On the question of whether the US has the moral standing to punish the Houthis, I assert that *anyone* has the moral standing to punish the Houthis, including the US, Israel, North Korea, Putin, whoever. Acts of piracy render you hostis humani generis, universal outlaws who may be punished by any state.
Even with the hypothetical ABCD-name scenario, isn’t it still a substantially higher priority to stop Denise? If your goal is minimizing the amount of conflict going on, then preventing Denise from attacking random bystanders and involving them in the conflict is a much bigger deal than the Bob-Charlie conflict. I suppose if they were equally tractable, you could solve both by stopping the Bob-Charlie conflict, but if that is substantially less tractable than stopping Denise, then your priority should be on directly stopping Denise to prevent further expansion of the conflict. After all, it’s not like the situation will become *less* of a mess after Ellen, Frank, and George get assaulted by Denise.
So I was drafting a response about possible roads to Israel/Palestine peace and how they might be difficult, but now your reply has me thinking: actually, if anything Denise’s behavior should provide *negative* reasons to withdraw support (if not having no impact).
Being the kind of agent (to the extent that countries can be considered agents) who can be coerced into changing your policies by (threat of) randomly attacking bystanders would be *disastrous*. If you do that, you’re incentivizing those who oppose your policies to do *nearly the most destructive thing possible*, both in terms of value destroyed and risk of bringing others into the conflict.
Now that Denise has started attacking bystanders with the aim of coercing Alfred, *even if Alfred ends up wanting to stop Bob*, he now is faced with the challenge of doing so while credibly not having been pressured into it by Denise, because otherwise Henry, Isaiah, and Jeremy will be incentivized to attack their own sets of random bystanders in attempts to extract concessions on the issues relevant to them.
Unless Denise expects Alfred to choose short-term appeasement at the expense of inviting long-term trouble (which may well be the case in the real-life situation, I have little insight into the thought processes of the Houthi leadership), Denise’s actions are making things *worse* for Charlie, by making it harder for Alfred to stop supporting Bob.
While of course there are risks to letting bad actors manipulate your behaviour, if you are doing something truly morally awful you have no right to continue that behaviour just to establish you won't bow to illegitimate pressure. Indeed, this is sort of a moral case where, ethically speaking, you have to bow to illegitimate pressure- "yes, we were aiding war crimes, but our terrible enemies threatened us to make us stop, so we couldn't stop" is no excuse. To avoid such cases, don't do grossly unethical things to begin with!
The hypothetical given is cute, but has no resemblance to the real world. And very weird that it includes the relative strengths of everyone, as though that somehow affects right and wrong? You would need to add:
1. The fight started because Charlie just made a murder attempt on Bob, but only managed to slice off a finger.
2. Charlie is still trying his hardest to kill Bob. Or at least to pause the fight so he can regroup and make another attempt later.
3. Bob is trying very hard not to kill Charlie.
4. Rather than throwing things to protect Charlie, Denise is half taking advantage of the distraction and half providing him one by going out and mugging some bystanders.
It breaks down if you try to make it too realistic, because groups of people just aren't as unified as a single person. Also, it is important whether or not individual people die, which is glossed over if you just look at large groups.
Great article, the issue is society must start to thing of war, or the agents of as a subconscious particle, each creating data structure of space and time, which are the conditions for conflict.
Subconsciously, it's about fight or flight, we're these to competing elements, are Subconscious analysising the state of nature.
In this case, the agents of war, must understand that by creating the conditions were the Subconscious data structure, built around a foundation that try to maximise a citizens utility, beyond the state of nature. Then with it you remove the conditions for war.
In this weather consciously or Subconsciously, the citizens will choose the flight rather than fight in order to maximise their utility and ensure their survival. N.Ireland were I am from is the living embodiment of thus argument.
In your original framing, you claim that supporting A (stopping Alfred) means that one should not support B (punish Denise).
The group of liberals you are criticizing support both A *and* B.
The rest of the post argues that A is a superior option to B, but barely addresses the fact that A and B aren’t mutually exclusive! Alfred *could* do either, both, or neither.
As someone who does broadly support both A and B, you have given me no reason to stray from my position of “A and B would be best, but B is better than nothing” other than the vague idea that Alfred/the US wouldn’t have the moral standing to do B without A. I completely reject this - of course the US (and all countries) are hypocrites when it comes to how they act on the world stage. I like it when my country does good things overseas and dislike it when my country does bad things overseas. The attitude of “I cannot support my country doing a good thing until they stop all bad things” would, in practice, be disastrous - the outcome would just be that my country continues to do bad things (as it was already doing those against my vote) while doing fewer good things (as I would now be voting against the good things as well)
Well now you are hitting upon my life. If I saw someone attacking another, and I never bothered to find the cause, I reacted to intervene. I didn't act to stop Bob from fighting, I acted to refocus Bob's attack on me and then kept his focus not my striking back but letting him hit me but staying between his original target.
I don't know if my behavior was morally right or wrong. It was certainly not rational but reactive. It was generally considered foolish and often when the police Bob went free and I was hauled away. But Bob didn't any longer attack his target.
I never understood (or tried to do so) what was right behavior. But I focused myself on trying to eliminate what I thought was wrong behavior, at least when it occurred in my presence.
I was considered foolish. I was warned I might get hurt. I did get hurt. I felt justified by being hurt if someone else was prevented from being hurt but only if I didn't hurt anyone in the process. That is my only standard of judgment.
As in, more fundamentalist religious organization/society less right than less fundamentalist/religious organization/society and Wahhabis less right than anybody else.
The context is “are the actions Israel is taking in Gaza (and the West Bank) right.”
Unclear why the level of religion in Israel vs Gaza matters for that question unless you think that a less-religious society is ethically entitled to inflict arbitrarily large amounts of death on civilians of a more-religious country.
(And being against Israel’s actions doesn’t imply that Hamas is “right” either)
the amount is not arbitrarily large, but as large as one can convince its people to inflict in its name. other than that, more or less yes.
when there's a conflict like what's going on at this moment, one cannot say one is against both. it's possible to say one doesn't care, but if one is against Israel then one is for Hamas and vice versa. 2 people trying to kill each other, if you stop one, the other will kill. you can not care, you can just watch, or if you intervene you stop one or the other which is helping the one you aren't stopping. if somebody dares to go between Hamas and Israel as live shields to stop them from fighting each other, they'll both first blow that person up before continuing to try to kill each other. So I support whichever side contributes more to the world which is the less religious one and that's Israel.
The issue is that Israel is not just killing Hamas, but also many Palestinians. It seems like you would be fine with Israel nuking Gaza and killing a huge number of innocent people who never voted for Hamas. I would not be fine with this, and saying that makes me pro-Hamas is absurd. I am pro-civilian, anti-Hamas, and (to a somewhat lesser degree) anti-Israeli government.
Israel is also running an apartheid state with a two-tiered justice system in the West Bank without any plausible national security excuse.
In your "two people fighting to the death and will kill any innocent bystanders" hypothetical, the morally correct thing to do would be to knock both of them out and arrest them, or, failing that, to kill them both.
I was describing my opinion of reality but I don't know how anyone can claim to describe absolute reality itself. All descriptions are subjective to me.
I don't know if my position would change, I feel like the opposite of what I said is supposed to be moral but I cannot bring myself to say that I have the moral position. I think at this point I'd still stick to my original position knowing it's not the correct thing to do. I don't know.
> Even if you think the US has the moral standing to punish Yemen, they should surely do so after they stop the ongoing genocide they themselves are contributing to.
Wrong. If there are two things and they should do both, the order is irrelevant; and if you believe that stopping/punishing international piracy is more important/justified than stopping/punishing a country-internal genocide (which is an obvious consequence of "upholding territorial integrity is an unambiguous goal while moral pushings are much less so", a view explicitly stated by Noah), then doing that one first is par for the course.
To take your example, if Denise's actions are considered wronger than Bob's (e.g. bringing a gun to a childish fistfight) then yes, Alfred should stop Denise _before_ Bob is stopped.
"After" might be a little too strong. "After, or at least simultaneous with", would be better perhaps, since Alfred ceasing to support Bob takes essentially no time.
In general, I think it is a principle that if your evil behaviour caused X's evil behaviour, you probably lack the moral authority to punish X. This becomes even more obvious when you're still doing that bad thing that caused X to do their bad thing even as you go to punish them, and even more obvious again when your bad act is worse than theirs.
I think that principle does not hold water at all. To take a deliberately outsized and extreme example, if, say, you're a transphobic/Islamophobic/whatever-phobic government and a fed-up trans person/Muslim/whatever starts a mass shooting, you still have full moral authority to send police to apprehend them even if you generally continue the X-phobic policies.
I'm not convinced you do. It's a good thing in terms of its consequences if you do, but morally you must cease the mass shooting, and simultaneously drop the policies that led to them.
As I said, it's only a general principle, but I think it becomes even more persuasive when your action is wronger than, or as wrong as the person you're intervening against. In this case the relevant comparison, on a size for size basis, would be a policy of randomly killing members of the relevant group, in which case, yes, I think it's absolutely clear you must simultaneously cancel the policy as you send the police.
But that is a far more limited claim than the one in your main post, which states "there is no consistent way to both oppose X and not oppose Y". Everything I laid out here is quite internally consistent.
"Irrelevant" may be an imprecise choice of words. What I meant was "both things should be done, so they are to be resolved in the most efficient order, not in order of the situations' appearance if these differ".
On the question of whether the US has the moral standing to punish the Houthis, I assert that *anyone* has the moral standing to punish the Houthis, including the US, Israel, North Korea, Putin, whoever. Acts of piracy render you hostis humani generis, universal outlaws who may be punished by any state.
Even with the hypothetical ABCD-name scenario, isn’t it still a substantially higher priority to stop Denise? If your goal is minimizing the amount of conflict going on, then preventing Denise from attacking random bystanders and involving them in the conflict is a much bigger deal than the Bob-Charlie conflict. I suppose if they were equally tractable, you could solve both by stopping the Bob-Charlie conflict, but if that is substantially less tractable than stopping Denise, then your priority should be on directly stopping Denise to prevent further expansion of the conflict. After all, it’s not like the situation will become *less* of a mess after Ellen, Frank, and George get assaulted by Denise.
You can stop Denise instantly by ceasing to support Bob's attack on Charlie.
So I was drafting a response about possible roads to Israel/Palestine peace and how they might be difficult, but now your reply has me thinking: actually, if anything Denise’s behavior should provide *negative* reasons to withdraw support (if not having no impact).
Being the kind of agent (to the extent that countries can be considered agents) who can be coerced into changing your policies by (threat of) randomly attacking bystanders would be *disastrous*. If you do that, you’re incentivizing those who oppose your policies to do *nearly the most destructive thing possible*, both in terms of value destroyed and risk of bringing others into the conflict.
Now that Denise has started attacking bystanders with the aim of coercing Alfred, *even if Alfred ends up wanting to stop Bob*, he now is faced with the challenge of doing so while credibly not having been pressured into it by Denise, because otherwise Henry, Isaiah, and Jeremy will be incentivized to attack their own sets of random bystanders in attempts to extract concessions on the issues relevant to them.
Unless Denise expects Alfred to choose short-term appeasement at the expense of inviting long-term trouble (which may well be the case in the real-life situation, I have little insight into the thought processes of the Houthi leadership), Denise’s actions are making things *worse* for Charlie, by making it harder for Alfred to stop supporting Bob.
While of course there are risks to letting bad actors manipulate your behaviour, if you are doing something truly morally awful you have no right to continue that behaviour just to establish you won't bow to illegitimate pressure. Indeed, this is sort of a moral case where, ethically speaking, you have to bow to illegitimate pressure- "yes, we were aiding war crimes, but our terrible enemies threatened us to make us stop, so we couldn't stop" is no excuse. To avoid such cases, don't do grossly unethical things to begin with!
The hypothetical given is cute, but has no resemblance to the real world. And very weird that it includes the relative strengths of everyone, as though that somehow affects right and wrong? You would need to add:
1. The fight started because Charlie just made a murder attempt on Bob, but only managed to slice off a finger.
2. Charlie is still trying his hardest to kill Bob. Or at least to pause the fight so he can regroup and make another attempt later.
3. Bob is trying very hard not to kill Charlie.
4. Rather than throwing things to protect Charlie, Denise is half taking advantage of the distraction and half providing him one by going out and mugging some bystanders.
It breaks down if you try to make it too realistic, because groups of people just aren't as unified as a single person. Also, it is important whether or not individual people die, which is glossed over if you just look at large groups.
Great article, the issue is society must start to thing of war, or the agents of as a subconscious particle, each creating data structure of space and time, which are the conditions for conflict.
Subconsciously, it's about fight or flight, we're these to competing elements, are Subconscious analysising the state of nature.
In this case, the agents of war, must understand that by creating the conditions were the Subconscious data structure, built around a foundation that try to maximise a citizens utility, beyond the state of nature. Then with it you remove the conditions for war.
In this weather consciously or Subconsciously, the citizens will choose the flight rather than fight in order to maximise their utility and ensure their survival. N.Ireland were I am from is the living embodiment of thus argument.
Love to be on the side of houthis! Thats like really brave! Impressive lefties!
Must have missed the bit in my own piece where I said I was supporting the Houthis.
I was talking about their western supporters in general.
In your original framing, you claim that supporting A (stopping Alfred) means that one should not support B (punish Denise).
The group of liberals you are criticizing support both A *and* B.
The rest of the post argues that A is a superior option to B, but barely addresses the fact that A and B aren’t mutually exclusive! Alfred *could* do either, both, or neither.
As someone who does broadly support both A and B, you have given me no reason to stray from my position of “A and B would be best, but B is better than nothing” other than the vague idea that Alfred/the US wouldn’t have the moral standing to do B without A. I completely reject this - of course the US (and all countries) are hypocrites when it comes to how they act on the world stage. I like it when my country does good things overseas and dislike it when my country does bad things overseas. The attitude of “I cannot support my country doing a good thing until they stop all bad things” would, in practice, be disastrous - the outcome would just be that my country continues to do bad things (as it was already doing those against my vote) while doing fewer good things (as I would now be voting against the good things as well)
Well now you are hitting upon my life. If I saw someone attacking another, and I never bothered to find the cause, I reacted to intervene. I didn't act to stop Bob from fighting, I acted to refocus Bob's attack on me and then kept his focus not my striking back but letting him hit me but staying between his original target.
I don't know if my behavior was morally right or wrong. It was certainly not rational but reactive. It was generally considered foolish and often when the police Bob went free and I was hauled away. But Bob didn't any longer attack his target.
I never understood (or tried to do so) what was right behavior. But I focused myself on trying to eliminate what I thought was wrong behavior, at least when it occurred in my presence.
I was considered foolish. I was warned I might get hurt. I did get hurt. I felt justified by being hurt if someone else was prevented from being hurt but only if I didn't hurt anyone in the process. That is my only standard of judgment.
Never seen Noah go so warhawky, it's pretty cringe.
I'm so surprised people have THAT opinion. I think Israel & Houthis are right, Hamas and Saudis are wrong.
What is the meaning of "right" in this context?
As in, more fundamentalist religious organization/society less right than less fundamentalist/religious organization/society and Wahhabis less right than anybody else.
The context is “are the actions Israel is taking in Gaza (and the West Bank) right.”
Unclear why the level of religion in Israel vs Gaza matters for that question unless you think that a less-religious society is ethically entitled to inflict arbitrarily large amounts of death on civilians of a more-religious country.
(And being against Israel’s actions doesn’t imply that Hamas is “right” either)
the amount is not arbitrarily large, but as large as one can convince its people to inflict in its name. other than that, more or less yes.
when there's a conflict like what's going on at this moment, one cannot say one is against both. it's possible to say one doesn't care, but if one is against Israel then one is for Hamas and vice versa. 2 people trying to kill each other, if you stop one, the other will kill. you can not care, you can just watch, or if you intervene you stop one or the other which is helping the one you aren't stopping. if somebody dares to go between Hamas and Israel as live shields to stop them from fighting each other, they'll both first blow that person up before continuing to try to kill each other. So I support whichever side contributes more to the world which is the less religious one and that's Israel.
The issue is that Israel is not just killing Hamas, but also many Palestinians. It seems like you would be fine with Israel nuking Gaza and killing a huge number of innocent people who never voted for Hamas. I would not be fine with this, and saying that makes me pro-Hamas is absurd. I am pro-civilian, anti-Hamas, and (to a somewhat lesser degree) anti-Israeli government.
Israel is also running an apartheid state with a two-tiered justice system in the West Bank without any plausible national security excuse.
In your "two people fighting to the death and will kill any innocent bystanders" hypothetical, the morally correct thing to do would be to knock both of them out and arrest them, or, failing that, to kill them both.
And what is the meaning of "right" in *this* context? (We now have *two* outstanding questions).
I mean, from my subjective point of view, I find one right and the other wrong when that pair has a disagreement.
1. *At the time you wrote your original comment*: did you think you were describing:
a) reality
b) *your opinion of* reality
2. If you were to now try to describe reality itself, would your position change?
I was describing my opinion of reality but I don't know how anyone can claim to describe absolute reality itself. All descriptions are subjective to me.
I don't know if my position would change, I feel like the opposite of what I said is supposed to be moral but I cannot bring myself to say that I have the moral position. I think at this point I'd still stick to my original position knowing it's not the correct thing to do. I don't know.
> Even if you think the US has the moral standing to punish Yemen, they should surely do so after they stop the ongoing genocide they themselves are contributing to.
Wrong. If there are two things and they should do both, the order is irrelevant; and if you believe that stopping/punishing international piracy is more important/justified than stopping/punishing a country-internal genocide (which is an obvious consequence of "upholding territorial integrity is an unambiguous goal while moral pushings are much less so", a view explicitly stated by Noah), then doing that one first is par for the course.
To take your example, if Denise's actions are considered wronger than Bob's (e.g. bringing a gun to a childish fistfight) then yes, Alfred should stop Denise _before_ Bob is stopped.
"After" might be a little too strong. "After, or at least simultaneous with", would be better perhaps, since Alfred ceasing to support Bob takes essentially no time.
In general, I think it is a principle that if your evil behaviour caused X's evil behaviour, you probably lack the moral authority to punish X. This becomes even more obvious when you're still doing that bad thing that caused X to do their bad thing even as you go to punish them, and even more obvious again when your bad act is worse than theirs.
I think that principle does not hold water at all. To take a deliberately outsized and extreme example, if, say, you're a transphobic/Islamophobic/whatever-phobic government and a fed-up trans person/Muslim/whatever starts a mass shooting, you still have full moral authority to send police to apprehend them even if you generally continue the X-phobic policies.
I'm not convinced you do. It's a good thing in terms of its consequences if you do, but morally you must cease the mass shooting, and simultaneously drop the policies that led to them.
As I said, it's only a general principle, but I think it becomes even more persuasive when your action is wronger than, or as wrong as the person you're intervening against. In this case the relevant comparison, on a size for size basis, would be a policy of randomly killing members of the relevant group, in which case, yes, I think it's absolutely clear you must simultaneously cancel the policy as you send the police.
But that is a far more limited claim than the one in your main post, which states "there is no consistent way to both oppose X and not oppose Y". Everything I laid out here is quite internally consistent.
Why is the order irrelevant (and, what is the meaning of the word in this context)?
"Irrelevant" may be an imprecise choice of words. What I meant was "both things should be done, so they are to be resolved in the most efficient order, not in order of the situations' appearance if these differ".
Ok that makes more sense, initially it sounded like you were saying the order necessarily made no difference.
Yes. Occam has nothing on you.