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May 11, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
47:55
232 Justice

The superhero of morality!

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Good morning, all.
How are you?
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It is 8.36 on Thursday, the 11th of May, 2006.
And I'm going to do a four-parter, I think, based on a suggestion from a board member, which was seconded by one or two other board members, on justice, honor, integrity, and contempt.
There you go. You could just open the dictionary and get a definition, or you could listen to hours and hours of rambling from the chattering head of Big Chatty Forehead.
Well, let's say that you're going to go for the latter, because the dictionary is only going to tell you what other people want you to hear, whereas I'm going to aim to try and prove stuff, relatively, and so give you the chance to evaluate it for yourself.
So, maybe it will be worth it.
We shall see. One of the things that, just before we get into that, and if you're listening out of sequence, this will mean nothing to you.
Nothing! But if you are listening in sequence, then this will mean something to you.
Just to follow up on Fight Club yesterday, one of the things that I was thinking about this morning, as I was getting ready for work, was that Fight Club is also a...
An example of the kind of inappropriateness of rage that appears when somebody is, a man generally, is reacting to the kind of passive aggressive hostility of what is often a woman, right? Passive aggression, as you know, or as you may know.
If you're listening out of sequence, you won't know.
Oh, my God, the horror. Okay, my name is Stefan Molyneux, and I run a Freedom Amendment.
So, if you are in a relationship with a woman, let's just say, And you find that she's kind of cold and distant and then she needles you and then she sort of sinks back.
And then you end up getting really angry.
Like this could happen where she puts you in an impossible situation.
And the impossible situation is you've been planning something for weeks and it's supposed to be the best time ever.
It's Christmas. It's Christmas.
It's Easter. It's everything rolled into one big juicy pile of funsiness.
And then she starts sort of picking a fight or getting upset or being unhappy or whatever.
Then you're kind of in this impossible situation because she's kind of provoking you.
But at the same time, you're supposed to be having this great time.
This often happens when you're going over to, this is my experience, when you're going over to family members and so on, that you're supposed to have a good front, right?
If you're going over to friends, you can say, oh yeah, well we were late because we had a fight or whatever, but if you're going over to her parents or your parents, you can't really say that, so she puts you in this impossible situation where she's kind of needling and distant and obviously unhappy, but saying nothing when you ask her what's wrong and so on.
That's sort of an example of passive aggression.
So you end up feeling very angry And she's all, what?
I was just this? What? I was that?
Because the whole point is to put you in this impossible situation, which is going to provoke a great deal of anger in you.
And impossible situations are just one way of doing it.
There are many ways of doing it, for sure.
And this, I think, Fight Club also is an example of the kind of rage which emerges when Somebody is in a passive-aggressive situation, they're being manipulated in a passive-aggressive kind of way, and then they end up getting angry.
Well, if you're not really confident with your anger and say, no, my anger is justified, there's something that's going on here that's a problem, I'm not sure I can tell you exactly what it is, but that's okay.
You don't have to know exactly what you're angry at in order to express your anger.
You don't act it out, you don't punch the wall, you don't do anything like that.
Because that's abusive to yourself and to others.
But what you can do in these kinds of situations, which is not what the Fight Club guys do, is you can say, well...
I feel angry about something that's going on here, and the woman may say, well, there's nothing going on here, you're imagining it, and you've got to say, no, I really, you know, this is something that I need to respect in myself.
I need to trust that I'm angry for a good reason, that I know what's going on, that I know why it's going on, and I can't tell you exactly the cause and all of the sequence, but that's okay, we'll figure it out.
But there's a reason why I'm angry, and we need to respect that, and we need to figure it out.
Well, that would be a positive, I think, and beneficial way to deal with passive aggression.
Now, if all that happens out of passive aggression is that you end up being provoked and then denied, right?
That's the classic passive-aggressive scenario, right?
Somebody provokes your anger and then denies that there's any cause for it and then sort of intimates that you're crazy and so on.
And, of course, the big passive-aggressive scene in Fight Club is when the woman takes her pills, calls him up, and says that she's going to die.
This is classic passive aggression, right?
That you self-inflict harm and then tell someone, right?
And is it a cry for help?
Is it this or that? It's passive aggression, and that's sort of what's going on.
And, of course, he responds by rushing over and this and that and so on.
So... That's sort of an example, I think, of what happens that men who are not confident in their anger, and of course you could reverse the genders, but I think it's most useful to talk in the classic or typical sense.
Men who are not confident with their anger, like when you feel provoked by someone, you're damn well being provoked by them.
Even if they remind you of someone in the past, that's still important.
They're still reminding you, which means that they're similar to someone in the past.
So, that's something that's kind of important and I would really recommend that in your personal relationships with friends, family and lovers to say, when you feel angry at someone, to say, you know, I feel angry at what's going on here.
I don't know what's going on.
I don't even know if it's you, but I sure as heck feel angry.
And if the person just says, oh, there's no reason to feel angry, don't be silly, oh, come on, don't be so petty, stop being such a drama queen or whatever, right?
Then, you know, run, run, run, run as fast as you humanly can away from that person.
Because that person is going to continually provoke and destroy your instincts, right?
Your instincts are what will save you, your instincts are what make your life happy, your instincts are what make you strong, and your instincts bring you...
Oh, can you feel the full circle of free domain radio lariat closing around you and gently tugging you to a lance of wisdom?
Oh, one layer too many on the metaphor, I think.
It just cracked and broke. But we are now coming full circle because your instincts also lead you to justice, which is the first topic of the day.
So justice, to me, is a relatively simple thing.
I'm not saying it's easy to execute or easy to figure out and so on.
But justice is...
Something which we have emotional responses to, and it has to do with, in my view, it has to do with a recognition of the presence or absence of moral choice.
So, for instance, I got yet another, I have a whole folder set up for these now, I got yet another email yesterday about...
About the ethics of emergencies.
People just cannot let this go.
It's just astounding.
Okay, I'm going to give you the scenario that was given to me, and then I'll talk to you about how justice might work in that situation.
The situation that was put forward is this.
So, okay, there's a plane, you see?
And the plane is flying towards a tower.
Now, the plane has only 50 people in it, and the tower has, like, more, 150 people in it.
And you are sitting, just coincidentally, at an anti-aircraft gun, and you can shoot this plane down before it hits the building, see?
And then if you shoot the plane down, you're saving everyone in the building, but you're killing the 50 people.
But the 50 people are going to die anyway.
But then if they die by crashing in, then you get 150.
All this kind of stuff. Anyway, got to tell you, I really look, I mean, I don't want to sound like too callous.
I really do understand and respect the desire for intellectual consistency that leads people to come up with these lunatic scenarios.
But, you know, to be a moralist is to be a nutritionist, to be a doctor.
It's about prevention. It's not about cure, right?
As we all know, standing there and shouting that collectivism is evil does not stop one single bomb from landing on you.
Standing in the desert in Iraq or in Fallujah and saying that Western imperialism, American foreign policy aggression, is immoral does not sort of stop one bunker buster from opening up your chest cavity.
So it's sort of hard for me to understand what it is that people say when they say, how are you going to apply morality to a situation of extreme emergency, of desperate choice, and so on.
Which is sort of like saying to a nutritionist or a surgeon, okay, so you want to save lives, right?
Yeah, I want to save lives. I want to keep people healthy.
Okay, so there's this guy, see?
And he's just been shot in the chest, and his leg has been sliced off by a passing train, and, you know, both of his hands are being pecked at by crows, and he's got diabetes and cancer, and he also is smoking an unfiltered cigarette.
What do you do? Right?
Well, it's like... Well, I don't know.
I mean, try and save the guy, I guess, but what does it matter?
I mean, there's no good choice to be made.
And, of course, that's not what the science of medicine and nutrition are about.
The science of medicine and nutrition are really around prevention.
I mean, nutrition particularly is around prevention for the most part.
And medicine is to some degree around cure, but not in situations where, you know, okay, a piano fell on this guy, and then a truck ran him over, and, you know, what are you going to do?
What do you do? What do you do? You've got 30 seconds.
What do you do? It's like, I don't really think that they have those tests in medical school.
Or if they do, I actually might become a doctor, because that'd be kind of cool.
But this is not what morality is about.
I mean, this is completely inappropriate use of ethics, right?
Ethics is about general universal moral principles.
And moral principles presuppose choice.
And I don't really feel, and this is sort of where I'm talking about the instincts and where justice might come in.
When I read about somebody who just, well, look, I got a Dr.
Phil episode coming up tomorrow.
I just, I'm going to find a way to post the file because it's something really worth talking about.
But, for instance, when you see, as you see in this Dr.
Phil episode, this woman beating on her children to the point where they're literally on their knees, begging for mercy.
And then the phone rings, and she says, Hi, how's it going?
Oh, I'm just chatting with the kids, blah, blah, blah.
Oh, take care, all the best, right?
She completely masters her temper.
And then goes right back to screaming at the kids.
Well, obviously when you see that kind of situation, what does your feeling tell you?
Well, your feeling tells you, your emotions tell you, that this woman is totally evil.
She has the ability to control her temper.
When the phone rings, she just chooses not to when she's beating on her kids because they can't do anything to her.
She's got all the power and so on.
Well, my feelings of real anger in that situation are around justice.
I would not feel the same anger.
I would feel more pity and terror if I were looking at a woman who was obviously in the grips of a severe, biologically caused mental illness, some form of schizophrenia and so on, and who was unable to control her impulses towards violence or fantasia and who was unable to control her impulses towards violence or fantasia or hallucinations and
And these children were caught up in this terrible net that it is something that we feel differently about, at least I do, and I think that it's fairly universal because in the one situation, the woman has a choice and is perfectly able to turn off her temper like that and chat on the phone the woman has a choice and is perfectly able to turn off her temper like that and chat on then go straight back to beating her kids right after she hangs up the phone.
So this woman has a choice, right?
This is not something that is biologically coarse, and we'll talk about this more tomorrow.
But... If a woman is in the throes of mental illness and has no real ability to deal with it, then it's clear that she's suffering from a diminishment of choice or an elimination of choice with regards to her children, and therefore we feel more sympathy for the woman who has no choice than we do with the woman who has choice.
And so justice to me is an emotional recognition of the presence or absence of choice in a moral situation.
So if we see a guy shooting a guy, Then we feel like, oh, there's a guy in a park, and he's in the middle of the dawn or something.
He just shoots a guy. Then we may feel that this is an evil, oh, this guy's so terrible, and so on.
And then if our view pans back, and we see that...
There's a sort of laser on his head and there's a sniper who's going to kill him if he doesn't kill the guy, and also his children and his wife are tied up behind him and they also have lasers on their foreheads and so on, then we obviously are going to feel not so much that this guy is evil, But we are going to feel sympathy and terror for this kind of situation.
Now, we may still say, oh, you shouldn't shoot the guy.
You should let yourself be shot and your wife and children get shot and so on.
But fundamentally, we are going to feel very differently about that kind of situation.
Now, similarly, we are going to feel, and this is sort of layers of justice, if we see a guy getting, like he's just walking down the street, walking his dog or something, some guy jumps out from the bushes and, I don't know, breaks his kneecaps with a baseball bat, we're going to feel pretty bad, right?
Now, if, though, it turns out that this guy is in hock to the mafia up to his eyeballs and voluntarily got in there because he was unwilling to control his gambling addiction or whatever, Then we're still going to feel this is a bad situation, but it's not going to be causeless.
That's pretty important.
It's what I was talking about with Cecilia Zhang yesterday with regards to immigration and bribed marriage situations.
These things are not causeless, and that doesn't mean that the people who do them don't have a choice.
The guy who's shooting the guy in the park, even though he's going to get killed and his wife and kids are going to get killed, is still making a choice.
He's making a choice to live and to save the lives of his wife and children.
And he's doing it by killing a guy.
Well, that is something that we can say is occurring under real duress.
So that is something that we can sort of understand.
And this is something that allows for the existence of free choice as opposed to sort of cornered options, right?
The free choice is you're standing in the middle of the desert, you can walk in any direction you want, Whereas, you know, forced choices, like you're in a dead-end corridor, you can continue to try and walk into the wall like somebody who doesn't know how to play the old game Berserker, or you can turn around and come back to where you came, right? There's not a sort of free plethora of choices floating around when violence gets applied to the situation.
So to me, justice...
It's the emotional recognition of choice and the sort of commensurate condemnation or sympathizing with moral situations.
And so the one thing that I think is missing from the people who talk about the ethics of emergencies is this particular issue.
This particular trait or capacity of the human mind to empathize with that situation.
I'll tell you how I would look at somebody who just happened to be sitting in an anti-aircraft gun that they knew how to fire when a plane was moving towards the tower.
I guess this is the equivalent to the Air Force pilots in 9-11.
And they have to shoot down the plane because...
Well, I'll tell you what I would feel in that kind of situation.
I would feel, oh my God, what a terrible, terrible, terrible situation to be in.
You know what we should design?
Assuming this is the 9-11 metaphor, we should try and design a society where this kind of foreign policy murders that go on from the United States and other Western countries out throughout the world, we should try and set up a situation where...
Countries, governments don't go around murdering foreigners to the point where people fly planes into buildings.
And that sort of being the case, I think that's a much better solution for a moralist, right?
I mean, if you're a lung doctor and somebody has, you know, smoked 50 cigarillos a day and now they have terminal lung cancer and they're, you know, 20 minutes away from kicking the final bucket, joining the choir invisible...
Then it's sort of tough to say, well, as a lung doctor, what would you do?
It's like, well, I just sort of hold his hand and give him sympathy and so on.
No point berating him for smoking now, right?
Because he's going to die. Whereas I will sort of to somebody else say, you really shouldn't smoke and here's a picture of this guy who did and so on, right?
So that kind of situation is much more important to understand.
I would have so much sympathy for somebody who was in the position of...
You know, I've got this BBC site that was posted on the board.
You know, it's like a trolley or a streetcar is rolling down the tracks.
And you can switch the track and have it go into a fruit stand and kill only one old Italian guy.
You can have it go into a schoolyard and kill ten children.
Well, the Italian guy is older, you see.
And so he has less life to live and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Well, this stuff's all nonsense.
And let me ask you this.
Even if you don't have empathy for someone like this, let's just put you in a classical court situation and you're on the jury.
This is sort of what I'm trying to get to when it comes to justice.
So you're on the jury and you are examining a case.
And we'll just say it's something similar to the present system.
We don't know what the DROs would look like exactly, but let's just say it's close to the current system.
Well, you're on the jury and somebody is on trial because they shut the plane down and saved the people in the building.
Well... Would you throw that person in jail for shooting the plane down?
In other words, morality is around what you shoot people for.
This is really all it comes down to.
That's why morality is only a very small part of philosophy.
Because morality is, who do you shoot people for?
What do you shoot people for? Forgetting for the moment the DRO thing, this is really what it comes down to, because it's the principle of self-defense.
What are you allowed to shoot people for?
And so, sort of in the current situation, in the current sort of justice system, if I go out and kill some guy, then I have to go to prison or they're going to shoot me, right?
So it's a legitimate use of force against me.
And we'll just pretend that the DROs are going to do the same thing to simplify the discussion.
But that really is the reality of the situation.
What is it you're going to shoot people for?
And that's the ethics of emergencies.
It really comes down to that.
So if you're on the jury, and the guy decides to do something, like instead of shoot down the plane, like kill all 50 people on board, He's going to try and send a shell into the air, and this is sort of something you often don't hear about, these sort of impossible situations that have a sort of morality supposedly written all about them, but are just passive aggression.
He's going to send a shell into the air that's going to try and divert the course of the plane, either by clipping a wing or by creating a shockwave that's going to throw it off course and so on.
That's his sort of solution to the problem.
And let's just say then that it fails.
So he doesn't shoot the plane down.
He doesn't shoot the...
So he doesn't shoot the plane down.
He tries to deflect the plane's course, or move it off course, so it won't hit the building, or at least will only clip the building.
And unfortunately, it doesn't work.
He only gets one shot, right?
One shot! Timing, timing, no time!
And the plane slams into the building and 200 people get killed.
Well, this guy gets thrown into court for murder.
Is it murder, really? Would you really feel comfortable putting that cause on his conscience, right?
I mean, that he's the moral agent.
So you've got some, let's just say, a hijacked plane flying towards a building and...
It seems to me the hijacker would be the proximate cause of the murders, but would you really say that this guy who could have prevented it and he had like five seconds to make a decision and he tried to do the best he could to save everybody's life, but unfortunately it didn't work and he didn't have time for a do-over because then 200 people were dead.
Would you shoot this guy, really?
Would you stand up there and shoot him if he didn't go to jail?
Because that's really what's being talked about in these ethics of emergencies.
What are you going to shoot people for?
What are you going to shoot people for?
So to take an extreme example, right, you've got some pedophile who goes around raping kids.
Yeah, you know, I got to tell you, personally, I got no problem with the guy getting shot if he doesn't go to jail.
No problem. I mean, I think that I would actually sleep more soundly if the guy was dead than even if he was in jail.
Because in jail, he's going to start raping other people, right?
So, I just feel that that kind of level of human corruption, absolutely unrecoverable.
I mean, the one thing about pedophiles is they can't be cured.
All they can do is sort of restrain their hideous impulses and so on.
But there is no way that I would have any problem with that guy getting shot, right?
Some pedophile, and this is not somebody who's like psychotic or, you know, somebody who, you know, chooses to go and rape children when he could be doing something else.
So that guy, yeah, shoot him.
And if I see him raping a kid, yeah, I'll shoot him, for sure.
I mean, you know, if it's the only way that I can stop him, and I'm assuming that I'm good enough with a gun that I'll be whatever, right?
I would do it. You know, I'm not saying that I would sleep like a baby, but I would certainly not feel that I had done something immoral.
In fact, I think that I had done something quite moral if I saw some guy raping a kid and I could shoot him.
Yeah, I'm all over it.
Absolutely no problem whatsoever.
And... In the same way that if I see a guy hitting a kid with a bat, which is what's sort of talked about in the Dr.
Phil I'll talk about tomorrow, then if the only way that I can stop him is to take a bat to his head, I've got to tell you.
I've got to tell you. Yeah, I'm all over it.
If you're beating up a kid with a bat and the only way that I can stop you is to put a bat to your head, yeah, I'll risk the concussion, I'll risk the brain damage, I'll even risk the death if it's the only way that I can stop you.
And I would go to my grave happy that I had done what I could to protect an innocent life.
So I really don't feel that those situations are situations that I would not feel comfortable using violence in the defense of the helpless or whatever.
I think that...
Those, I guess, ex-Marines who have a black belt in karate and so on, they can protect themselves, but there's a lot of little old ladies whose property is also theirs who need some help, and of course children being the most vulnerable in society of all.
And so my question then would be, so this guy who's shooting off this anti-aircraft gun tries to deflect the plane and doesn't do it, would you shoot him?
Would you shoot him for the choice that he made?
Or would you say, oh my god, I'm so sorry that you ever ended up in that kind of situation.
What a complete mess.
I can totally understand that in the split second that you had to make that decision, that it's really tough to figure out Exactly what the right course of action is.
Because, for instance, in this kind of situation, you know that there's 150 people in the building.
Well, how do you know? What if it's the middle of the night?
What if it's possible that some of the people in the plane could survive The impact.
I'm just, I don't know, it's all things that would go through your head.
I mean, if you don't know anything about it, it's, you know, not impossible, I guess, right?
So, in this kind of situation, we're given a lot more information than the person on the ground is, right?
So, if the streetcar's rolling down, you're always given these pieces of information that it's like it's all well and good to say afterwards, but you don't know at the time, right?
So, Oh, if you throw the switch and send the streetcar in this direction, one guy dies.
And if you throw the streetcar in another direction, another guy dies and so on.
Well, but you don't know.
You don't know what's going to happen.
Maybe all the kids are going to run out of the way, right?
So you send it towards the kids' playground and the kids are all nimble and dive out the way.
And you send it towards the other place and the sort of, I don't know, fat old Italian fruit seller.
I don't know why he's Italian.
It just sort of makes sense to me. But he's not nimble and he gets creamed, right?
And so that is something that I think is quite important to understand, that it's all fine to set up the algebra of things before and after, but you don't know that.
In the split second, you see the streetcar coming down, you don't know which way to send it.
You're not going to sit there like the Terminator with his computer eyeballs, right?
Do-do-do-do-do-do-do! Ah, three deaths this way!
Do-do-do-do-do-do! 14 deaths this way.
Probability of success. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, these things just... It's not how the brain works, right?
I mean, you work much more instinctually.
And it doesn't mean that you're not processing an enormous amount of information when you do work instinctually.
It's just that it doesn't work out in that kind of mathematical way that you can then be judged for it afterwards.
So justice to me is the retributive element of force or of a withdrawal of sanction that is a recognition of the moral choice involved in somebody's actions.
It is justice, I think, to say to the guy who's the anti-aircraft gunner who doesn't do the right, you know, kills 50 people or 100 people or whatever, but has to make that split-second decision about what he's going to do, I think that it is justice to say to that man, Look, you did the best you could under the situation.
I mean, I would hate to be in that kind of situation.
And it's all well and good for us to check all the ballistics and logistics and know exactly who was in the building and where they were located and how many people were on the plane.
Because, of course, the guy doesn't even know how many people are on the plane either.
I mean, there could be 200 people on the plane.
How does he know, right?
I mean, you just don't know these things.
And let's just say, oh, well, here's someone who tells him.
It's like, well, maybe that's someone who tells him it's a terrorist who's intercepting the airwaves.
There are way too many variables to be able to make these kinds of mathematical equations, right?
It has to be, and the ethics of emergency is always about a sort of split-second choice.
But, of course, when you have this kind of split-second choice, you don't have all of the reliable numbers.
So, you know, I would say if I were the foreman, dude, go free.
So sorry that you were in this situation.
I think the blame lies with the terrorists, and I think the blame lies with the foreign policy and the people who joined the army and the people who forced others to pay for the army who were sent overseas, who killed all of these people, say, in the Middle East, could be.
So I would say you are sort of caught up in this.
We can sort of debate all we want about what the right decision would have been when we have the luxury of doing so.
In an air-conditioned courtroom with lots of ballistics and charts and full knowledge of all possible situations.
But when you had, you know, a couple of seconds to make the choice out of nowhere, then I can certainly understand that you did what you did and that you rolled the dice with the intention of saving as many people as humanly possible.
And so, you know, go in peace, my brother.
That would sort of be my emotional reaction to it, and I think that that emotional reaction is a recognition of the degree of choice involved in someone's actions.
This is why, of course, when we see a very young child, say eight, who is an arsonist or torturing animals or something, who has all of these sociopathic tendencies or mockers, That we are probably going to be a little bit more upset with the parents than with the child, because the parents have a choice.
The first choice they had was to have a child, and then the choice was in how they raised it.
And so in that situation, the child who has been brutally maltreated during his short life is not going to be somebody who has as much choice As somebody who's been well-treated and then just sort of turns out to be a bad guy or something.
I mean, this is sort of theoretical. I think if you treat someone well, they're going to turn out to be a good guy.
Some people are completely hopeless and they sort of become completely insane.
And some people are raised well, the sort of theoretical minority that's out there somewhere, maybe.
I don't think so, but maybe. Those people who are raised well, and then you have all the people in between who can go either way, who know that it's wrong.
And who hide it, right?
This is sort of the major criteria.
Do they hide what they're doing?
And this is another way that you know whether somebody has moral choice or not or recognizes morality, right?
The argument of sort of temporary insanity or insanity in general is predicated on the understanding or the belief that the person had no capacity to determine right from wrong at the time.
They were in a fugue state or a psychotic state and so on.
And the best way to figure that out is do they try and hide Or prevent other people from knowing their crime.
So if someone says, I hid the murder weapon, but I was temporarily insane, then it's probably quite likely that they were not temporarily insane, they're just trying to use this weasel defense to get out of having to go to jail.
So, this idea that someone's going to hide it, someone's going to prevent other people from knowing, or is going to create an alibi, and so on.
I mean, this is how you know premeditated murder versus a crime of passion, right?
If somebody goes to all the trouble of setting up an alibi in some manner, hires a twin to be seen in a public space or something, then it would seem to me that this is somebody who is not sort of...
And then they say, oh, a crime of passion, I had no idea it was coming.
Well, it's sort of... They know it's wrong, they know that people are going to come after them, but they're going to try and do it anyway, and they're going to try and make sure that they don't get blamed for it to the degree that they can.
And that, to me, is a pretty strong example of somebody who has a lot of choice.
The most fundamental choice is they know that it's wrong and they're going to do it anyway.
Or, even if they believe that it's right, they're still taking the pains to hide it.
So, in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov is...
Somebody who believes that certain kinds of world historical souls in the sort of Napoleonic mold have the right to use force because they are sort of superior to everyone else and this, that, and the other.
Wow, this is quite some rain we have going on here.
It's been beautiful here lately, so I have no particular problems with it.
And it gives us more time together on this rather important topic of justice.
So Raskolnikov believes that he is morally entitled to use violence to achieve his ends because he is the sort of superior.
He's the Nietzschean hero.
He's the superman, right? He's the ubermensch.
He's sort of above the normal norms of...
Morality, because morality is simply invented by the powerful to keep the weak down and therefore to use force in violation of this pseudo-morality, of this suffocating morality of the overlords to keep you down, then you get to bypass that morality and you get to be an overlord yourself and all this kind of stuff.
You vault beyond good and evil to a realm of pure will and glorious whatever, whatever, right?
Well, but he still tries and hides it, right?
So even if he believes that it's moral, he still wants to escape the sort of secular consequences of what he's done.
So he certainly knows that it's against the law, and he certainly knows that he's going to be punished for it if he gets caught.
So this is another indication that somebody has free choice and free will in the matter, and it's another, I think, fairly important indication of how we should feel about them in terms of justice.
So you could obviously comb this back and forth ad infinitum.
It's a lot of different layers of the onion of what it is that people deserve when it comes to evaluating their moral actions.
But one of the things that occurs in the realm of justice, in my sort of humble opinion, is that when you see a sort of a surly, unpleasant, I mean, not to be too stereotypical, a tattooed and nose-ringed and tongue-ringed kind of slouching, resentful-eyed teenager.
If you're driving past that guy, you're going to say, oh, what a ridiculous poser or something like that.
What a shallow and silly approach to life.
Doesn't he realize X, Y, or Z? It's tough to get a job if you look like that and so on.
Now, if you dig into these people's history, more times than not, you're going to discover or uncover And in that kind of situation, probably sexual abuse, but certainly physical abuse, and certainly significant emotional neglect and abuse.
Like the kind of stuff where it would break your heart if you actually saw it occurring.
We see the scar tissue that people's personalities become, and we judge that scar tissue, and I understand that.
I really do, and I sympathize with that.
However... However, what is important, I think, is if your heart would break upon watching that child experience the abuse that he or she experienced as a child Then, to some degree, we cannot just judge the scar tissue.
We must also judge the wound, and in fact, we don't even judge the wound, we don't judge the knife, we judge the hand that is repeatedly stabbing into the child's psyche, creating this scar tissue which manifests itself in antisocial or self-destructive behavior.
Now, does that mean that the teenager doesn't have a choice?
Well, that depends. If the teenager has been brutalized to the point where they become completely insensate to any kind of tangible or social or moral reality, then they're sort of insane.
And therefore, we have sort of more terror and sympathy for their life than we would for somebody who could go the other way.
So, that is sort of something else that's important to understand when it comes to justice, right?
So, if we look at, you know, the sort of Truman Capote novel, In Cold Blood, there were these guys who killed a family and so on.
And, of course, Stone Evil, right?
But you start to look into the history of these men, and one of them, I can't remember the other one, but one of them was...
Raised in a nunnery or in a religious institution, was like thrashed to a bloody pulp every other day of his life, was constantly shipped around, never had a chance to develop any human attachments, lived a life of brutal and degraded misery and horror from day one until the last day where he was thrown into a gas chamber and killed or hung.
I think he was gassed. Well, we have a moral judgment, in my sort of view.
We have a moral judgment of this guy for going and killing this family, because he was trying to make some money off.
thought there was a safe there.
And I can feel anger towards that.
But at the same time, I do feel pity and terror for the people who, for him as a child, right?
So that he was beaten and terrified and hid under the bed, was dragged out by the priests and nuns and beaten again and, you know, screamed at and, you know, hurled into cold rooms and left for days.
I mean, this is just the kind of treatment that is absolutely going to train a human being in brutality.
And particularly if you're a human being who doesn't have an excess of intellectual or emotional intelligence, you are going to be in a situation where your impulse control is going to be virtually nil, right?
I I mean, intelligence is not a moral factor, I think, except in the absence of very strong abuse or significant abuse.
It takes a fair amount of intelligence and introspection to...
Well, certainly introspection, and I'm not sure I understand fully the relationship between intelligence and introspection, but...
It takes a fair amount of introspection to overcome the effects of evil.
It's certainly been my experience.
And if you don't have a lot of intelligence, then strong situations of evil is going to produce some pretty ugly personality structures that you're really not going to have the ability to work with very much.
Doesn't mean that you don't still have a choice, right?
Because this guy was attempting to kill this family, or he killed this family, for a profit.
So he obviously was able to understand cause and effect, and he wanted to act for the betterment of his own financial situation and so on.
Although it might be more astute psychology to say that he was using the fantasy of a safe in the house in order to be able to act out his own rage at having been so brutalized.
There's lots of ways that you could look at that kind of crime.
But it's not as simple as, you know, a bad guy comes out of nowhere and just becomes a bad guy.
I mean, this is how our natural justice is blunted.
Because if you look at this guy who killed the Cutter family in Cold Blood, which is a good book to read if you get a chance, if you look at this guy, then I would sort of say, okay, well, he went and killed the family, that's really evil.
But what was even more evil was the beatings that occurred for him as a child at the hands of the priests and the nuns that he was raised at, in these sort of orphanages.
Because they had dedicated themselves to protecting the innocent and so on, and they were sort of dedicated to that, sort of theoretically in the religious sense.
And they were also adults and he was a child.
So he had no capacity for self-defense at all.
These families, they can always install a home security system, they can have a gun by their bed, they can do whatever, right?
And I'm not saying that this means that it's not evil what occurred to them, or it's anything to do with their faults, but...
What they did was that they had the capacity for self-defense, and they had at least a theoretical possibility of surviving such an encounter.
And of course, one of the reasons that this guy ended up at their house was because they hired a lot of guys who were just kind of coming through to do yard work and farm work and so on.
And of course, this is a time back in the 50s, I think.
There's no checking for references or anything like that.
So they just take these guys and sort of I don't know, cross their fingers and try and do the right thing, and that might be considered a little bit foolish.
I mean, it's obviously a pretty significant punishment, even if it was foolish, but the idea is sort of basically that the reason that we believe in sort of people who just pop up and they're evil, they're just bad.
They're just bad to the bone, as George Thurgood sings.
Well, we believe in that because we want to obscure any kind of sympathy for who they have become.
And the reason that we want to obscure any kind of sympathy for who they've become is because we don't want to follow the trail back to their parents.
Right? Because there is a huge, absolutely enormous blind spot in society regarding violence towards children.
I mean, children are where women were in many ways a hundred years ago in terms of social views on violence.
A hundred years ago you could beat your wife and you just couldn't kill her, right?
These days you can beat children for years and if you kill them, then you might go to jail for a couple of years.
But other than that... I mean, for instance, if a cop comes by in a domestic dispute incident, right, and a woman says, he hit me or whatever, the cops can press charges regardless of the woman.
But you look up, just look it up and try and tell me how many people, when the cops get called and the kid's being abused, how many people end up in jail?
How many parents end up in jail?
Well, they don't. At all.
And of course, this is partly because nobody wants to get involved, but the major reason is because the state prefers that children get abused.
I mean, that's why they put them in school in the way that they do.
The state prefers that children get abused because abused children either become hyper-compliant, which means docile taxpayers, or they become hyper-aggressive, which means that they get to get arrested, which justifies the police and also justifies all of the money that goes into the court system and the prison system and so on.
So the state is more than happy.
Power structures are more than happy.
They're overjoyed with the abuse of children.
This is sort of the major reason why it continues.
So we really don't want to follow this trail back because it's morally confusing in a simplistic kind of way.
If you have a simplistic approach to these things, it's morally confusing to feel sympathy for somebody who has committed a heinous crime.
However, I think that we need to open up the richness of justice because the purpose of our feelings around justice is to set up situations around prevention rather than cure.
The reason that it's important to feel both terror and pity for somebody who's committed a heinous crime Is because we need to trace it back to the root, which is their experiences as children, where the major power disparity between the parents and the children was being exercised under the blackest and most evil of influences, which is corrupt parental power, or, I would say, in general, though not exclusively, parental power.
So, I think it's important for us to feel all of this complexity so that we get back to the actual cause.
If we believe that evil people just sort of pop down from the sky like parachutists from Satan's clouds or something, then...
We are forever going to be confused about prevention.
If we understand that criminals are generally produced from abusive parental power exercised upon helpless, dependent, and powerless children, then we can begin to understand the real cause of violence and crime, which is parenting and also state policies, as we talked about yesterday and have we talked about a number of times.
But that, I think, is a very important approach to take.
Justice. The allocation of blame for moral choices is a complicated phenomenon for sure.
And, of course, I'm fully aware, and you can certainly email me to remind me if I forget, but I'm fully aware that when we go back to parents, we sort of solve one problem and cause another, right?
So we say, oh, this guy's a bad guy because his parents were bad, and so on.
So we kind of solve that problem, and that's hunky-dory.
But, well, not solve it, but we enrich that problem.
And then, of course, we go back and we say, well, his parents were bad, and this, that, and the other.
Well, of course, they had parents, and they had parents, and they had parents, and so on.
So, to what degree can we finally cut it off and say, ah, this person is to blame?
Well, that's the philosophers, in my view.
But we'll get into that another time, because the philosophers condition everyone's thinking about this, that, or the other.
So, I hope this has been helpful for you.
To sort of reiterate the idea that justice is the emotional comprehension of choice in moral situations, and therefore the justice or the, I can't use the term in the definition right, the appropriateness of retribution for particular actions, so we don't punch someone who is, we don't sort the appropriateness of retribution for particular actions, so we don't punch someone who is, we don't sort of throw somebody in jail who was absolutely psychotic and insane, We sort of get them treatment and confine them.
But we also have sympathy for those who've turned out evil, partly because of their own upbringings and so on, which doesn't mean that we don't judge them and punish them.
But it means that we also, in the justice and punishment of them, we also need to make strong cases for better parenting, right?
Because jail is not even a cure, right?
Jail is just a containment.
It's like, you know, if you have diabetes and you have to go sort of regular injections, or if you have a kidney failure, you have to do dialysis.
It's not exactly a cure.
It's just kind of a holding pattern.
It's just kind of keeping things in abeyance through the application of significant Resources and time and money and so on.
In the same way, jail is sort of like dialysis, right?
It'll sort of keep a situation relatively stable and make the worst aspects of it manageable.
But it's not a cure, right?
So, I mean, the jail system is like the dialysis machine and it's not like the worst thing in the world.
But what we really want is the cure, right?
And so the cure is not throwing people in jail any more than the cure for kidney illnesses throwing more people on dialysis.
The cure is better parenting, as always, always, always comes back to better parenting.
But in order to get better parenting, we need to clear away the rubble of bullshit that is thrown around in society at all times and under all circumstances.
And what that means is that we have to oppose things like the state and religion and the country and patriotism and all this nonsense that gets thrown around with all this moral righteousness.
Because that really destroys and undermines people's capacity to make intelligent moral choices or moral decisions.
And so I think that's the approach that we have to take.
But first of all, we need to get all the complexity that goes into creating evil within society.
And that has a lot to do with both sympathy, terror, judgment.
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