And I believe that this is a truism that people use to do things they normally wouldn’t do just to win. What you do, and what you win, should always be topmost in your mind.
Then why the handwringing? If there’s no moral choice to be made, what the hell are we debating?
You just said “there is no morally correct action to be taken,” which, if you’ll pardon me, seems to me like you’re sidestepping the harsh reality that sometimes doing the right thing is unpleasant.
I get it, but then he murdered three kids, and that makes people a little salty too.
Logically I do not understand how something can both be morally right and the wrong thing to do in a moral sense. I don’t know of any philosophy where this is the case. I think a lot of you have conflicting values. You value life, by extension you thing people have a right to defend those lives, but if someone gets killed defending a life you turn into one of those robots from Star Trek who break down because they can’t handle a logical paradox.
What prompted the thread was the celebration of the killing of the murderer in the press. I thought it was a bit much, and I wondered why people weren’t more subdued.
The answer seems to be, in part, that a heinous enough crime is enough for some people to strip the perpetrator of his humanity altogether; other people can’t see a necessary action as immoral; still others don’t like mixed verdicts on the actions taken.
We have countless threads where some posters insist on an absolute morality, while others just as vehemently argue that all morality is comparative and subjective.
I doubt anyone will ever “win” that argument.
FTR, I’m a comparative/subjective sort myself.
So when arguing the morality of this event, those two are certainly going to have major disconnects in attitudes.
FYI, Oregon Public Broadcasting has an interview with Mr Giamanco.
I think I’m handling one just fine. I think it’s the people insisting that because a bad thing was necessary it must be a good thing who are having trouble handling one.
Yes, it can be morally right to do a bad thing. Yes, that looks like a paradox. It isn’t really — It’s only true when other choices are worse — but I think a lot of people can’t get past the apparent paradox.
Thank you for posting that. It includes more information, both about just what happened, and about Giamanco’s state of mind.
I note that he definitely thinks of the teenager as a human being, and as one who he thinks should have been better cared for during his life.
Lying, for example. Say, to a murderer who asks you where their victim may be found.
It’s not immoral to lie to a murderer to prevent their finding a victim. The categorical imperative is overrated.
It’s not wrong to tell a Nazi there’s nobody in the attic.
And for exactly the same reason, it’s not immoral to kill a mass killer in the process of mass killing in order to stop him from mass killing.
Yeah, I think Kant would be down with the shooting of the teenager. Seriously.
All of that is true. And none of it makes lying, let alone killing people, a good thing. It only makes it a necessary thing.
But, if you believe that, then: what’s the point of something being good? Imagine someone who gets told that, okay, you spent their life approaching every choice with a benevolent desire to help people and save the lives of innocents as a law-abiding citizen always doing what was necessary from that recommended standpoint but, dun dun dun, was that good of him?
Maybe you go on to decide that, yes, it was good — or, no, it wasn’t good — but what does that change? If you eventually conclude that it was, I’m not feeling any better about it; if you eventually conclude that it wasn’t, I’m not feeling any worse about it.
Here we will disagree vehemently. Lying to save a life under such clear and obvious circumstances (a known murderer are after the person intending to murder them) is a very good thing. The proper measure of an action is its outcome relative to the alternatives. The proper measure of a person’s morality is their purpose. The proper measure of a person’s sense is whether their actions were reasonably calculated to bring about the best option.
But, to be clear, I don’t know where this shooting of a murdering child falls on any of these scales. I don’t know if the murdering child could have been disarmed without killing, but the fact he had already been tackled at least makes that option seem more plausible. I don’t know whether the father who shot the murdering child had the purpose of saving lives or of executing some warped perception of justice (eg: he’s down on the ground and disarmed, but the little shit doesn’t deserve to walk out of here after what he’s done). I don’t know if the father was unreasonably mistaken about the relative need for his actions.
So, while I recognize that morality and the law are two (often very) different things, I really hope the police take statements and thoroughly investigate the necessity of this shooting. Was it the lawful defense of others, or was it the unnecessary and unreasonable killing of a person (a child, if you prefer) who had already been rendered defenseless?
But it isn’t a “necessary” thing. It’s not necessary, full stop, to lie to the murderer, or to interrupt a murderer by killing him; you could totally just stand back and do nothing to foil the murderer, possibly with a grin. It’s only necessary in the implied context of, y’know, commendably wanting to foil that murderer.
This (school shooter) kid … came from some seriously inauspicious beginnings. IMHO, nothing excuses what he did, but some things may tend to explain it:
I, too, saw the interview with Kaylub Giamanco. Like many of us guessed … his feelings about what happened seem anything but simple.
Once in a while, a select carpenter truly makes history.
This is as it should be. This was a complex situation with tragic outcomes no matter what. I commend Kaleb for his quick actions and for preventing further tragedy. I sympathize with him for the anguish he has for having to kill a teen.
And I am certain that all the braggerts out there with the “I would have blasted the hell out of the little bastard” mentality would have either 1. ran the other direction; 2. froze; or 3. made the situation worse.
The New York Times article on the Oregon Public Broadcasting interview mentions that Mr. Giamanco put his gun down and his hands up when armed police arrived.
“At that point, I swung the door out and open, and I stepped in, and I fired,” he said. The teacher and the gunman dropped to the floor, he said. The teacher then ran out of the room, fearing Mr. Giamanco was another attacker, he said.
Mr. Giamanco said he saw Mr. John scrambling for his shotgun and shot him two more times, killing him. A heavily armed police officer arrived moments later.
Mr. Giamanco said he put his gun on the floor, put his hands up and told the officer, “‘We need your help over here right now — please, please, please.’”
The interviews were really interesting. Giamanco seems to have his head squarely on his shoulders and be dealing with the complexities of the situation far better than the initial news coverage that prompted this thread.
The one about the shooter’s background was just depressing. They reached the father in a homeless encampment, and he said he hadn’t seen his son in about a year — gee, that couldn’t be a factor here anywhere.
No amount of background excuses what he did, but it’s interesting to see if only for trying to prevent future tragedies.
I’m really not following your question. If there’s a good choice, then that’s the one to take, as opposed to a bad choice. Some situations have multiple bad choices and no good ones. Some situations have multiple good ones. Some situations have some of each. In a few situations it’s hard to tell, at least in time to make a choice. I don’t see how any of that, or anything else I said, affects the “point” of something being good; and if you do see that, I don’t understand why you see it.
Or did you mean, what’s the point of being a good person if you may have to do a bad thing anyway? I think I’ve been entirely clear that taking what appears to general-you to be the least bad choice doesn’t make you a bad person, even if that choice was to do a terrible thing. The point of being a good person is the same as it was all along — a good person is far less likely to do bad things when there are better choices available.
I agrk with you about the proper measure of the person’s morality. Yet again, as I’ve said multiple times in this thread, it doesn’t make anyone a bad person to do a bad thing if their other choices are worse. What we’re disagreeing about — and I don’t know whether the people still insisting on this can be in any way convinced otherwise — is the claim that this somehow magically makes the bad thing, in itself, a good thing. In some circumstances it’s a good thing to choose the bad thing; but the bad thing is still bad.
Unless he’s lying in the linked interview, I think we can rule that one out.
Agreed. I’ve also been saying all along, though not repeating in every post, that in regards to that specific situation I’m going on the information that I have. The police, and the other proper investigators, are in a position to get information I don’t have; as well as information I have no business having unless the people most concerned decide to voluntarily publicize it. They should do so, and decide in a legally proper manner whether anybody (other than the teenage shooter, who can’t be because he’s dead) should be prosecuted.
That’s a choice, also. I think it’s a bad choice. I think it’s a worse choice than intervening (though I do understand that some people freeze; and I don’t know for sure that I wouldn’t be one of them.)
What I meant was that it might be necessary in order to save more lives. You’re correct that, strictly speaking, it isn’t “necessary” to do much of anything.