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Notes -
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.
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.
I think your criticism regarding the rules and my failure to ‘even try to meet the standards” was below the belt, given that I have answered hundreds of your questions in good faith in the course of our long-running discussions . However, as a mistake theorist I am an inveterate optimist and a glutton for punishment, so here’s the next batch.
Both sides can be evil, or neutral. The rest of the section is mostly wordgames. You throw moral condemnation around all the time, it’s only when I use good and evil that I have to start the definition from scratch.
The situation is this: I give a gun to a slave/jew, and when the sheriff/SS catch us, a fight breaks out, leaving law enforcement dead. Yeah I think that’s morally fine. People are allowed to defend their freedom with lethal force. I hold the policemen responsible for enforcing immoral laws/doing evil, they are not an inert instrument of the democratic will.
The laws are irrelevant whether they serve good or serve evil. The laws are just the cliff’s notes version of morality, for those who need a shortcut. If legality and morality conflict, morality should win every time (whether it’s your morality or mine).
‘Gentleman’s duel’ was ironic, I do not care for southern honor culture, or duels. A gunfight breaking out between a slave and a slaver is a “just war” for the slave, not a ‘doubly just’ duel.
Because you’re never supposed to resolve a mistake by killing the other side.
No, you can fail morally, repeatedly, without being evil. But at a certain threshold of moral failure, you become evil, and that essentially means that ‘the good’ can treat you as an enemy, and no longer give you the benefit of morality. That’s why lying to a nazi policeman is okay.
But of course if one withdraws the benefit of morality willy-nilly, one quickly finds oneself in a war against the whole world. For example, I do not consider you, or most of my political opponents (even nazis), or most westerners, to be evil and vogelfrei. Unlike unconvicted murderers, Lee-rommel and nazi bakers. A key difference is that they have done evil.
No. If tomorrow, your side and the woke declared a civil war in my country, and most people picked a side, I’d want nothing to do with it, and leave. Like a duel between two acquaintances, I’d be disgusted by both sides.
Yes, still evil. The mob’s will is not absolute, and I am not bound by democratic rules to commit genocide. The contradiction in your position is that you appear ready to jettison democracy and discourse, start slitting throats , declare war on your evil enemies, now, for a level of oppression that is objectively far below that of the jews under nazism or the blacks under the confederacy (who apparently are not justified in their rebellion).
I thought having views attributed to me that are not my own was likewise below the belt, given that it is one of the actions explicitly banned by the rules here, and for good reason. I made my comment in good faith, but will not chide you on the rules in the future. It would be nice if you would refrain from attempting to describe my beliefs to third-parties in the future, as you do not understand them.
I ask you questions because I cannot predict the answers. In our last exchange, I had 3/4ths of a reply written and saved to a text file when I was interrupted, and it contained a bunch of attempts to predict what your response would be to various questions; this conversation has shown that almost all of the predictions are wrong. I do not understand how you think, though I think I'm getting close.
I'll try to have replies to the rest of the above done tonight. Would you prefer more questions, or just statements?
...As a peace offering, an answer to a specific question from last time:
I am not an absolute monarchist, a theocrat, or an anti-enlightenment reactionary. I'm a Christian. Beyond Christianity, I suppose you could say I'm a humanist, or perhaps a better term might be a Machiavellian. I see the basic ethical question as split between "What is right", and "what is expedient". The former is useful for determining what I should be doing in an absolute sense, and the latter is useful for figuring out what I should be doing provided it does not contradict with the former, and otherwise is useful for predicting what other people will do, irrespective of the former.
I believe this split is absolutely necessary for a proper understanding of the world, but I suspect it is also the source of much of our disagreement. My best guess is that you don't recognize such a split, or your split operates very differently from mine, which makes our assessments diverge wildly.
The Enlightened, Absolute Monarchists, theocrats, and presumably anti-enlightenment reactionaries, it seems to me, all believe that humans are a simple mechanism amenable to control through the construction of legible systems of rules. It seems exceedingly obvious to me that this model of humanity is dead wrong. Humans cannot be controlled by rules or systems of rules. No legible system can ever contain them indefinitely, because one of the things humans consistently do is break things that get in their way. Everything made by the human hand and mind can be unmade by those same tools. As I sing to my child each night, "time is filled with swift transition, naught of earth unmoved can stand". I criticize these ideologies when they confuse temporary Schelling points and ad-hoc coordination mechanisms for immutable laws of the universe. Meanwhile, I point to the fact that Human Nature does not change, that it is the same today as it was when the epic of Gilgamesh was written, and that ideologies that claim otherwise are headed, sooner or later, for a bad end.
I could tolerate living under any of the systems you named. I recognize that none of those systems can ever possibly fix all of our problems, and eventually the problems they can't fix will bring them down. All of them will crumble within a few generations, most within less. I aim to understand what makes them crumble, so the crumbling can be either hastened or temporarily forestalled, whichever seems preferable given the situation.
I do not believe that there has ever been a "Good" society. All humans are some variety of evil, and so all human societies are some variety of evil. Evil can be temporarily minimized, but at some point in the relative short-term, human nature expresses itself and the evil seeps back in. Evil can be concentrated and amplified, but doing so tends to crash the system, likewise on a relatively short-term. The base state is moderate levels of evil, and we always return to that base state sooner or later. The goal should be to minimize evil as much as possible and for as long as possible; that's the best we can do, and we will never succeed at it sufficiently to be "good", because society is made of humans, and all humans reliably choose evil at least some of the time.
People frequently try to evade this reality by redefining good and evil, such that the evil they're particularly prone to becomes good, and the good that they're particularly bad at becomes evil. This process is generally labeled "moral progress" of late. My read of the historical record is that it never works, and often results in periods of concentrated evil.
Does this answer the question sufficiently? If you have more questions I'll try to answer them, and otherwise will try to get replies to the above done tonight.
Thanks, I appreciate that.
I usually ping you when I do. I still think you and the others defend the carrying out of immoral orders, even though you don’t think they’re immoral. The strawman accusation comes across as an attempt at controlling and censoring my interpretation of your beliefs. You can always refute and dispute (like I flatly stated to you recently : “I didn’t say that”). Half of all discussions are just two people trying to reconcile their interpretation of the other’s position. Don’t ask me to blindly accept your perspective on your beliefs, like a sacred garden you have dominion over.
That’s up to you, it’s all good, at your service.
Looks like you’re claiming the unassailable rock of the skeptic-pessimist so you can easily criticize without ever having to defend.
I like machiavelli, I like the split, I don’t buy that he was ironic and it was meant as an indictment of the prince. Taking one variable away is always a useful way of looking at the world.
But it seems to me the kind of people lampooned in the OP have taken his thought experiment too seriously, and consider themselves free to always act expediently, and relegate the question of what is right to their inner conscience. Sola fide, if you will.
I was thinking of jumping in, when you originally asked FC the question. I refrained, because I was curious how much we are on the same page, and didn't want to prime him, but now that I see we agree quite a lot on this, I think I can confidently say, you're missing the point.
The phenomenon you're describing is real, and it's quite common for people to take this sort of defensive position, but it's not what's happening here. The point isn't to say "democracy bad, theocracy good" or the other way around, or even to poke at each of them while remaining safe behind non committal. The point is that it's not about the system, it's about Asabiyyah. Even some Enlightenment Liberals understood that, or at least that's how I understand the quote about everlasting vigilance and freedom.
I don't think democracy, in itself, will help you maintain Asabiyyah any more than theocracy will, or vice versa.
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