My point is neither stupid nor dishonest, you just don’t understand it. You apparently think there’s a relevant distinction between “directly responsible due to their actions” and “morally responsible.” You’ll find that if you really think about that distinction, it doesn’t exist. If I tell my brother to kill someone, and he does, am I “morally responsible” or am I “directly responsible due to my actions?” If I lie to my unstable brother and persuade him that bullets don’t kill people–in fact they like being shot–and he kills a bunch of people, am I “morally responsible” or am I “directly responsible due to my actions?”
The examples offered were both well-known and obvious examples of people who persuaded others to do terrible things. If you don’t believe that a person is ever morally responsible for what another person does, then you cannot say that Osama Bin Laden is responsible for the deaths on 9/11 because his only causative effect was to persuade others to take certain actions.
Stripping out the volatile subjects of Osama bin Laden and Hitler, the general question is, “Are leaders bear any responsibility for actions taken by people who follow them?”
In an even more general sense, we might ask, “Does a liar bear any responsibility for actions taken by people who believe them?”
The point was a bit of a reductio ad absurdum, since most people start from the premise that Hitler is morally responsible for the Holocaust.
And it isn’t exclusively about whether speech can cause moral responsibility. It need not be that narrow. Rand Rover denies the existence of the concept of moral responsibility altogether, regardless of the nature of the relationship between the subject in question and the ultimate actor. I suspect Loach did not understand the extremeness of Rand’s position, which is why he thought the statement was unfair.
Right. But aside from the reductio, there is a legitimate debate in there, which would be obscured by an unnecessary “I’ll see your Osama and raise you one Hitler.”
Fine. I just wanted to be clear that I chose the examples precisely because they are morally unambiguous, as opposed to an effort to inject some kind of emotional appeal.
I struggle with these ideas, and I don’t think they’re as unambiguous as you seem to.
Let’s talk Hitler. I find him rather easy to understand in the sense that he was a total wacko spouting insanity. I find it much more difficult to understand why so many others, apparently more rational, bought into his dieased rantings.
If you accept that Hitler was insane, and you probably don’t and I’m not even sure I do, then it’s arguable he had less moral responsibility than those to took his ideas and ran with them.
Yeah, Ok. I meant that there was no ambiguity relevant to the point Rover was making (i.e. whether the ultimate actions were immoral, whether the actor intended those results, whether the actor was a proximate cause those actions, etc.).