My solution to the bees and the gang-raping bandits is to remove them.
That is an easy solution, if you totally ignore real world difficulties.
You want to remove the most fanatical tenth of a percent (for instance) of the Muslim faith. Okay, but aside from carpet bombing a billion people what is your solution for it? My solution is increased prosperity and education. It takes time.
You want to know how to *increase *their numbers? Burn some Korans just to piss them off.
Your pretzel logic both absolves the murderers and dehumanizes them at the same time. You’re essentially claiming Islamic radicals are no more than Palovian dogs. When the bell rings, they behead someone. It is not their fault, poor things. Some meany-pants on the other side of the planet burned a book. Clearly, they had no choice but to commit mass murder.
The murderers do not get a pass because they live in shitholes governed by madmen. They do not get a pass because other religious people were similarly intolerant throughout history. They do not get a pass because they really believe this particular book is really important. They do not get a pass for any damn reason. They freely chose to murder innocent people. Their “provocation” is irrelevant. A book burned on the other side of the planet a couple of weeks ago does not place them in any imaginable mortal peril. They had no lawful or moral reason to commit murder.
Do you think that two or more people can’t share blame without lessening it for one of them? Blame isn’t some magical fluid like caloric. There can be plenty to go around.
No one is saying that the killers aren’t to blame. But knowing that there are killers like that out there adds another layer of blame where the asshole who started all of this fits.
What about the hypothetical in post 23? Is the sign poster blameless?
What if someone tells a tweaker that you deal meth and carry a ton of product and cash in your car’s trunk. When they carjack you and leave you bleeding in the street, are you gonna hold any blame at all for the person who exercised their right of free speech?
Iago and Othello are both causes of Desdemona’s death. They both murdered her. Iago is premeditated and in the first degree because he planned it. Othello in the second degree because he had no malice aforethought. (Do I have the degrees right there?)
Well, IMHO, Terry Jones(Religious Right) is a troll. He purposefully burned a Quran, hoping to start a flamewar IRL, the thing is, that the IRL flamewar has been going on for quite some time. He pisses off some Islamics, and he invokes Rule 14, which states that if you argue with a troll, it automatically wins. The WBC(also Religious Right), are another well known group of trolls. Am I noticing that everyone on the far right is a troll?
Flawed analogy. You posit a particular known criminal with a high value target in close proximity. There’s a strong element of immediate danger to a particular person. This is several orders of magnitude above random obscure guy does something two weeks ago, and then random people on the other side of the planet decide to use that act as an excuse to murder other random people. None of the random people involved have ever met or corresponded in any way. Jones is not some master puppeteer. The criminals had no strings controlling their trigger fingers. They put the magazine in the weapon. They put a live round in the chamber. They lined up the sights. They pulled the trigger. They are solely responsible for their actions.
Tomorrow, some nutcase may nuke us from orbit because I had bacon on my cheeseburger on a picnic today. If that happens, the fault is his and not mine.
If it makes you feel any better, it was a very tasty bacon cheeseburger.
They are responsible. But they wouldn’t have set out that day if Jones hadn’t chosen to piss them off. Now some people are going to be pissed off no matter what you do. But specifically choosing to piss them off for no reason other than to paint all Muslims as monsters for the actions of a few is certainly blame-worthy.
If you knew that the orbiting nutcase was going to do it, I might hold some blame for you not choosing a different bit of picnic fare. I mean the Kosher hotdogs were right there!
You know, it kind of does make it a little better.
Let’s say you’re in a hostage situation with a crazy person. He’s holding a gun at someone, and you’re watching through bulletproof glass. Obviously if you piss him off and he shoots the hostage, it is definitely his fault. However, knowingly aggravating an insane person with a gun is probably one of the worse moves that could possibly be made. Given that you’re sane and the other person is, at the very least, delusional, you probably know more about the consequences than they do. To say you bear no responsibility at all when you had all the information to know what your action could cause seems a bit ridiculous.
They are insane. In this country insanity does sometimes get people a pass (whether of not it should, well…). These people have been brainwashed, and hold beliefs directly contradictory to empirical reality. They have been trained from birth, practically programmed, to behave as such. Maybe they’re not on the level of dogs, but it’s not a stretch to compare them to mentally deficient children.
Jones is personally responsible for the criminal conspiracy entered into by men he’s never met, on the other side of the planet, to murder other people he’s never met, two weeks after he burned a book in front of 60 people? Really?
Really?
Is he still on the hook next year, if some nutcase decides to celebrate the anniversary of the murders with more murders?
How long is he personally responsible for the criminal actions of random strangers? Until someone else burns another book? Forever?
education and prosperity will certainly aid the process but this is the 21st century with instant communication that permeates even in the remotest backwater. This is way beyond walking on eggshells.
If it isn’t the koran or a cartoon or some other mention of Islam then it’s our way of life that is preached against by the Imam’s driving this insanity.
They’re not insane. They’re fanatics, who believe evil things, and incorrect things (there’s one report that says this was spurred on by somebody spreading the rumor that there were a mass of Koran burnings across the US) but they’re not insane. They fully knew and understood that what they were doing would kill other people. The mere fact that you believe reprehensible things doesn’t make you insane. If it did, then Jones wouldn’t be responsible for his actions based on his insanity.
If feasible, that’s a fine solution. However, until you implement it – or address the problem in some other way – it’s potentially irresponsible to go around acting in a way that you know will increase the likelihood of violence against others to no end.
I’m still waiting for someone to stick up for the hypothetical sign-maker from post #23.
See, I anticipated this very concern in the OP and addressed it in the hope that, at the least, we could start the discussion about it at Step 2 – unfortunately, most posters on the other side of this issue have posted as if it didn’t exist. What I said:
Or, put another way: everyone is responsible for their own actions. The murderers are responsible for murdering those people. Jones is responsible for knowingly making murder more likely. If you want to say that burning the Koran was worthwhile enough to make up for the danger it posed to others, then you can make that case (though I think it’s a hard slog). What you really can’t do, however, is say that Jones gets to completely wipe his hands of the consequences of his choices just because what he did was not, by itself, a *sufficient *condition for the murders.
Would it make a different had Jones burned the Qur’an for different reasons? Can one criticize Islam in light of knowing that someone somewhere might do something violent in response?
Potentially – I’m sure someone could come up with a scenario in which the benefits would seem to outweigh the costs.
Sure, it just depends on the specific circumstances. What are the potential benefits to your form of criticism? What are your motivations? How much of an inconvenience would it be to forgo or modify your criticism? Just how likely is it that your action will lead to violence? Would the potential violence most likely be directed at only yourself, or are you also endangering others? Etc.
Jones’ Koran burning falls on the ass-end of just about every such question.
I just took a gander at this thread before heading to bed. I find it quite ironic that those who think that Jones is culpable have made analogized Muslims to wolves, who will mindlessly feed on a carcass, and bees that if they sense provocation will swarm into a stinging frenzy. It’s almost as if one side in this debate doesn’t think that Muslims are thinking humans, who can make choices. It seems they think them to be animalistic, incapable of choice, unable to understand proportionality, and that they are hard-wired to kill and behead innocent people when they think themselves to be insulted by someone they never met nine thousand miles away. Even when the vast majority of Muslims do no such thing.
I ask the side that is of this opinion, why do you think so lowly of Muslims? Do you have any evidence showing them to less able to control their passions and rage then non-Muslims? Any evidence showing them to be intellectually less evolved then the rest of us? Why this tendency to compare their actions to the actions of animals?
I just took a gander at this thread before heading to bed. I find it quite ironic that those who think that Jones is culpable have analogized Muslims to wolves, who will mindlessly feed on a carcass, and bees that if they sense provocation will swarm into a stinging frenzy. It’s almost as if one side in this debate doesn’t think that Muslims are thinking humans, who can make choices. It seems they think them to be animalistic, incapable of choice, unable to understand proportionality, and that they are hard-wired to kill and behead innocent people when they think themselves to be insulted by someone they never met nine thousand miles away. Even when the vast majority of Muslims do no such thing.
I ask the side that is of this opinion, why do you think so lowly of Muslims? Do you have any evidence showing them to less able to control their passions and rage then non-Muslims? Any evidence showing them to be intellectually less evolved then the rest of us? Why this tendency to compare their actions to the actions of animals?
How do you know that the vast majority of Muslims wouldn’t, too? Certainly the ones I know do.
Also, from your last post, I think you don’t really understand analogy. Bookmark for future reference.
The pastor has no moral responsibility for deaths. None whatsoever.
No, no, a million times no. The point of those analogies is to examine the choices of the instigator, not the perpetrator. If you make it more likely that someone else is going to be attacked, ethically it makes no difference if that attack will come from a person, an animal, or even something totally inert. That’s what the thread is about: Why is it that having another person making choices between you and the bad outcome you helped to bring about absolves you of the responsibility for your own choices which ultimately led to said outcome?
It’s been two full pages now; I’d really like to see someone engage this point.