[hexer292]

> You can save thousands of people, but murdering someone still should mean a life sentence.

I've struggled with this point of view since my early teens, and possibly even earlier. There is no amount of good one can do to compensate for even the slightest misdeed.

As much as I may agree, however, it's probably the most damaging and destructive moral framework you can possibly have, because it just consumes anything positive.

[selcuka]

> I've struggled with this point of view

Because it is much easier for people to universally accept a system where good or neutral deeds are expected by default, and misdeeds are punished.

It is very difficult to construct an alternative system that humans could internalise. Where would you draw the line? What about saving 50 people, and then killing 49? Should they cancel each other, too?

[DrScientist]

> What about saving 50 people, and then killing 49? Should they cancel each other, too?

Only if they were linked - you blew up a plane that was about to be flown into a building for example.

That's completely different from one day taking over a plane and landing it safely because the pilot was out of action, and the next day shooting down a plane for fun.

You can't save up to murder your wife by giving to the homeless.

[selcuka]

> Only if they were linked - you blew up a plane that was about to be flown into a building for example.

That's a bad example (because all 99 will die anyway if you don't do something, so you're not really killing 49 to save 50), but ignoring that, I don't think you can trivially answer such questions. They have been discussed by many philosophers for the last few thousands of years and we don't seem to have a common agreement about ethics and morality.

Would you change your answer if the building was a prison for 50 child abusers, and the plane carried 48 newborn babies (plus the pilot)? Why? A human is a human, right?

[DrScientist]

It really isn't complicated. For the first example the principal of least harm applies - the only hard part about that is the practical calculation of that - which can obviously be a matter of judgement - but the principal is clear.

And you are also missing the point of the comment - the key thing is the principal of least harm only applies if the things are directly linked.

I suspect you'd find it hard to find a philosopher over the last few thousands of years who thought that the concept of saving up societal credit so you can kill you spouse is somehow a valid one.

[listenallyall]

Where are you drawing the line? It's relatively easy to have a black & white ideological framework regarding murder - but what about lesser crimes, like beating someone up and causing serious, but not life-threatening injuries? What about being a witness to a crime but never reporting it? Does the motivation ever come into play? Can people who commit a crime never "redeem" themselves by performing positive deeds going forward? Isn't that the point of rehabilitation?

[hexer292]

There is no line. Killing one person while saving a thousand is just as bad as killing one person.

[andyjohnson0]

There is no answer to this. The universe does not provide any mechanisms for moral decision making or evaluation. Rather, morality exists in human minds, not in the external world.

We have to do the best we can to be kind and minimise suffering, while understanding that there will inevitably be a diversity of judgements on moral matters. And if those moral judgements have real-world effects, there will be moral judgements about that too.

The lack of moral universality is how it is, not a failure. And it never ends: there are no right answers, although there might very well be wrong ones. Its up to us.

[account42]

And that's exactly the thing about cancel culture - it seeks to elevate one particular moral judgement above all others and punish not just those that go against it but also those that advocate for or even just consider any other morality.

[andyjohnson0]

Firstly, its not even clear to me that "cancel culture" is anything more than a soundbite.

But even if it is, in fact, a thing - it's clearly not backed by "one particular moral judgement", as it is commonly portrayed. Lots of people face disapproval and punishment for a diversity of chosen moral stance, including people who could be categorised as "liberal" and who are typically considered to be those doing the "cancelling".

Supporers of the abolition of slavery or apartheid, or of human rights for minority communities, were for many years "cancelled" in the US, and in Europe, for example. Today, in the US, supporters of social equality and diversity are being "cancelled".

So I suspect that "cancel culture" is what you get when one moral/political group (of any persuasion) only sees part of the bigger picture, and uses that to manufacture a grievance.

[idiotsecant]

'cancel culture' used to be called 'calling out assholes' before we entered the current period of fetishizing cruelty.

Now, the worst and slimiest amoung us are crawling up on the cross and weeping and gnashing their teeth because people won't buy their book or watch their movie. It's almost always the most powerful who claim to be 'cancelled'.

Calling out assholes is a good and useful function and we should continue to do it.

[btilly]

This is a failure to think, disguised as moral judgment.

If a police sniper shoots a mass shooter in the middle of their mass shooting, that's a hero. Not a villain.

[kelnos]

To be fair, though, some moral frameworks (not mine) proscribe that any killing is bad, even to save oneself or others.

I don't mean this as a "gotcha", but as a reminder that morality is a human invention, and different humans will take different moral stances on things.

[HWR_14]

There is a clear difference between "I had to kill someone to save 50 lives" and "I saved 50 lives, so I'm allowed to murder one person as payment"

[Filligree]

By that metric, doctors doing triage at a disaster site should be jailed.

[darkwater]

This is even more out of touch of the comment you are answering to.

[skeeter2020]

forget about murder, you make a terrible comment or single mistake in your young adulthood and you are done for ever. Kids are not allowed to make mistakes anymore.

[embedding-shape]

That's not true though, no one "Has their life ruined forever" because of one off-hand comment. Eventually, social media moves on, and people stop haunting you, if that's what you're encountering.

Great way of avoiding 99% of the harm with that, is literally getting off social media, if that ever happens to you. Most people around you in real-life won't know about it, nor recognize you, or anything else, unless you had a pattern of bad behavior for a longer period of time.

But you can still make mistakes, even online, and eventually people forget about it.

[skeeter2020]

>> Eventually, social media moves on, and people stop haunting you, if that's what you're encountering.

That's only true if you fade with your misdeeds. Try doing anything that raises your profile and watch them jump back to the surface.

[embedding-shape]

No, it's true if you want to remain a normal person, instead of becoming a celebrity or "celebrity-lite" or whatever we call them today. But yeah, if you try to become a "public figure" or similar, then people will try to find skeletons in your closet, but it's always been like that, and very different from "you make a terrible comment or single mistake in your young adulthood and you are done for ever" which was the initial claim.

[nemomarx]

People will talk about it, but how much does it really matter? Many actors and other figures credibly accused of sex crimes or whatever just wait a few years and then start getting work again. Kevin Spacey seems to be going alright as an example.

The gap years certainly hurt, but at a sufficient level of money and power you're broadly fine I think. The real risk of cancelling is for people without money and status who could be shunned by family or friend groups mostly.

[empthought]

This sounds more like scrupulosity than a moral framework.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrupulosity

[hexer292]

People have always told me I'm too hard on myself.

Then again, I've made mistakes to know I wasn't hard enough on myself.

If you're worried about causing a negative effect on someone and then you do, the solution isn't to not worry about that.

[watercolorblind]

As someone who has been quite hard on myself too:

To err is to be human. If you minimize your life to minimize negative impacts on others, you are hurting yourself (and your friends and family). If you make a mistake, learn from it and try to be better. None of us are born with the skill and knowledge to do the right thing all the time, and sometimes there is no right thing, just different tradeoffs with different costs.

[HWR_14]

> If you minimize your life to minimize negative impacts on others, you are hurting yourself (and your friends and family).

Mind expanding on that?

[empthought]

I'm not the commenter, but I interpret it as:

The benefit that others get by you reaching your potential is greater than the risk to others of you making space for yourself to reach your potential.

[Nursie]

> I've struggled with this point of view since my early teens, and possibly even earlier. There is no amount of good one can do to compensate for even the slightest misdeed.

I think there's a hole in the thought somewhere.

If you save thousands of people and murder one, you should serve time for that murder, but you should still be appreciated for your other work.

The error is thinking of actions and life like a karmic account balance, even though it's an appealing metaphor, people are complex beings and seeing them reductively as good or bad is probably wrong.

Scott Adams was an asshat in later life. I don't know all the controversy he stirred because I drifted away from paying attention to him years ago. He gave me a lot of laughs, he had some great, fun insights into office life, he has some weird pseudo-scientific ideas in his books, and then he devolved into a bit of a dick. Maybe a lot of a dick. His is a life that touched mine, that I appreciate in some ways and am sad for in others.

Bye Scott, thanks for all the laughs, thanks for nurturing my cynicism, but it's a shame about what happened with you after twitter came along.

[fwip]

Good does not cancel out bad, but bad does not automatically outweigh all good.

[hexer292]

How would you compare the two? I think no matter what the good was, you're still left with "yeah, but x happened".

[fwip]

Quick aside - you can also do the inverse, excusing whatever bad because "x good thing still happened." That framing probably feels more obviously incorrect to you, because of your outlook.

One metric is just by if people still want to hang out with you. Sure, you made a mistake and hurt their feelings before. But they're still your friends, and still talk to you because they, on balance, predict that interacting you will be good for them. Said less cynically - they genuinely like you. Or - if the "you" is too difficult to accept (as it often is with mental health issues), you can see it in relationships of people around you.

Human beings are messy, and relationships (of all types) even more so. We all have brought both joy and sadness to those important to us. Trying to avoid harm above all else, will necessarily also reduce the joy you bring to others - you become withdrawn, isolated, cautious in all interactions.

Separately - hurting another person is not always a sign of a moral sin. Accidents and misunderstandings happen, no person can predict every result of their actions, and also - sometimes two people are genuinely in conflict, and there won't be a happy end to it.

[worthless-trash]

In the eyes of the law, it clearly does.

[account42]

Are you sure? Judges and juries consider the perpetrator's character beyond the bad deed all the time, both to reduce or increase the penalty.

[worthless-trash]

Yes, pretty sure, there are repeat offenders of up to 30 times that get exactly the same punishment as they did the first time.

Sadly, I no longer have access to that dataset.

[_carbyau_]

> because it just consumes anything positive.

I was perhaps not as clear as I'd wish. The next dot point after you quoted me was meant to convey that equally, the good actions cannot be cancelled/consumed by bad ones.

Life is a complex thing.

[unwise-exe]

I intend to do this very bad thing. How much karma do I need to accrue in advance, so that I don't go into the red from doing it?

[hexer292]

I guess my point is you will always be bad as a result of doing this very bad thing, no amount of karma can counter it.

[codebje]

You can't just "do good" like it's a spreadsheet, managing your karmic balance as the parent comment joked. You're only worrying about your personal consequences in that model, not the harm to others.

But I think it should be possible for a human to reflect on their actions, find remorse, and strive to do better in the future. They will always have done a bad thing, but they might not always be a bad person.

[ztjio]

This is pure nonsense. The moral distance between a good deed and the level of bad deed that receives a meaningful penalty, socially (e.g. felonies) is enormous and there is plenty of fungibility of good vs. bad actions in that space.

That said, it is strange to even consider being good, which is generally a rather easy thing to be, to be some kind of task you should be paid for even virtually. Being basically good is the trivial cost to avoid becoming anti-social. Why should a social group even tolerate you otherwise? With that in mind, as mentioned before, I think you'll find that social groups are highly tolerant of many misdeeds.

[hexer292]

Moral distance is an interesting concept, because it implies two acts are comparable at some level.

If someone cured cancer, do you think they couldn't be tried for murder?

[ztjio]

No? I don't see how you arrived at that, it seems entirely non-sequitur. I guess you deeply misunderstood what I meant by "moral distance." I'm simply trying to give a name to the idea that there isn't just a binary good vs. bad, and that some things are vastly worse than others. You might choose to represent it on a simple scale where bad is in the negative and good in the positive. In such a case, moral distance would be the distance between the two points on that scale. That's all. This representation would have no impact on whether a single individual can do things that exist on polar opposites of such a scale.

In the context of my comment the point is more about the distance between saying something rude and killing someone, it would be a large distance despite both being negative, and the tolerance levels would likely start somewhere in the negative side of the scale, though in reality you're going to be dealing with much more complex perceptions of good vs. bad behavior and social tolerance of it. But when you compare to the law that's going to have more of a concrete boundary. But it's still not 0 on this scale.

[fc417fc802]

It depends on if your question is about legality, morality, social stability, privilege of some sort, or perhaps something else.

If someone offered to cure cancer, but only if you permitted them to commit a single specific murder, is that a reasonable trade? All you've got there is yet another trolley problem.

[hexer292]

I think it's different to the trolley problem in terms of trying to measure the outcome.

If we make decisions based on what will have the best outcome, well the trolley problem is trivial; minimise the negative outcome.

In the scenario of murder for the cancer cure, you're still left with someone who was murdered. My take is that this isn't any less bad than someone who was murdered for something other than the cure for cancer, which in turn means I would stop this murder even if it meant not curing cancer.

[fc417fc802]

> you're still left with someone who was murdered

You've lost me. Isn't that also the case in any trolley problem? The trolley is a sort of satirical analogy. The thing actually being considered is "I get this good thing but I'm also left with this bad thing as a direct result".

I guess a key difference is before versus after the fact. Agreeing to the outcome to "pay" for what you want is different than deliberating over an act committed by the same person after the fact in the absence of any prior agreement. But if the only issue is the lack of an agreement then it's less a matter of "murder non-fungible" and more a matter of enforcing legal procedure for the sake of social stability. The state needs to maintain its monopoly on violence I guess.

[raxxorraxor]

It would be a pretty classic ethical dilemma if they couldn't develop a cure for cancer if you deny them murdering anyone. In the other case it would only be correct to try them for murder since it would be an independent act.

[raxxorraxor]

Being a purely good being is impossible for any human and this fact should be clear by reading entry level literature by those that put a few more thoughts into it. Babies have narcissistic tendencies until they develop morality. But even in the case of ethics in contrast to personal morals there is ample literature that a purely reasonable and logical approach to ethics is insufficient.

Demanding people being pure and good, denying their egoistical sides can lead to quite terrible outcomes. The art is to deal with these character sides as well.

I don't have a huge group of friends but all of them have flaws like me. If you can forgive yourself, people start to believe that you can forgive others too and maybe you would make friends. Generally people that only point the finger at the smallest flaws are called self-righteous for a reason. And no, they often do not have many friends.

[21asdffdsa12]

? What strange moral posturing is this? Of course there is good that can exists in parallel to bad deeds. Invent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process fertilizer that feeds the planet and your contributions to poison gas are forgotten. Not forgiven.

But science and progress are decoupled from whatever a person contributes. And even a disgusting person, while it should be kept from power, should be capable to contribute to science and progress. Even a insane nazi can feed half africa, while the most saint like person, may give humanity nothing.

The value society assigns is not the value a person has. The value is determined by the objective outcomes the person produces. Werner von Braun has done more for humanity then all of the socialist icons combined. He is still a disgusting person.

Imagine humanity like a spacestation. Science and Industry forming the hull, society on the interior, hard physics on the outside. The things a EVA worker contributes to all life inside the hull, can be substantial while he is a useless drunk on the inside. And somebody with a fishbowl over his head, cosplaying astronaut on the inside contributes nothing. Somebody yelling - redistribute the spacesuits, its cold in here - does more damage to society, then the useless drunk ever will.