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Notes -
“Just following orders” is not generally accepted as an excuse. Without it, I don’t see how this would absolve anyone.
Edit: more importantly, it makes for a poor parody. There are people who would endorse this sentiment, but I think you have to go a lot further auth than just retweeting an oppressor/oppressed (or paranoid conspiracy theorist) catchphrase.
Sure it is--eg, look at how women are treated by the justice system: that they had a male partner/pimp is often used to excuse their misbehavior. "Just following orders" is only not accepted as an excuse when we are predisposed to lack sympathy for the people given the orders.
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Apart from one case in 1474 and a couple of others in the 1800s, it was generally accepted that soldiers were expected to obey the orders of their superiors and that responsibility rightly belonged to the man giving the order not the man carrying it out. We (the Allies) unilaterally suspended this post-hoc because we were understandably disgusted by the Nazis and we wanted to pretend that disgust was backed by law.
Personally I think it is cruel and irresponsible to set up a situation where people are required to follow orders and punished for failure to do so, then punish them for doing what they were told. There may be conditions in which this is less clear (overzealously following or interpreting an order, for example) but I think it is wrong to punish somebody for following a direct order. They might flee or disobey, and I would commend them for doing so, but I think it's wrong to punish somebody for not being a hero.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
https://law.adelaide.edu.au/ua/media/2389/alr_432_04_gray.pdf
Thanks, I really appreciate this. I’ve still been digesting the latter pdf.
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I mean as a practical matter, removing the moral elements, this is how the world tends to work. Most of us meekly follow along with the powers that be. We might grouse about it, but we’ll do it because most of us have remarkably little power in our lives. If you have to at least pretend to love big brother (in whatever form it takes) just be a you have to eat, keep a roof over your head and so on. If you have to feed your and especially your kids, you’ll give your consent to a lot of things that if they were proposed without the stick you’d be opposed to. I don’t think anyone in a cold state would agree that any given medical procedure should be a condition for getting into a store or restaurant. But if you know you’ll be fired if you don’t check the vaccine card, you’ll check the card.
There’s a gulf between mitigating circumstances and true innocence. The OP relies on the latter, because otherwise, there would be something left to make it down the chain. Real life has lots of mitigating factors and a shortage of absolutes.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, because I would and do endorse mandatory vaccination. The MMR vaccine is my preferred example, but I’ll still bite the bullet on most of the original COVID restrictions.
For what it’s worth, I had coworkers who outright quit before the government-contractor mandate was suspended. Mostly older ones who were both very right-wing and very close to retirement.
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The man who submits to undue authority is himself making a moral choice. His slavery is a choice.
One's life or that of one's family's may be to steep a price to pay for one to oppose evil, but it is nevertheless a bargain one strikes. A bargain no different from all other such compromises in nature.
Most conceptions of morality still require you to act right under difficult circumstances. Arguably, morality is only useful under such.
The virtuous man does not free himself from the burden of conscience at the first sign of a cost, and the heroic man does not do so even in the face of annihilation.
The man who does the wrong thing enthusiastically is a bad man. The man who does the right thing at great cost is a hero. Somebody who does what he can, when he can, is just a man.
I look up to people who do brave things, but I don't think it's fair to look down on people for not being superhuman. That said, people should exert what agency they do have - I just find the philosophy implied by "Your inner morality is worth precisely zilch. A power imbalance isn’t a valid excuse to submit." a bit too yeschaddish for my tastes.
The problem with this idea is what Hannah Arendt calls the banality of evil. The idea that one can do evil without being evil.
In modern societies, acts, a fortiori evil acts, are parts of large, complex, systems and institutions where a whole bunch of collective actors do small reasonably small evils that ultimately culminate in large atrocities for which no single human can be held accountable.
This state of affairs evidently requires a stricter sense of morality to prevent those large atrocities than one that accepts the small pragmatic transgressions of people whose interactions do not have reach beyond their immediate circles.
Some solve this problem by encouraging strong militancy in everyone ("you can't be neutral in a moving train", etc). Others, like myself, prefer to require of everyone the ethical discipline that used to be reserved for kings. But one's responsibility has to be established somehow.
This is a well-written rebuttal, and I understand your position. To be frank, I do not believe that we can meaningfully address this. It’s just a feature of how humans are, and how they behave in groups. We can deal with individual monsters (serial killers, rapists, child-killers etc. but we cannot bring down large-scale tyrannies until they’ve already begun to decay. That’s what I mean when I say that I don’t want to condemn people for merely being a human and doing what humans do.
That said, the minimum I demand is this:
DON’T be enthusiastic. DON’T help. Don’t go along with things unless you can’t get out without significant cost, and to the extent that you must participate, do so as reluctantly and inefficiently as you can get away with.
In the context of Nazi germany, you don’t have to be the guy smuggling Jews out of Germany (although good on you if you are) but don’t you dare be the one who tips off the gestapo for giggles or to get a promotion. In the context of the modern day, don’t go along with cancellation campaigns against your friends, and if you have to join in with some stuff don't look like you enjoy it. In short, if you must commit small evils, keep them as small as possible.
Ideally, this leads to a slow spreading understanding that all of this is bullshit that nobody wants. Enforcing it gets harder and the bounds of acceptable heresy grow until the thing falls over. It’s slow and unsatisfying but I don’t think there’s a realistic alternative. We (conservatives) failed to nip this stuff in the bud and now it’s too late for anything except attrition. And keeping the memory of sanity for when it’s possible for it to grow again.
I believe this is the attitude invoked in the CIA’s field manual for sabotage:
https://www.the-future-of-commerce.com/2022/05/06/cia-sabotage-manual-for-organizations/
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Why is that a problem? If most people are merely banal gears in the mechanism of evil, then they are indeed not particularly responsible. The argument is smuggling in the assumption that there aren't other humans who are actually are evil running the thing... but there are. Both the Nazis and the Stalinists had plenty of evil people with a lot more agency than even Prison Camp Guard #1629, let alone Private Soldier Schmidt/Kuznetsov.
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He’s the weakest man, a leaf in the wind. He is indistinguishable from an amoral man. If he’s lucky, he’s on the good side, his self-interest happens to coincide with morality, so he’s good. If he’s on the bad side, he’s evil.
Sure, people are weak, and you can’t damn most of humanity for weakness. But the question remains: should one carry out the immoral order/fight an immoral war? You “commend them for [fleeing or disobeying]”, and I agree. @FCfromSSC and friends’ position, as I understand it, is that they should obey, out of ‘honor’, duty to their homes, oaths, loyalty to their superiors, because ‘obedience is good’, etc.
Secondly, even if we agree that people are weak, we can expect more or less of them. At the extreme end (and I do see it on themotte sometimes), their hands are metaphorically tied when they face the slightest cost, and their wills are inert.
He is almost indistinguishable from an amoral man. But the almost is important, I think :)
I expand a bit on immoral orders here: https://www.themotte.org/post/772/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/165384?context=8#context
In short, yes, I won’t look down on you for following explicit orders but I will for showing initiative or being enthusiastic.
With respect to war it gets a bit more complicated, I think. If it’s an offensive war and you aren’t conscripted, then obviously don’t help unless you have no choice (as above). If you are conscripted, or it’s a defensive war, then it’s tricky because defending your comrades or your people is something that I would regard as morally good. I don’t think that I would regard a nazi as evil for shooting me or my friend in battle, even though to some extent he is implicitly defending Auschwitz. Obviously he’s still the enemy and I’ll shoot him if I can but that’s pure practicality. When I talked about fleeing or disobeying, I meant the guard in the concentration camps not the guy who sells his wife’s friend bacon.
Basically it would be case-by-case.
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Any combination of those, or even not. It remains my opinion that it there are good moral grounds for people to choose either compliance or resistance, that both options can be backed by good reasons and do not categorically deserve condemnation. That most people are, in @Corvos' words above, just men, and we gain nothing by holding them to the standards of heroes. Of course one can still condemn outright villains.
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There are orders which cannot be carried out honorably, and those should never be followed. It seems theoretically possible that there could be an entire war that was similarly dishonorable, but I can't think of an actual example.
You've said that you would rather the general on the other side of a war torture prisoners to death for sport rather than fight with honor. That is madness.
I didn't say that. I said one can, and should, avoid heaping evil upon evil. I said it would be better if the evil general was dishonorable coward and a drunkard rather than a competent general, like it is better to be a german thief than an upstanding nazi baker.
You're not answering the question. Did lee, rommel and the grunts make the right decision to fight for their count(r)y ?
You think being a Nazi thief is better than being a Nazi baker, because the evil the thief does harms the Nazi government and the good the Baker does serves it.
If a nazi general tortures and murders prisoners, and this reduces the morale and thus effectiveness of his own men and increases the morale and thus effectiveness of the soldiers on the other side, would that not be better, by your lights, than the same general treating prisoners with respect and decency, if doing so created the opposite effect? In this scenario, the torturer, like the thief, harms his government, does he not? And if he harms his own government, you should prefer him over an otherwise identical honorable man for the same reason you prefer the thief to the baker.
If heaping evil on evil should reduce the effectiveness of the evil to resist the good, would you be for it?
I don't know. I do know that they didn't obviously make the wrong one, the way the troops working the camps did. What they did was not more obviously evil than fighting for America or Britain.
The moral system you argue for is exactly how evil is reliably heaped on evil. Your blindness to this fact is exactly why that outcome is inevitable.
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I also think that the sheer size of the US, and its initial consequent egalitarianism, created an expectation of personal agency that just doesn't work in crowded societies with fairly rigid social structures.
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Right. You explain it to them, because I’m not getting through. Doing the right thing isn’t supposed to be costless. Your inner morality is worth precisely zilch. A power imbalance isn’t a valid excuse to submit.
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I do think part of the left sees power as illegitimate (automatically defending ‘the weak’, and inferring from it an oppressor/oppressed relationship) and the bloodstained as innocents. The interlocking wills, people’s lack of agency, and the irrelevance of ideas/ ease of manipulation is a frequent narrative of the hard right on here. They also defend the carrying out of immoral orders (I had multiple debates about Lee and Rommel's moral character) without blinking.
At least in our conversations, it seemed to me that the disagreement revolved around what constituted an immoral order.
Otherwise-moral and even admirable actions become evil if they benefit evil. Lee leads the Confederate armies, the Confederates are evil, so Lee is evil.
The status of "Evil" is judged by the worst significant feature of a society. Sufficient evil, even if concentrated in a portion of the population, overwhelms the moral weight of other non-evil or even good portions of the population. The Confederate government perpetuates slavery, therefore the entire Confederate polity is evil, and so cannot be served without serving evil. Lee can't fight for "his home" or "the people" or "his men", who might be more worthy of such valor, but all his moral action must be assigned to "the confederate government", and hence, "slavery".
Big actions are more culpable than small actions; Lee is evil, but a confederate policeman isn't, because his action is smaller, less pivotal? Would this be an accurate inference?
Nevertheless, Evil people have no moral right, no defense permitted, no action allowed beyond unconditional submission to the Good.
Would these be a fair summation of your views?
First two points roughly correct.
Even he had agency, and therefore chose to serve, and is, evil, just considerably less so.
What does this even mean? If you “unconditionally” submit to evil, you’re evil. If you’re evil, different moral rights apply.
Let’s not necessarily rehash that discussion just from that narrow aspect. In my view, you, pal, are also guilty of ‘clouds above’ postmodern thinking and denying people’s agency, making Lee, Rommel and all the nameless followers your bloodstained innocents.
Suppose I'm a non-southerner, who travels to the south to free and arm the southerners' slaves. I do so peacefully unless resisted with force, at which point I shoot those resisting me. Your argument would be that a Southerner who tries to defend himself and his fellow southerners against me, and the lawyer who prosecutes me, and the jury who convict me, and the judge who passes sentence, are all evil in the same general manner as Lee (if considerably less so), correct?
What about the Southern baker selling bread? Is he evil in a similar fashion as well? He's contributing to the Southern economy, isn't he?
...The question I'm aiming at, is whether the Southerners can be rounded to "evil" in the way you claim. Suppose I say Lee is not fighting to defend slavery, but rather the bakers and the butchers and the candlestick makers, the mothers and their children, the poor farmers who own no slaves, and so on; his problem is that he can't defend the former without also defending the latter. One might put it more simply by saying that Lee recognizes that his society contains both good and evil, realizes that he must defend either both or neither, and believes that it is better to defend the evil alongside the good than to leave the good defenseless.
As I understand it, you believe that the Evil invalidates the good, and that therefore it is better to leave the good undefended if it means the evil is undefended as well. Correct?
"Good" attacks "Evil". And to be clear here, we're explicitly not talking about people "attacking" in a way that's intrinsically Good, if such a thing exists, we're talking about people who you consider "Good" attacking people you consider "Evil", through morally-neutral methods like tanks and bombs and guns. Your position, as I understand it, is that the "Evil" people have no right to defend themselves from the "Good" people, because they're evil and therefore unworthy of defense. As you say, "different moral rights apply". Would this be accurate?
And in my view, your moral arrogance is matched only by your moral incoherence. Clearly, one of us is seriously in error. And yet, how are we to determine which without examining the particulars of the arguments? I am amused by the fact that in the last thread, I argued that everyone is guilty, and in this thread you're rounding my position to saying that people are innocent or somehow not responsible for their actions, a position I have never held and categorically reject.
And the farmer, and the postman, and the tinker taylor soldier spy. Not the thief.
They have no right to “defend” their “property”, human beings.
The good are friends to one another, they do not fight wars against themselves. “Leaving the good defenseless” here means “refusing to fight a losing war that will end up harming them more”.
Why do you keep insisting that it’s me who labels them evil when you’re out of arguments? If you want to argue that the confederacy and nazi germany weren’t evil, just do so. Your original argument, if you recall, is that the overarching evil somehow does not ‘transfer’ to those who help and carry it out.
I told you a million times: when you condemn all, you condemn none. Your binary thinking, once again, erases all meaningful distinction. Hey, if everyone is guilty, that means your previous distinction between the good and the evil in southern society is moot, so that baker can be rounded off to evil by your own standards.
Interesting. Are you claiming that a person doing evil things to evil people therefore becomes good?
In this case, presume these people in particular don't own slaves, they merely live in peace with the people who do. In this scenario, suppose I shoot several people for resisting my attempts to free slaves, and then their non-slaving neighbors arrest, try, and sentence me for my "crimes". After all, by the laws they live under, I had no right to either free slaves or shoot people who stop me from freeing slaves. By enforcing the laws against murder, they align themselves with the evil those laws were protecting, correct?
This would seem to imply that whenever a war is fought, at least one side is evil by your standards, correct?
It is by no means obvious, especially in advance, that the war would harm them more than submission. Especially since the most recent experiment in the large-scale abolition of slavery terminated in a campaign of torture, rape and murder by the slaves against their former masters, resulting in the complete extermination of the formerly slave-owning society. I'm curious as to why you believe that Southerners in the pre-civil-war period should have known for a fact that freeing the slaves would harm them less than, say, fighting the civil war and another century of Jim Crow. I do not know that for a fact even with the benefit of hindsight.
I have not yet begun to argue. I have not yet even disagreed with what I perceive to be your labels. If they are not your labels, however, then state which physical laws or empirical tests establish their Goodness or Evil and provide the equation by which we might crunch the numbers on a given sample. Failing that, name the divine authority by which they are so defined, and explain the rules by which their Goodness or Evil is determined. Either of these is a reasonable basis for discussion. What is not reasonable is to insist that the set of Good people and the set of Evil people is too obvious to require justification, and also happens to exactly coincide with your own opinions on the matter.
That is not my argument. I have already stated that I think all states and indeed all humans are evil. I also think Nazi Germany was significantly more evil than the Confederacy, and think it arguable whether the Confederacy is more evil than the US in its current state. But in any case, your understanding of what it means to be Good or Evil is evidently not one I share, and it seems to me that the implications of our two definitions diverge rapidly. I'm trying to nail down what you mean by "evil", so that I can productively explain my disagreement.
No. If I have ten prisoners, condemn all ten, and promptly shoot all ten in the back of the head, they in fact all die. If I kill every living human, the equality of the outcome doesn't bypass its finality.
[EDIT] - the disagreement here seems to amount to you thinking that when it comes to morals, whatever is not forbidden is mandatory. That is to say, if someone is "condemned", then they must be killed, and if they are not to be killed they should not be condemned. I do not think condemnation works this way, or should. Someone can deserve death, and yet be spared due to mercy, expedience, extenuating circumstances, etc. This does not make them deserve death less, it merely means that giving them what they deserve must be balanced against our other interests.
No, it does not. I am arguing that Lee should be respected not because I think all men should be respected, but specifically because I think some men should be respected in this way and others not, and I think Lee is among the former. The fact that I reject your distinctions and definitions does not mean I reject any distinctions and definitions. One would not think this a difficult point to grasp, yet it evidently eludes you.
No, because I don't think "rounded off to evil", in the sense you seem to mean it and the way you seem to describe it, is a thing that should be done. Under certain circumstances, I'm willing to say that the baker should be fought and even killed. Under rather more stringent circumstances, I'm even willing to say his hometown should be firebombed indiscriminately, killing his family. But this is because he's an enemy, not because he's "Evil", and if we can resolve the conflict such that he becomes my friend again I am willing to consider the fighting and killing he did against my own side as a regrettable tragedy, and his service in opposition to my side as honorable conduct even if it involved killing my own family, friends and neighbors.
Of course, this presumes he conducted himself honorably. Honor forms a backstop, limiting the scope and scale of conflict, so that even mortal conflict does not become existential conflict. If he does not conduct himself honorably, if he pursues evil for its own sake, then it becomes justifiable (though not necessary!) to cast aside all restraint, and to condemn any who aid or even tolerate him as evil themselves. Slavery as practiced in the South was quite noxious, but it was not evil for the sake of evil. The extermination camps in Nazi Germany, and organizations like the Cheka in the Soviet Union were. But all germans, and even all german soldiers, were not as evil as those knowingly participating in the extermination of the Jews, or those who raped and tortured and murdered the innocent at the direct orders of Lenin and Stalin. Nor is there any shortage of examples where, having conquered the Evil, the victors extend them mercy they doubtless do not deserve, and while I have my reservations about such mercy, I have my reservations about condemning it as well.
The attitude I describe above is the raw material for constructing a durable peace from a state of serious conflict, and it was in no way rare in previous generations. Northern soldiers do not generally appear to have hated Southern soldiers at the conclusion of the Civil War, and reunions that brought together soldiers of both sides to commemorate their shared struggle were common so long as those soldiers survived. That people like yourself have lost all concept of this way of thinking speaks poorly both of your education and of our future prospects as a society: when the serious conflict comes, you will have no conceptual grounding to even recognize the road back to peace.
I think the biggest problem is binary thinking: evil vs good. To quote The Dragon: "'I've been taught this'... Everyone has been taught this. But did you have to graduate at the top of your class?" All these people have different culpability (the list is not sorted in the middle):
All of them are responsible, but the responsibility varies greatly.
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Do you see the parallel to the justice system? Parasitic behaviour, like thieving, on an evil entity (itself parasitic, among other things) is fundamentally good. Plying one’s trade and paying taxes, thereby strengthening the entity, is to become its accomplice.
More or less, but it’s unclear if it’s murder. The northerner just gives the slaves guns so they can answer the guns that keep them in slavery. Turns raw oppression into a gentleman’s duel.
Yes, the good can’t fight a war against a side they believe to be good. There is no ‘doubly just’ war.
Imo your view of the american civil war is too colored by your present CW concerns. I’m not interested in re-litigating that issue, what interests me is the general question of personal ethics under a (universally accepted) evil regime. If the evil of the southern cause is too murky and personal for you, take the nazis or pol pot or whatever.
Yes, I don’t believe in supererogation. That doesn’t mean all those who fail to do ‘the best’ deserve death or imprisonment, but they have failed morally to a degree.
Of course. Evidently we’re talking past each other if you think I condemn them all to death, even after the war and regime has ended. That’s just an absurdly barbaric position. I also never implied we should ‘cast aside all restraints’ in defense of the good, a position you keep imputing to me.
That’s rich coming from you, the guy constantly saying no peace is possible with his enemies. Have I not consistently affirmed my belief in the resolution of conflict by democracy and discourse, and defended a westphalian peace, against those who think like you on both sides?
Indeed. You've claimed that every war has a "Good" side and an "Evil" side, correct? Is "Good" and "Evil" relative or absolute, in your conception? Do you look at the two sides, add up their virtues and vices, and the one with a higher moral score is therefore the "Good" side, and the lower is the "Evil" side?
If it is relative, suppose we have nations A, B and C. A is +5 good. B is +5 Evil. C is +10 evil. A and B fight, A is the good side, B is the evil side. But if B offers that they form an alliance against C, then B becomes good, because C is worse. Would that be correct?
Or is it that there is a minimum bar of goodness, and those above it are Good, and those below are Evil? But you've already said you don't believe there can be a war where both sides are good. Can there be a war where both sides are evil?
They think it's murder, obviously, but you and I understand that the people I killed in this hypothetical were perpetuating evil, whereas I was acting for Good, so when I shot them for resisting me I was simply doing the right thing. The fact that I broke their laws is irrelevant, because their laws serve evil, and are therefore illegitimate. Is that the general idea?
An odd phrase, given your next statement:
I tend to think of gentlemen's duels as "doubly just": they are a form of lethal conflict where the assumption is that both sides are, to a considerable extent, in the right, yet nevertheless cannot reconcile. But leaving that aside, why can't one or the other side be good, but mistaken about the other side?
This seems almost exactly backward. My present CW concerns are colored by my understanding of the Civil war, wars generally, and history generally. Nor am I confident that you grasp either my present CW concerns in any meaningful sense, nor history generally. I agree that we can get to it later, though.
My entire argument is that "universally accepted evil regimes" don't actually appear to exist. All regimes are some degree of evil, because all people are some degree of evil. No regime is completely evil, because no person is completely evil. Few regimes even manage to concentrate their evil to an unusual degree, because regimes involve large numbers of actors, and large groups of actors regress to the mean. Some people embrace evil wholeheartedly, though, and some regimes allow those people to group together and secure power, such that they can enact unusually concentrated evil. The more concentrated evil is, the more obvious it is, the closer it is to evil for the sake of evil, the more severe and obvious its immediate harms, the more we should judge people harshly for failing to recognize it and act against it.
Your view, as I understand it, is that a given regime should be judged by its worst acts, and that the evil of these acts transfers to everyone who supports the regime in any way. The honest butcher and the honorable soldier are evil, because they live under the same government that empowers the men operating death camps. This culpability remains even if they do not know that the death camps exist, or what goes on inside them, or have no obvious way of acting against them. The soldier could surrender, and the butcher could burn his shop down and turn to robbing his neighbors, and failing to do so makes them culpable in the evil of the regime they support.
Interesting. Do you see all acts as either good or evil, or are some acts simply neutral?
...And yet, when I say that all people are some degree of evil, you say that I'm engaging in "binary thinking", because obviously Evil means raping babies and murdering grandmothers, not the small-beer, negligible indecencies we all inflict on those around us each day.
Would you say that failing morally is evil? Do you think anyone manages to "not fail morally" in this sense? Or do only the really serious failures matter? And how does this work with your statement that evil done to the evil is good? If evil done to the evil is good, and we're all evil, then the more evil we do, the more good we are, and that can't be right. So it must be that some people are good and other people are evil, but what makes them so? As I asked above, is the line between good and evil relative or absolute, in your view?
You've argued that their support for evil makes them evil, and you've argued that evil done to the evil is good. Were this a coherent argument, it would mean that robbing them, at least, would be a good thing, and I see no reason why "evil done to evil is good, actually" would apply only to robbery. Why not murder as well? Why not torture or rape? If robbery within an evil society undermines that society, why wouldn't torture, murder and rape undermine it even more, and thus, by your argument, be even better?
No peace was possible with Nazi Germany or with Soviet Russia. Peace was possible with Germans and Russians once those regimes fell. Blue Tribe is not a race, Progressivism is not congenital or heritable in any meaningful sense, and innate racial conflicts aren't a thing that exists in any case. Further, the thing that makes peace with Progressivism impossible is precisely that they agree with you on topics such as this one. They have no conception of limited conflict. They are not capable of uncertainty or doubt. They do not value honor in their opponents. They believe the world is divided into good people and evil people, and they want the good people to win and the evil people to be destroyed. Stable peace is not possible with such an ideology; the best one can do is wall it out and wait for it to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, or else hammer it to dust until its surviving adherents abandon it completely.
Peace not being possible doesn't mean that the other side is evil. Often, one or both of the two sides are simply mistaken. In this circumstances, it seems to me that limiting the scale of the conflict as much as possible is a good thing, because the hotter the conflict burns, the worse the harm people inflict on each other, and the more opportunity evil has to flourish.
And once the regime falls, you need decent people on the other side to work with to try to put a stable peace back together. To the extent that the other side actively eliminates its decent people, building a stable peace becomes much, much harder. This is why honorable enemies should be valued: because conflict is unavoidable, and peace is precious, and they help restore peace. As I and others have pointed out repeatedly, conflict doesn't require honor, but peace does. To the extent that you eliminate the sort of honor typified by Lee or Rommel, you are not reducing the risk of conflict, but ensuring that it will burn indefinately in a self-perpetuating cycle.
And if democracy and discourse fails, you believe that one side of the resulting conflict is blameless, and the other side is evil, and that harm against the evil side should be maximized until their regime and ideology are crushed, no?
[EDIT] - Wait, no, hold on. In the slave-freeing and -arming example above, you appear to endorse illegal actions, including killing people, in defiance of democratically-enacted law. You didn't say that freeing and arming slaves would be a bad thing because that would be a violation of discourse and democracy, you said go for it because slavery is evil. So which is it? If discourse and democracy gives a result you consider evil, are you still evil to "follow the rules" and cooperate with that evil?
For the record, I don't think you understand how I think very well at all. I certainly do not understand your thinking very well, which is why I'm asking so many questions.
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