Hey, Gary, wasn’t trying to defend MSmith. Just saying that, for most people, it’s not a question of whether or not the lives of the people matter, it’s a question of where the tragedy occurs. For instance, here on the West Coast, we felt a tremendous amount of grief and frustration (and a bunch of other negative emotions) following 9/11. However, I have no doubt that, for most, those feelings would have been amplified significantly if a West Coast target had been hit.
It’s like the difference between being punched in the gut and being punched in the balls.
Are we to hold to every life in the same regard? Impossible.
You pick up a newspaper. You read on the front page of the tragic death of person in auto accident. Horrible, you say, a terrible loss. You read on to discover that this person was a friend of yours. The tragedy of the situation is magnifed, isn’t it. Isn’t it more of a loss to you that it was someone you knew?
Things take on a different meaning when they hit closer to home. As for the non-Americans there, they were killed pretty close to my home, if you know what I mean.
I’ve honestly never bothered to quantify it. I doubt I could because it’s largely emotional. The point is that the lives of those I empathise with have more value to me than the lives of abstracts. There is an entire spectrum in there somewhere running from a complete abstract ‘Jane Doe’ through to my girlfriend or mother. The more I empathise with someone the more I value them and the greater the sense of loss I feel when they are gone. I think everyone feels this. If this wasn’t the case we’d feel as great a sense of loss at a stranger’s obituary in the paper as we do at the death of our father. We couldn’t function like that.
The important point is that Mssmith is by her own admission almost completely ignorant of Afghanistan and its people. They are as abstarct to her as the Persians are to me. As such they can have little value. Americans on the other hand she knows well. She sees them every day. Knows their lifestyle and language etc. As such Americans are going to have a much higher value to her than Afghans. It’s inevitable.
Personally I think that anyone who says they feel as great as sense of personal loss at the deaths of 5000 Bangaldeshis in a flood as they do at the loss of 5000 American on 9/11 is full of shit. I have never seen tears from people all over the US on hearing news of floods in Bangladesh or an earthquake in Bolivia. I certainly have never cried at such an event but I had tears in my eyes listening to those phone calls from the WTC. And if people don’t feel as great a sense of personal loss then they obviously never put as high a personal value on the lives in the first place. That’s understandable. It’s not wrong. It’s the way the human brain works. We value that which we have a personal connection with more strongly. It certainly doesn’t make us bigots because we have a personal connection with our own that we don’t share with strangers.
Then don’t do it now until you can see some evidence of intolerance in making such value judgements. Valueing something less highly than an alternative does not mean you are intolerant of it.
:rolleyes:
What a classic strawman.
Address the argument presented please, not one you wish to tar me with.
Is the killing of a goldfish less of an atrocity simply because we can’t sympathise with it as easily and hence it is of less value to you or I personally irespective of its value to the owner? The effects of the crime are exactly the same with the exception of the species being removed. Same grief caused to owner, same monetary loss etc. I simply don’t value goldfish as highly as dogs. My reasons are my own. Does this mean that you would consider the killing of a goldfish less of an atrocity because you value it less? Or is the atrocity the fact that a loved pet has been wantonly killed and a person’s property and happiness deprived them?
Do you only consider crimes to be as serious as the personal value you place on what is being deprived? If you personally don’t value the photographs of a complete stranger (and you couldn’t, not having ever seen them) you don’t consider their theft a crime? Or do you understand that the seriousness of an act is dependant on its effect on the world at large, not just on yourself? In short do you understand how the level of seriousness of a crime is not dependant on personal value judgements?
Of course, SPOOFE, it is completely justified and understandable that you should feel more alarmed and shocked by a tragic event which happens near you or your family. No-one would blame you or call you bigoted for this. But we are discussing (or at least I am) the tendancy for some people to feel more sympathy for their own countrymen no matter where they are, just because they are citizens of the same nation. For example, what if you heard that a Red Cross building in Afghanistan was bombed and a bunch of innocent Red Cross workers were killed. Would you feel sorrier for them if they were American than if they were Afghan? Would their lives be worth more to you?
And spooje, we are not talking about the loss of someone you know, compared to the loss of a person you don’t know. Let’s say my office building is bombed right now. The people I care most about in it are myself and my boyfriend. Then, after that, are all the people whom I know, and lastly all the people whom I don’t know, to the same degree, regardless of nationality, ethnicity or religion.
So your point is that ignorance of a people leads someone to attach greater value to the lives of their compatriots than the lives of foreigners, and this is an acceptable thing?
As a separate point, I really do appreciate your argument that empathy is greater when identify with people, but surely you can see there is a world of difference between saying “X’s life is more valuable to me than Y’s” and “I can identify more with X than with Y”.
Gaspode, you misunderstand me. I am not accusing you of underplaying the seriousness of a crime against non-Americans or judging that the death of innocent non-Americans is any less of an atrocity than the death of innocent Americans. I found your example regarding the dog and the goldfish shocking because of the implication that you value the two lives differently in the same manner than you would value an American life differently from a non-American life. If that was not implied, then I’m sorry. I did not intend to dispute your claim that your empathy with the dog does not make you intolerant to fish nor does it mean that you do not condemn both crimes equally. What I cannot understand is the ability to value human lives differently based solely on the criteria of nationality. And I probably wouldn’t call someone who does this a “bigot”. I would prefer the word “patriot”, or “zealot”, as you suggested.
But it seems that you contend that your heirarchy is more moral than mine. I feel that my countrymen must be a part of that list(for me). That does not mean I would feel no sympathy or empathy for non-Americans. I don’t think it makes me a bad person.
No, spooje, I wouldn’t say that my hierarchy is more moral than yours, but I feel that it is better than yours (obviously, since otherwise I’d just convert to yours) and I also feel that it is more reasonable than yours. If your hierarchy is based on the idea that all Americans are necessarily more similar to you than all non-Americans, then I honestly (not sarcastically) don’t understand how you can think that, for reasons that I’ve already mentioned. But if it is based on the principle that Americans should stand together and value each others’ lives more than anyone else’s, then it is something which stems from your patriotic values. Now patriotism is something which I don’t like, but in the same way that I don’t like organised religion, I respect the right of other people to think differently while nevertheless harbouring the secret hope that one day all people will think like me.
And there never was any such implication. That was a hypothetical, defined as 'an assumption or concession made for the sake of argument". It wasn’t real. Perhaps I should posted a discalimer.
Then you’re missing the point. As far as I can see everyone is valuing lives based on emotional attachment, something you yourself have stated you would do, vis “The people I care most about in it are myself and my boyfriend. Then, after that, are all the people whom I know, and lastly all the people whom I don’t know”.
The fact is that the set ‘people I empathise with and therefore have an emotional attachment to and hence value’ (PIEWATHAEATAHV) and the set ‘Americans’ tend to overlap to a huge degree. Similarly the set PIEWATHAEATAHV and the set ‘Afghans’ don’t overlap much at all and for Mssmith in her ignorance of Afghan culture this overlap is almost non-existent. Therefore saying that we value American lives over Afghan is no different than saying we value freinds and family over strangers, as you have done. Sure the overlap isn’t perfect but as a group American lives mean more than Afghan for exactly the same reasons the people you know mean more to you than people you don’t know.
The value isn’t being placed on these people because of their nationality, it’s being placed there because of their familiarity or lack thereof. It just so happens that Afghans are not familiar to most Americans, whereas Americans are. Of course some Americans may also lead unfamiliar lives and be hard to empathise with. Of course some Afghans may be very easy to empathise with. But no one in the world clarifies everything that way. Perhaps it would be more correct to say “I value the lives of people with whome I can empathise more than those with whom I cannot, and while acknowldging that the vast cultural melting pot that is modern America may lead to the presence of people or groups of people with whom I cannot readily empathise, and while similarly acknowledging that many Afghans may be people with whom I could readily empathise I find myself on the whole, in the balance, all additional factors being take into account, valuing American lives over and above Afghan”. However such clarification is not germaine to the discussion at hand and doesn’t make for readable posts.
This in no way invalidates a statement that ‘the lives of Americans are worth a lot more to me than the lives of Afghans’. Nor does it mean that making such a value judgement necessitates a lack of tolerance for the unfamiliar. Complete and total ambivalence is not intolerance, yet necessitates a complete devaluation of the subject.
[sub]No goldfish or dogs were harmed in the making of this post.[/sub]
I would rather be a little tolerant of an American in NYC who is living with this day in and day out than quibble over politically correct language.
There is such a thing as being over sensitive to the plight of the Afghans at the expense of our own victims here in this country.
You’ll have a hard time making that case. The targets hit were all on the east coast, and the majority of the real Anthrax cases are hitting over here as well.
If you live around NYC, then it is MUCH more personal for the average person then it is for the average person who lives somewhere else. We still live with tunnel and bridge restrictions everyday, occasionaly they search cars and trucks going over the bridges and thousands of people are working somewhere else because of the ongoing rescue operation.
We remember watching the Towers fall, not on TV, but in person. We remember the phone lines being so tied up that our families couldn’t call out to let us know they were alive. We remember that people had to walk for hours to get out of Manhattan, all the while having no idea if another attack was coming. As we went about our daily lives we could see where the Towers used to stand and where the rubble was currently still burning with our friends and families underneath it.
So if a New Yorker wants to get a little mouthy and politically incorrect right now, I say fuck it.
We can handle the sensitivity training a little later when things are a little more settled.
Well you see, that’s the thing, Gaspode. I can understand people having an emotional attachment to their boyfriends, girlfriends, families, friends, and acquaintances but I can’t understand the emotional attachment to all of their countrymen.
I just don’t like the “us vs. them” mentality that I have recently begun to see in some people, both American and non-American. I’m not accusing you of it, but just explaining why I chose to participate in this discussion to begin with. Most of my friends feel sorry for the victims of September 11th, but don’t feel as sorry as they do for the civilians killed in the air strikes in Afghanistan. Why? “Because America deserved it.” “Because America was asking for it.” I ask them, how was America asking for fifty Bangladeshis to be killed? What about all the people of other nationalities who were killed? And I try to make them realise that everyone who died suffered and none of them deserved it.
You’re right, Freedom, I can understand this coming from a New Yorker, or the reverse from an Afghan, so I’m sorry if I offended any of you who belong to one of those two groups.
I had friends in Miami when hurricane Andrew hit, and I had an aunt in California when they got rocked by the last big earthquake. These events did not effect me the way it effected them.
I’m also sure that many from the north east had friends in relatives in the midwest when they got flooded out several years ago.
You can’t even begin to pretend that the north east was effected on a similiar emotional level as people in those areas.
There is not a person within an hour of New York City who isn’t still feeling real life effects of this everyday in our day to day lives. And considering the magnitude of what the Towers were, there is not a person here who doesn’t have a personal connection to them either through a friend, family member or personal experience.
Our National Guard has been called up and is expected to be used throughout the clean-up effort.
There are so many funerals for firefighters and the police officers that the ones still alive can’t make them all. So they are still broadcasting the funeral schedules and asking the general public to start attending.
Our overlooks at our parks have been turned into memorial sites.
As we drive around we pass memorials in front of homes where people with lost loved ones still have hope that their family member might be found alive.
This was an attack against the entire country, but it happened on the east coast. Please don’t try and convince me that the west coast was also hit.
You don’t have to understand it. The point debated isn’t what types of emotional attachment are good or bad, but whether it’s “Bigotry” to be more concerned about some lives than others. It isn’t; I think the OP was full of it.
You ascribe more value to some lives than others, by your own admission. You are making exactly the same type of judgement that msmith was ripped by the OP for making; the fact that you’ve selected different criteria is beside the point.
And with all due respect, I do not believe your claim that everyone you don’t know is in the same boat. If your town was rocked by an earthquake that killed fifty thousand people, are you seriously telling us that would affect you just as little as the earthquake in Turkey not long ago that killed that many? Sorry, I don’t buy it. I think the death of 50,000 people in your home town, or in your country, would affect you quite a bit more.
