Yes it is. I asked:
How is the question of an object being given special consideration due to religious belief not in the OP?
All this analysis does, though, is reframe the question. Now the issue can be stated as, “is there any property valuable enough to protect with a human shield?”
Two thoughts spring to my mind, as further examples in this thought experiment:
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The US constitution - essentially irreplaceable and profoundly political. Worth a life?
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As a buddhist, I would have to say no, no physical object justifies death. The Taliban blew up irreplaceable statues in the Bamiyan valley, but it’s still would not justify their deaths. Karma can be rough though.
Interesting question.
I came into the thread thinking “no way - human life is more important than any property”. But then I got to thinking.
Suppose somebody discovered something irreplaceable, that could add to human knowledge. Someone finds a backup copy of all the volumes in the Library of Alexandria, or a genuine extra-terrestrial artifact. And some nut decides it’s evil, and tries to destroy it.
Would I be willing to use deadly force to defend it, even if I was sure that neither I nor any innocent third party was under threat?
I have to say Yes - that some losses of property are worth more than a human life. But it has to be irreplaceable, and not just worth a lot of money.
The other example is endangered species. Would I be willing to kill someone who was about to wipe out the last passenger pigeon or spotted owl? That I don’t know. ISTM that these are less irreplaceable - there are other pigeons and owls that can be studied and used.
But it is an interesting OP - thanks!
Regards,
Shodan
Glad this is providing some food for thought!
I think we should separate out defending something from punishing someone for destruction after the fact. In the example given above of the security officer I think we should take it as read that force (sometimes even deadly) can and will be used to defend highly valuable objects. The specifics of this are difficult for me to work out though - particularly in the “terrorist going at the Mona Lisa with a water bomb”, I genuinely don’t know whether such a person should be capped or not.
Looking at after the fact punishment, and the Bamiyan statues was an example that I had thought of myself, I really can’t support the execution of anyone for the destruction of any object. Even if someone were to destroy the original US constitution, we know what it says and it wouldn’t stop the agreement between the states existing unless someone decided cynically that this was the moment they were waiting for to secede (I’m looking at you Texas). Would trying and executing someone for the destruction of what is, ultimately, a piece of paper be justifiable?
Wow, that is some hardcore (and IMO irrational) pacifism. You have a problem with killing one non-innocent person when their actions will lead to the death of multiple innocent people. That’s about as “justified” as it gets.
I watched the vid. You could have done ctrl + a then clicked delete, or indeed just deleted the folder. Would have been easier 
Sure, the copy in the National Archives is irreplaceable, but if it is destroyed, it would still be controlling law. We would just be out one piece of antiquity.
I’ve said it in other threads that the reason I support lethal force to protect property whether it is your home, car, personal possessions, etc. is that you do not have a crystal ball to know that property is ALL that the person is going to take. If someone is violating a basic construct of society that you don’t forcibly take someone else’s things, then it is entirely reasonable to believe that he might just turn around and put one in your head on his way out.
Same thing with the examples upthread. There is no way to know that the man with the knife is ONLY going to burn down a house (or the whole block). You are dealing with a disturbed individual and it is very reasonable to thing that he may take someone’s life and therefore reasonable to use deadly force to stop him.
I don’t know if I could justify killing someone just over the destruction of objects, but on the other hand, I thought immediately of the Bamiyan statues when I saw your OP. I think destroying important cultural relics is a special level of evil, and I remember tears coming to my eyes when I saw the pictures of the destruction on the internet. Killing people is evil…trying to eliminate an entire culture is a whole new level, you know? That was when I realized the Taliban were capable of anything.
What, exactly, is irrational about it? Not what premises of mine do you disagree with, but what’s irrational. It proceeds quite rationally from some observations such as the human tendency to meet violence with escalating violence, the existence of the vengeance impulse, the possibility of any violent act having unintended damages, the fact that millenia of violence has never led to a non-violent world, etc.
I have a problem with killing any person (who doesn’t want to be killed, that is, I’m cool with euthenasia). One person (“justified” or not) would be one too much, as it were.
No it isn’t. You’re preceding from a starting premise (ends justify the means) that I don’t share. I don’t hold *individual *human life in as high regard as you seem to. I worry a lot more about the collective, and I think that actions that reduce violenceincrease the chances that mankind will move away from the animal part that resorts to violence first, often unthinkingly.
Very much so. In fact…
Agreed. Although much of the justification for deadly force against vandals (to use a short hand term) is going to be based on the fear that the vandal may go on to act against humans, instead of simply confining himself to trashing the Mona Lisa. That seems to underlie a lot of the thinking that goes into justifying shooting burglars who enter an occupied house - he might just be after the silverware, but he might not be, if he found my wife home alone. It depends to a large degree how well his intentions can be established.
Thus “he breaks in, I warn him to leave and he makes a threatening move and I shoot him” = OK. “He breaks in, grabs the DVD player and jumps out the window and I shoot him as he makes his getaway” !+ OK. Because it was clear that there was no threat against me or my wife, and my DVD player is hardly irreplaceable.
Copies of the Constitution are a good example of something I would not consider irreplaceable (likewise the Mona Lisa).
We can continue to reap the benefits of the Constitution even if all the original copies were gone. We could recreate the text from backup, and it would (as you say) continue to operate. In almost the same way, we could recreate the Mona Lisa from all the reproductions that exist of it.It wouldn’t be exactly the same, no doubt, but like the Constitution, it is more or less a souvenir rather than something irreplaceable.
What I was thinking of was something from which we had not yet fully benefited, and which we could not benefit from if it were destroyed. Off the top of my head, I don’t know if the Bamiyan statues in Afghanistan fit that description or not.
But consider something genuinely irreplaceable - or rather, several somethings. I was considering the idea of the death penalty for property, and as before, I started off thinking “no way”. But -
Suppose there were five volumes of the Intergalactic Encyclopedia, scattered in five safe deposit boxes across the world. Two people know where the boxes are. One is a mystic; the other an escape artist. (I know, I know - work with me here.)
The mystic will reveal where each volume is, one every ten years. The escape artist is convinced that, if all volumes are revealed, it will mean the end of civilization. The escape artist has already destroyed the introductory volume of the IE. He is capable of escaping from any prison.
Would it be justifiable to impose the death penalty? I would say Yes.
LWOP will not work - he will escape and destroy the irreplaceable volumes. Therefore, if it is logical to kill him to defend the volumes, it is logical to kill him to punish him for destroying the introductory volume, because that will prevent him from destroying the rest. Just like the regular DP, with the difference that the DP is justified (in my view) because it prevents future murders.
If this bogs down the thread in discussion of the DP, I apologize in advance. If it helps, I will promise not to defend the DP in this thread. Please, no hijacks - I think this is an excellent and thought-provoking OP.
Probably there is some glaring hole in my scenario you can find and blast open without discussion of the death penalty anyway.
Regards,
Shodan
You think there’s a glaring hole in your scenario involving a mystic, an evil escape artist and copies of the Encyclopedia Intergalactica?
Actually, this sounds more like the setup to a very geeky shaggy dog story.
I’m quite sure that armed guards at museums are not permitted to shoot vandals.
Your own words (below) illustrate what seems irrational to me.
You suggest you don’t hold individual human life in as high a regard as the collective, but your previous comments seem to be contrary to that. You view violence against an individual human life as unjustified when it’s done to prevent harm to the collective. It seems to me that you view any violence as the greatest possible evil, when in my view violence can sometimes be justified as an evil lesser than what it was intended to prevent.
Let me propose another scenario that doesn’t have to do with the protection of property so that I can try to understand the limits of your pacifism:
An armed guard at a baseball game sees a man approaching the stadium entrance with a machine gun and a suicide-vest. Is it acceptable to you that the guard opens fire (fires first) on this individual in order to prevent him from reaching the crowd where he can easily kill multiple people? If your answer to this is “no” it’s not okay for the guard to fire first, is it at least okay for the guard to return fire if the attacker opens fire on him first?
If your answer is still “no”, then I suppose we’ll have to just agree to disagree, because I don’t see either of us convincing each other of anything.
I’d shoot him in the legs. A lot of people died to keep that painting there.
They should be fucking killed. No judge, no jury, straight to execution. What’s more chickenshit than fucking with a man’s automobile ? I mean, you don’t fuck with another man’s vehicle. You don’t do it. It’s just against the rules.
How so? I’ve laid out why I think violence is wrong. At any point in there did I say “because the individual human life (of the vaccine-destroyer) is precious?” No, I did not. So you seem to be seeing a contradiction where there is none.
Bingo!
I’m glad you feel you have the ability to always judge which is the lesser of two evils, not just in such clear-cut hypotheticals but also in fuzzy real life.
Me, I think “lesser of two evils” is often just post-hoc justification. No-one does this complicated moral calculus before they act in the real world.
And sometimes it takes years for the “lesser” of those evils to be extinguished. Take my country - lots of people thought taking up arms against the Apartheid South African government was the right thing to do, using exactly such "lesser of two evils"reasoning, if they reasoned at all.
End result - a country flooded with cheap AK-47s, an entire traumatized generation now in their late 30s, and a legacy of murder and violent crime in a country that should, and could, be a paradise. As a direct result of people using violence to try and solve problems that, actually, were better solved by non-violent means. It wasn’t the armed struggle that killed apartheid, in the end. It was the economy and the end of the Cold War.
Let me save you some time - my pacifism *has *no limits.
And I say this as someone who has been whipped (by the police), shot at (by the Army), raped (at knifepoint) and knifed (by thieves), mind you.
Now, if I wouldn’t condone violence against those cops, those soldiers, that rapist or those muggers (and I don’t), why should I compromise for some property destruction? There’ll always be another vaccine, but doing violence scars the collective, permanently.
Some physical objects are more important than others.
*You can burn my house
Steal my car
Drink my liquor
From an old fruit jar
Do anything that you want to do, but uh-uh honey,
Lay off of my shoes*
I don’t condone the death penalty at any cost, but I wonder how I’d feel if someone blew up the Pentagon (where miraculously no one died).
Whilst I’m not willing to go all way to Mr Dibble’s pacifism in the face of anything (violence in self defence is to me the most obvious justifiable violence) I think s/he has stated the case why I personally find it very difficult to make clear-cut decisions about the use of lethal force. Even in an after-the-fact execution, it’s hard to know with complete certainty that taking someone’s life is the right thing to do, and it’s not a decision that can be reversed. I don’t think every individual human life is so important that it outweighs anything, but I hold life to a higher standard than any object. I think this thread has clarified that for me, I really can’t think of anything that should appropriately have the sanction of death for its destruction.
Can I remind everyone that we’re discussing death because of the destruction of objects, I think the various discussions about the ethics of killing one to save many is a whole other topic.
I have Joss Wheddon on line 1.
[Digression]That was deliberate - I needed some footage of me doing it to talk over. ;)[/digression]