“Obeying an unlawful order makes you as guilty as the person who gave it” is not a statement of opinion. It is a statement of fact. You don’t get to have your own facts.
We’re not concerned with your choice of undergarments.
That said, this is a more useful direction for you to take the thread. The big bad organleggers who are out to get you weren’t interested in your brain to begin with, so documenting its dysfunction won’t protect you – but raising a few other medical issues might convince them to seek other targets.
Exactly. Further, allowing soldiers to think for themselves makes better soldiers. One of the reasons the early Israeli military so thoroughly outmatched their Arab enemies is because the Arab commanders demanded strict obedience, while the Israeli commanders encouraged junior personnel to think for themselves, question orders when necessary, and show independent initiative.
The army Smapti describes is a very weak army and wouldn’t stand a chance against a modern force.
It’s cool though - as long as they have orders to jack his pancreas, no harm no foul, right ?
It’s hard to pick any one in particular from this thread, but I’ll just pull one at random:
You endorse the assertion that the state is both infallible and the ultimate source of morality. Ergo, you endorse the elevation of the state to Godhood. QED.
Even more amusingly, one of his paranoid fever dreams was that the doctors would carve him up because “the senator needs a new kidney” – this, both preceded and followed by repeated expressions of a worldview in which he ought to gladly give up whatever “the senator” or any other authority figure might see fit to demand from him.
Well, to be fair, Olivaw’s premise (and presumably Smapti’s as well) is that the very concept of “justice” derives entirely from law. Infallibility is not part of it; laws might be inefficient or harmful to society or poorly written, but they are nevertheless laws, and until they are changed they constitute the definition of justice. Morality likewise doesn’t enter into the idea of justice; laws might be based in human moralities, but morality is not quantifiable. Law is.
If we define “just” as “lawful,” then there can be no such critter as an unjust law. I don’t think that *necessarily *elevates the law, or the State that enacts and enforces it, to infallibility or godhood.
A cop who would just order a random civilian to murder a hobo is so corrupt that he’s just as liable to murder me for refusing, so I do it.
Now prove an objective standard of guilt.
It is indeed, as noted in that thread, perfectly legal at this time for a for-profit corporation to vivisect you for parts and sell them to a paying customer as long as you’ve consented to “donate” them.
I disagree with that law, which is why I’m not an organ donor and I oppose the efforts of some to make it default or compulsory.
There is no such thing as the ultimate source of morality. Morals are invented by humans. We made them up, every single one. People come together to form the state in order to establish a uniform code of acceptable behavior for the benefit of all based on their moral consensus, which becomes codified as law.
You wouldn’t run away? You wouldn’t say “yes”, then pretend to kill the hobo? You wouldn’t try and find another cop? What a coward, and an idiot, you are.
“Did you play a part in this action or event yes/no” seems like a good, boolean even, starting point. Not to mention purely objective and fact-based.
Pretty sure the sale of organs is very strictly verboten, not to mention the transplant committee of exactly zero hospitals will work with a kidney/lung/liver they don’t know the exact provenance of (if only for strictly medical reasons, on top of the few picayune ethical quandaries posed by accepting “a kidney, no questions answered”)
In fact, a cursory research reveals that Iran is the only country in the world that allows the sale or purchase of human organs. Which kind of surprised me actually - I figured the casual neofeudal decadence and excess of Saudi Arabia would have been all over that shit.
Your moral system has a terrible, terrible track record in human history for serving human beings and the common good.
And then the cop “discovers” you attempting to murder a hobo, puts two bullets in your skull, and gets to murder a random civilian and be hailed a hero for it, all because you’re too stupid, too cowardly and too fascist to not give him an excuse.
Even Iran requires the donor to be dead before organs are harvested, which conflicts with the usual (as opposed to the Humpti Smapti) definition of “vivisect”.
We haven’t addressed my “moral system” in this thread. I am discussing what the nature of the world is. The fact that I acknowledge that this is how it is doesn’t mean I like it. I don’t like that I’m going to die one day, but that doesn’t mean I can simply choose to believe I’m immortal.
So I’m dead either way, then. Why are you giving me crap about my choice in a no-win situation?
If my life is being threatened? Sorry, my life is worth more to me than that of some hobo.
Too bad that we don’t have that standard in this country, where, as noted in previous threads, it’s perfectly legal to cut up a living person for organs and kill them in the process if a corporate bean-counter decides that saving their life wouldn’t be profitable.