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Notes -
The Illegitimacy of Power
In the beginning, the world was just, populated by true equals. Injustice was born when a Will first imposed itself upon another. How? Power. Is it possible to learn this “Power”? Not from the Good. Might makes wrong. Might as well submit, and take your righteous place in the great chain of...
The Interlocking Wills
With Power, the original Will comes down from above, and as it passes through inert Wills, is transmitted losslessly to the bottom . An ukrainian supports war on his government’s orders, itself a vassal of the EU, itself a vassal of the US, itself controlled by the CIA, the telephone company, boomers, elites, jews, rich cishet whites, billionaires, english royalty, the NWO, or you-shall-name-and-blame-it. Whoever He is, we are all NPCs in the Prime Mover’s single-player game. His shadowy Will reigns supreme. Fear not and rejoice, for it means we are...
The Bloodstained Innocents
We have no agency, pure victims even as we victimize. Our crimes are His crimes. Passing them down the chain, and guilt up the chain, we are a perfect conduit of power. Can’t victim-blame the helpless oppressed. As absolute power corrupts Him absolutely, utter lack of it frees us from corruption. Free to dance and sing and reach for...
The Clouds Above
All our ideas are at best irrelevant, at worst another manifestation of His Will. As we are powerless, it appears he manipulates us through media and everything else for the hell of it. Or an epiphenomenom, the illusory superstructure rising from the base like a cloud of smoke.
edit: I do not believe any of this.
“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.
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.
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.
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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