Do you think that even people from disadvantaged households are fully morally responsible for their actions? Very well, you must accept this as well... From Freedomain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world.
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| This is part three of a philosophical analysis Of the British rioting, and I really want to thank everyone who's posted a plethora of comments and filled my inbox with responses, and I want to address a pretty core one that people are making about what it is that I'm saying. | |
| Where they're saying, Steph, how can you say that there is diminished moral responsibility for these poor kids just because they come from hardscrabble, single-parent, welfare-laced backgrounds from ghettos? | |
| Well, I think that's a fine question to ask, and it does reveal to me the tragedy of what passes for thinking in the world. | |
| And I mean this with all sympathy. | |
| It's not your fault that you can't reason in this way. | |
| You certainly can innately. | |
| It's just being crowned out of you by state-run or state-controlled education. | |
| So let me explain what you're missing, because not one person has made this point. | |
| point, and it's a very obvious point once you see it. | |
| If somebody is rich and privileged, I think we can assume that they have an easier time being a better person. | |
| I don't think that's a hugely controversial thing to say. | |
| I'm not saying this means nobody has any free will, but there are influences. | |
| And let's look at a guy. | |
| Just some guy. In England, picked semi-randomly. | |
| Let's say that this guy spent almost the first two years of his life at a family home in Paisley Terrace at the Willowbray area of Edinburgh. | |
| His dad worked as a tax inspector while his dad was studying for a law degree from the University of Edinburgh. | |
| And then he spent a couple of years in Australia where his father was a lecturer. | |
| In law at the University of Adelaide, he spent the remainder of his childhood in Durham, England, where his father lectured in Durham University. | |
| Then he went to the Corister School in Durham, and then he attended Fetter's College, a prestigious independent school in Edinburgh. | |
| Then he became a lawyer. Well, this is a pretty rich, white, privileged background. | |
| Would you say that somebody like this had more... | |
| Moral responsibility for how his life turned out or the destruction that he wreaked, would he have about the same, or would he have less moral responsibility than a ghetto kid? | |
| Well, I think that reasonably it's easily able to say that with opportunity comes responsibility. | |
| With greater privilege comes greater moral accountability. | |
| It's not 100% to 0%, but it's definitely there. | |
| This rich, privileged, Young white kid grew up to be Tony Blair. | |
| And Tony Blair, in the first six years that he was Prime Minister, ordered British troops into battle five times, more than any other Prime Minister in British history. | |
| Iraq, 1998 and 2003. | |
| Kosovo, 1999. Sierra Leone, 2000. | |
| And Afghanistan, 2001. | |
| None of these countries were threatening the United Kingdom. | |
| This was not Operation Sea Lion with Hitler trembling at the haunches on the French coast. | |
| These were clearly international war crimes falling under The worst crime, which is aggression from one country to another, the unprovoked invasion of another country. | |
| Down the street memos seem to indicate fairly clearly that intelligence was manipulated and the population was lied to in order to draw England into the Iraqi war in particular. | |
| And this has resulted in the deaths, most conservatively, of 100,000 or more Iraqis, the displacement of a million or so, and the shattering of the infrastructure and the housing and the hospitals of an entire country. | |
| So it's fine with me if you want to place the heavy cloak of moral responsibility On ghetto youths whose brains have been shredded by crappy government schools designed to squash them and keep them into a permanent underclass. | |
| It's fine with me if you want to say that people who've never been exposed to a work ethic, that people who've never been exposed to any role models, that people who've grown up in poverty, in single parenthood, in a culture that avoids work and has been trapped in the welfare system, it's fine with me. If you want to say that these people are 100% morally responsible for what they do. | |
| But what level of moral responsibility falls upon some rich kid like Tony Blair who starts wars against international law and who is a war criminal by any objective standard? | |
| What is his level of moral responsibility? | |
| Tony Blair now makes about 7 million pounds a year And commands about 250,000 pounds for a speaking engagement and still builds out his private security force to the taxpayer. | |
| Hundreds of thousands of pounds a year has an estimated net worth of 60 million pounds and works for a variety of financial companies and is a lecturer at universities and has book deals. | |
| What is his level of moral responsibility? | |
| Well, do you think that nobody sees this in society? | |
| Do you think the children are not aware of this? | |
| this? | |
| Do you think the youths are not completely aware of the rank moral hypocrisy involved in this kind of stuff? | |
| The cost of the bailouts of the British banks Let's talk about that for a moment. Because we're all about Holding people accountable for theft and destruction of property. | |
| Well, 850 billion pounds. | |
| 850 billion pounds. | |
| That is an extraordinary amount of money. | |
| That is what went to the banks. | |
| banks. | |
| Let's take a quick look, shall we? | |
| Now, the raising of tuition fees for British youth will Will cost the British government about $18 billion, right? | |
| $850 billion to bail out banks and to keep the bonuses and executive salaries of people who ripped off other people largely or made extensive miscalculations, which they alone should be responsible for. | |
| $18 billion are being taken from the youth. | |
| And these are just loans which the youth are obligated to repay. | |
| It's true that some of the banks may have to repay some of these loans, but those are banks in general way down the road, not the executives making bonuses right now. | |
| They get to walk away with all that money. | |
| This 850 billion pounds is going to take decades, if not generations, to pay off. | |
| And this was passed like that with no consultation from the youth. | |
| Who will actually have to pay it? | |
| And the government is going to need people with some pretty damn high earnings to be able to pay off the amount of debt that it's forcing down the young people's throats, and yet it's not going to loan them any money to go to school to improve their skills. | |
| Or if it is going to loan it to them, it's going to loan them to an extremely high rate. | |
| And tuition fees are going up enormously. | |
| And the whole system itself, the whole system itself, statism as a whole, is the initiation of force to achieve your goals. | |
| If you want the poor people to get money, well, what you do is you go and raise taxes on the productive. | |
| You take from the productive and you give to the impoverished. | |
| That's the idea behind the welfare state. | |
| Can we really blame the kids for eliminating the middle man and simply taking stuff from the productive themselves, the shops and the restaurants and the local businesses? | |
| It's hard to see why it's okay for a tax collector, but it's wrong for a youth. | |
| It's surely more efficient with the youth, much less overhead. | |
| So I just wanted to sort of point these things out. | |
| I do not condone violence. | |
| I do not condone the initiation of force. | |
| It is wrong. It is wrong what these rioters are doing. | |
| They're playing directly into the hands of the ruling powers because now everybody in the majority in England are going to beg for an expansion of state power. | |
| So, I mean, they're just shooting themselves in the foot even more than they have been shot in the other foot. | |
| Let me take that gun. I still got a toe here. | |
| Boom! But the reality is that the youth are listening. | |
| The youth are listening. | |
| They don't listen to what their elders say. | |
| They listen to what actually occurs in the world. | |
| They listen to what actually occurs to rich white people who cheat and lie and miscalculate and get massively rewarded. | |
| They look at what happens to people who start wars in foreign countries for no reason of self-defense and lie to the population. | |
| They get awards, rewards, teaching positions, executive positions at banking and financial institutions. | |
| They get all the goodies that society can provide. | |
| They look at how important they feel to those in power when they see the government passing off their future in a nice little slave crate to the banking institutions and then shaft them for tuition fees. | |
| You understand? |