The purpose of punishment is to prevent future harm. Thus, any person whose past actions (even if harmless) indicate that he will cause direct or indirect harm in the future unless he is punished should be punished.
Or:
A necessary condition for any act to be considered a punishable offense is for it to indicate that the actor will directly or indirectly cause harm in the future.
This statement appears to be better, clearer and perhaps even more accurate than the earlier statement I made.
But I have absolutely no idea how that relates to the first four posts I made in this thread. It appears quite unrelated.
You (obsrvr524) said:
Obviously, you are saying that you and Wendy are making a counter argument that I’m missing. But a counter argument against what? Obviously, against something I wrote in the first four posts of mine in this thread. But exactly what?
The reason people make and enforce laws is because they believe that the act of doing so together with its consequences is more preferrable than any other act and its consequences.
That’s the purpose of laws – to create a better life.
If a law does not fulfill its purpose, it’s a bad law. If not enforcing a law leads to better consequences than enforcing a law, then it’s a bad law. If a different law does a better job, it’s a bad law. And so on.
Every law is put in place in order to avoid worse consequences.
Regardless of the purpose, regardless of being good or bad - if a law is not consistently enforced
it isn’t a law at all.
What if the laws of physics didn’t exist at all? What if everything merely behaved randomly - obeying nothing - no gravity, no electric polar attraction, no momentum, no molecular bonding - none of it?
What would the universe be? Do you think people could exist at all?
Are those laws there only to serve the purpose of benefiting Man?
Laws give structure from which life can form and grow
regardless of what their purpose might have been.
Without the enforcement of laws - there is no society - at all - good or bad.
Or as James put it -
God - by definition - is the ultimate law enforcement - without which there is no universe at all - good or bad. You have to first have a structured universe before you can talk about any purpose for anything.
The same is true for a social discourse - first there must be enforced rules (in one form or another - at very least that everyone is speaking a language that others can understand).
First there MUST be laws or rules but - to ban a person from a social media platform is analogous to a government or religion killing someone for breaking the law - they do not exist anymore (“for the benefit of those approved”).
Then it comes to -
Banning specific speech is analogous to jailing or killing an idea - it doesn’t exist anymore (in that setting) - “for the benefit of those ideas approved.”
And in the case of Facebook and Twitter -
Mark SuckerBorg and Jack Dorky with a drugged up god-complex are playing God - assassinating anyone who is not approved (Mr Trump) and condemning all “bad ideas” (“bad angels” - “devils and demons”) to the underworld - the abyss - Hell.
I explained that you misunderstood my position and that you presented a counter argument against something I did not say.
I said that I never said that there is such a thing as the origin of causation.
I also said that I never said that guilt or innocence is determined by the originating cause.
And though I did not say it in subsequent posts, it nonetheless appears to be the case that I never said anything that opposes the last statement in your post.
(I wholeheartedly agree with it.)
You then responded by saying that I am missing a counter argument that you and Wendy made.
Where exactly is that counter argument and what statements of mine is it addressing?
It is one thing to ask me questions (“What do you think about this?”, “Do you agree with this?” and so on) and a completely different thing to argue against something I said. Since you’re doing the latter, you should explain exactly which statements of mine you’re arguing against. Otherwise, I am lost (:
_ 1) The highest priority is to have a means to enforce the laws to be made. 2) Make those laws via a constitutional - representative separation of powers - legislative-adminstrative-judicial structure - formed Of the People involved - NOT the corporation that is supposed to be merely providing the environment.
They aren’t. But here in this thread we are talking about man made laws. A man made law is a law that is created and enforced by men in order to serve a purpose. An example of such a law is “Wash your teeth two times a day” or “Speak the same language as everyone else”. If you don’t speak the same language as everyone else, then it becomes extremely difficult for other people to understand you. And that’s not a good thing if it’s important for you to cooperate with others in order to survive. The same goes for rules of the road. Without them, driving a car from one point to another becomes cumbersome.
If you decide that something should be a law then you’re supposed to enforce it as soon as you acquire the power to do so. If you already have that power, you should enforce it immediately. There’s no reason to wait.
If you’re not enforcing a law, that might be because 1) you don’t have the power to enforce it, 2) you are not completely sure it’s a good law, or 3) it’s not a law at all but a pretense the purpose of which is to conceal your true motives.
If your true laws are unnacceptable to the public (e.g. if being honest about them can make the public turn against you), you can always try to hide them behind the veil of false laws (thereby pacifying the public.)
Performing an act is said to cause harm to someone if its effect on the quality of that someone’s life is worse than the effect of performing some other act.
It is NOT a reference to physical harm (common definition) nor is it a reference to loss of something of value that one previously had (less common but still pretty common definition.)
As an example, if someone takes all of the women in the world for themselves, they are harming others even though such an act causes no physical harm to anyone and even if no woman was previously owned by any man. If you take all of the resources for yourself, you are harming other people even if those resources were previously in noone’s possession.
The same applies to traffic rules. If every person drives however they want, moving from one point to another becomes difficult for everyone involved (alterantively, it becomes easy for few but difficult for many.)
You refuse to blame the primary actor accordingly and would rather pollute the issue with relativity rather than primacy, the actor. I do not understand this mindset other than as another symptom of the modern virus of nihilsm and its inversion of sanity.
Is it direct harm or indirect harm not to share your water or gasoline with someone who’s car ran out of gas in the desert who dies from dehydration the next day? I’ve heard the argument that the person who refuses another person water or gasoline has made the requesting person’s life worse at that moment, however the requester is not immediately worse off in being denied. Yet, the denier committed an offense, a crime, that causally down the chain of time caused the requester harm in the future. For some reason, the nihilistic virus sufferers seem to think indirect causal chains bear validity to their claims of wrong doing, denying the ultimate responsibility of the requester to blame the denier.
If I hire a hitman to assassinate someone, I would be an indirect cause and the hitman I hired would be the direct cause of that someone’s death. Both of us would be responsible (me for issuing an order to kill someone and him for choosing to obey that order) though not necessarily equally.
If by primary actor you mean “the direct cause”, then no, I am NOT refusing to blame the primary actor. (Rather, it is you who are refusing to blame someone you really should.)
There is something you have to understand about laws.
Laws have to be prosecutable - you have to be able to prove your accusation (unless you live in an authoritarian regime). And that is why prosecutors avoid issues of indirect involvement.
In the scenario you stated, you would not be prosecuted for even indirectly killing the man. You would be prosecuted for break the law that states that you may not contract someone to break the law - that is a direct violation of the law.
And the purpose of that law is to prevent people from indirectly harming other people. The emphasis is on the word “indirectly” because that’s my entire point. (That’s what Wendy is arguing against.)
And she would have argued that you cannot prosecute people for indirectly doing things because there is agency between the indirect and the direct. The indirect person cannot be proven to have even indirectly done the harm any more than the direct person’s school teachers or parents who could have taught the killer to not accept contracts to kill. In the long run, everyone can be blamed for indirectly causing harm - not prosecutable - not candidate for laws.
So laws are made against specific indirect harms then they are prosecuted for breaking the law - not for the indirect harm - such as running red lights even when no one got directly harmed - it causes a distrust of law enforcement - indirectly harming everyone so a law directly against it.
No one gets prosecuted for doing harm (legally blamed). They get prosecuted for breaking the laws.
I am not entirely sure you and Wendy are on the same page. You think you are but I am not convinced.
Either way, I understand everything you’re saying. The problem is that I don’t think it’s relevant. It largely misses the point. And that is why I wrote this post that you ignored.
The red bolded part is the only thing that matters. My point is MERELY that those who indirectly harm others are likely to indirectly harm others should be punished prevented from doing so. Exactly how is irrelevant. Whether you’re going to prosecute them for indirectly causing harm or for doing something that may cause harm but does not necessarily do so is completely irrelevant.
I would bet that her argument was going to be very different than mine. I was focused more on the root. But we both agreed that when there is intermediate agency, we cannot “blame” the indirect person. I was building the case as to WHY we cannot blame them (which is what you seem to claim is irrelevant).
If you think it is irrelevant then you do not understand it.
I did not ignore that post. I was explaining WHY that post is nearsighted of the actual problem - that it is only breaking a law that can be punished - not doing harm - direct or otherwise.
When you make laws you have to be specific. You cannot say, “you indirectly caused harm therefore you must be punished” - THAT doesn’t work. And nowhere in any legal system is that allowed.
It is okay to make laws against indirect harm. But it is not okay to punish people for doing anything but breaking whatever laws you have contrived.
I suspect you’re committing a strawman fallacy. In order to resolve that, I suggest that you prove that you’re arguing against something I said. I wrote exactly four posts before you responded in this thread. Quote those parts of these posts you are addressing and for each part provide your interpretation. Otherwise, there will be no further discussion between the two of us.
