[justin66]

> No matter how good a person is, they will encounter moral dilemmas (or at least, there exist moral dilemmas that could be posed to them) with no good option. For any one of these situations you can say "OMG! I'm so indignant that they chose A" ... And the same for B.

It's as if you believe every moral choice, including the choice to support or oppose torture, is a choice of equal moral consequence such that a person deserves praise whichever way they choose. I don't intend to sign on to this new ethical theory of yours.

[SilasX]

I do not see a similarity between the critique I gave and the position you attributed to me. Could you reply more directly to the point I made?

[justin66]

Okay, let's start over. I'll pick things apart as well as I can.

> Good people can't ever support anything with (moral) downsides?

"Moral downsides" is not, as far as I know, a term of art in ethics or religion so it is hard to know what you mean, but I'm pretty sure you've been downvoted for underplaying the importance of a decision to support something many of us believe to be intrinsically evil.

> Indeed I did; it's precisely what I was replying to.

You were replying to post where I indicated that having chosen to support torture removed Ronco from the category of person so admirable we should hold him up as an example for the rest of us to follow. This is - usefully, I think - a lot more specific than dividing the world into "good people" and "bad people."

> No matter how good a person is, they will encounter moral dilemmas

That is part of the human condition, yes.

> (or at least, there exist moral dilemmas that could be posed to them)

There also exist math problems that could be posed to them. I wonder why you've gone all hypothetical here.

> with no good option. For any one of these situations you can say "OMG! I'm so indignant that they chose A" ... And the same for B.

There are, hypothetically, moral dilemmas such that every outcome is equally bad.

The decision to support torture is not one of them. I do not believe even a supporter of torture would characterize the decision to engage in torture or not to engage in torture as a decision such that deciding one way or the other will result in equally bad outcomes.

> By that standard, there cannot exist good people.

Whatever.

[SilasX]

>Okay, let's start over.

Sure thing; I hope some of it will make more sense now.

>"Moral downsides" is not, as far as I know, a term of art in ethics or religion so it is hard to know what you mean,

First of all, I never used that term; I referred to downsides, and clarified the context in a parenthetical. Because so much of grandstanding about torture is apparently from a deontological perspective (cf. your insistence on things being "intrinsically evil"), this was simply to clarify that the "downsides" were with respect to a moral calculus, not e.g. some CBA of material costs.

Second, certainly you can compose concepts together, even when that combination of the words is not formally enumerated in some lexicon?

Third, it feels much like you're calling me ignorant by unnecessarily drawing attention to specific phrases and complaining about them not being in the official lingo. Now that you know what I'm referring to, could you either a) give the standard term for it which you would not have complained about, or b) apologize for the insinuation, or c) explain why you were unable to infer meaning of a new term the normal way?

>but I'm pretty sure you've been downvoted for underplaying the importance of a decision to support something many of us believe to be intrinsically evil.

That would be a bad reason, since I never "underplayed" the importance of this, which would suggest some sort of "well, yeah that's bad, but no big deal". I'm complaining that, if you are going to write someone off every time their decision has a downside, they can't win, no matter how good they are, and so the existence of such downsides isn't a strike against their goodness at all, any more than a politician is evil for recognizing the existence of tradeoffs between funding for hospitals and funding for schools. (Can you believe (Jack|John) (John|Jack)son? He supported reduced funding for (school|hospital)s! Does he not thing (education|health care) is important?)

>>(or at least, there exist moral dilemmas that could be posed to them)

>There also exist math problems that could be posed to them. I wonder why you've gone all hypothetical here.

That was simply to avoid the (slimy) trick of refusing to engage moral dilemmas -- i.e. consider someone praiseworthy simply because they never had to encounter a hard choice. Is that a reasonable caveat?

>There are, hypothetically, moral dilemmas such that every outcome is equally bad.

>The decision to support torture is not one of them. I do not believe even a supporter of torture would characterize the decision to engage in torture or not to engage in torture as a decision such that deciding one way or the other will result in equally bad outcomes.

Why the focus on the case of the outcomes being equally bad? A "supporter of torture" can (and usually do) agree that torturing people is bad, but not as bad as letting millions die when the bomb goes off. (This is where people usually muddle the distinction between "it wouldn't work" and "it would be bad even if it did work".) They simply don't regard the badness of that option as a dealbreaker. (There's no requirement that the options be equally bad for the logic to apply.)

That's the same thing I'm criticizing on your part. You could equally well play the game of "he advocated letting millions of people die! Bad!" Well, sometimes you can't win. The very best people can be placed in that dilemma, and their having to take one bad branch should not be a strike against them.

The point I was trying to express in one line originally.

[justin66]

> I never "underplayed" the importance of this, which would suggest some sort of "well, yeah that's bad, but no big deal".

Okay, you don't think you're underplaying the importance of a person's support of torture, but in saying things like this you are lumping all a person's transgressions together:

> if you are going to write someone off every time their decision has a downside

This is absolutely not "every time," this is the time the guy used his influence to provide public support for the institution of torture by America instead of using his influece to condemn it.

Incidentally, I'm not talking about writing someone off. I'm talking about excluding him from the very enthusiastic category person we should admire as an exemplar of good which pg created for Ronco. (seriously, he invoked the Bible)

> they can't win, no matter how good they are, and so the existence of such downsides isn't a strike against their goodness at all, any more than a politician is evil for recognizing the existence of tradeoffs between funding for hospitals and funding for schools.

I agree that if we regard all moral transgressions as being equally serious then it makes no sense to draw the distinction between good and bad acts, or perhaps even good and bad people. I just think that is an absurd premise.

> Why the focus on the case of the outcomes being equally bad?

A choice between equally undesireable alternatives is usually what is meant by "dilemma." Some of that is just the dictionary, but more intuitively it's just not usually worth arguing about the cases where one choice is regarded as worse than another.

> That's the same thing I'm criticizing on your part. You could equally well play the game of "he advocated letting millions of people die! Bad!"

In much the same way that I do not believe all moral transgressions are equally serious, I do not believe all arguments are equally sound.