to offer something of similar value. This "rounding" is not central to my argument in the least.
I don't have a specific numerical answer, but I don't need one, because the answer is definitely not 2-3 OOM.
How about just "try running away before shooting"? But, I don't concede that a brighter line outweighs the expected loss of life.
Agreed, but alas the framing of this conversation isn't what to do if you are omnipotent, but what actions / laws we should advocate for.
Again, there is a gradient here. Most things in life are on a gradient. We can't just ignore the gradient, because it makes decision-making simpler.
Ignoring all the bits here and there, let me give you my own thought experiment that I think illuminates my intuition:
Suppose you have two sons: Bob and Dan. A genie comes before you and say
Which would you wish for? Is Dan's honor/fairness/safety-from-fists more important to you than Bob getting shot? [Edit: Which society would you want children to grow up in? ]
My fault here was not ignoring "Still far and away from the 2-3 OOM factor I've been harping on." That seemed to imply that you had just skimmed past the 2-3-OOM-factor case, that your "specific probability" paragraph was still just referring to the previous case. A straight "no, this time I'm definitely just crossing my fingers for Suzie" (or even "probably no but I'm still unsure") to the latter case would have been clearer.
Indeed! There's still several unanswered questions in this thread I'd originally been hoping to hear your answers to. Even if the answers were all just "I'm unsure"; it would have been a step up from just dropping them. The vehemency with which you were certain that 2-3OOM is excessive punishment made me assume that you had a more precise moral code than my flippant speculations, one which would thus have wider applicability. If your answer is just "the ratio is below 100 and maybe below 2 but I can't get any closer than that" then that'd be terse and honest and it might be correct, but it's also as wide a range of uncertainty as I've got and so it's much less educational than I'd hoped. This would have been an incredibly widely relevant sort of moral rule if it could be pinned down more clearly.
In what equivalent sense am I refusing to grapple with any issues? Was there a question or ten I missed answering? Was any of my own uncertainty underspecified to any greater extent than your range?
My primary concern at the start of this wasn't that I hadn't noticed
... because I was pointing out the gradient here! The post I replied to mocked the idea that a punch could be as scary as lethal force, so I pointed out that punches are frequently lethal force. Maybe they're not lethal enough to treat as lethal force, since we have to draw a line somewhere, but talking as if we've found bright-line categories by drawing a line in between "zero" and "positive" is just a way of evading the fact that it makes us much less comfortable to have to draw a line through a gradient in between some x and 1.001 x.
In this particular case? Prosecutors say the deceased was "tussling" with the shooter's friend when the shot was taken. That probably makes the shoot even stupider but it also probably morally precludes the shooter just running away.
Very good advice in most similar cases, though, I'm sure. Hell, even in cases where the shooter can't run away it's probably often worth it to try; e.g. the first thing that made me suspect Rittenhouse was being misdescribed was the video of him trying his best to disengage before defending. Accepting an increased risk of your own death in an attempt to reduce that of your assailants can be a noble thing to do even when supererogatory.
This is a very good thought experiment; I think it clarifies my moral intuition much better. Imagining someone I care about rather than myself does make the "just don't start shit" option seem too much less certain, so in the drunken-bar-fight case I'm hoping for Bob to remain unshot even if Dan got beaten because of those norms, even after I try to correct the implicit one-to-one ratio in your version of the thought experiment to something more realistic.
But as you originally posited, I don't think it's the lethality ratio that's motivating me here. If we change the scenario to something where the lethality is of the same magnitude but the root cause is pure sociopathy rather than pure drunken stupidity, I'm then okay taking the other tradeoff. Suppose Bob played "the knockout game" on someone? A punch is still just a punch, and if he gets shot because of it I'm going to be distraught, but I'd also be thankful that the "game" stopped and it's safe to walk down the street again, and I'm going to blame my awful son and my awful parenting, not the shooter. Conversely, with lethality increased but the root cause still just impaired stupidity, I'm hard pressed to morally criticize. If either Bob's victim or Dan (or Cranston) was drunk or punch-drunk and took a shot, not because it was a good shoot but because he had no idea what was going on and couldn't distinguish "fistfight that ends in bruises" from "attacker out for life and limb", I'm not going to be too upset with the shooter for being mistaken, and even if my equanimity just means I regret us having to put him away for manslaughter I'm certainly going to think further escalation is excessive. There's a reason why "26 seconds" was a headline-grabbing claim in this Cranston case; that's not even as much time as it takes to write a brief comment here, but every extra second decreases the odds that the shooter thought defense was a necessity rather than an excuse.
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