Then make it prescription drugs, or narcolepsy, or some non-criminal but negligent (if ignored) condition that might make operation of a vehicle unsafe – I think you understand my point.
Possibly – but even if this is so, each poster’s “sin” was very small. Though even small, hopefully such posters have learned something from it.
Possibly. Again, Bush (and his team’s) actions were so highly immoral, in my opinion, because their negligence caused such incredible suffering to so many, and this was a forseeable possibility.
Negligence that causes suffering is immoral, in my view, and negligence that causes widespread death and destruction is extremely immoral.
Ok, I think is where we simply disagree. I think immorality must go hand-in-hand with advertance of the will. You cannot mistakenly be immoral: you must intend your immorality.
This truly seems pretty nuts to me, considering the many other examples (in my mind) of immorality despite honest belief (like the “honest” white supremacist lyncher). But I accept that we just disagree.
This is actually an incredibly interesting sub-debate, and I’d love to see it in Great Debates. I can easily see good arguments for both sides.
In fact (fucking miracle!) I actually lean slightly toward Bricker here. For a very long time, my working definition of “evil” has been the deliberate causation of unnecessary pain. (It invites the question of “what is necessary,” but it has the benefit of excluding such things as surgery from being evil. Sometimes, some pain is just not avoidable. Deliberately denying anaesthesia in surgery…that’s evil!)
So…kinda…I think that evil (or immorality) does require an intent.
However, this also leads into the murky waters of deliberate ignorance. When someone has been told a thousand times that an act is unnecessarily harmful, and they continue to deny knowledge of this, it becomes difficult to honor the innocence of their intent.
We see something like this every year, with people leaving kids in hot cars in parking lots. The justice system is usually lenient to the first incident of the year, but later instances are punished severely. You can’t say, “It was an honest mistake” when it’s the tenth or hundredth case.
Leaving a child in a car seat in summer is (almost always) a mistake. It has incredibly profound consequences, of course, but even if it’s the hundredth case of the year, it’s not the hundredth instance for that parent.
I urge you to read this article on the subject. I defy you to remain unaffected by the narrative.
It’s known that Cheney-Rove Administration officials perjured themselves with anti-Iraq claims. When Valerie Plame’s husband called attention to the uranium-document hoax, Cheney’s aide illegally outed Plame.
Do you live in such a right-wing news bubble that you’ve remained unaware of these facts for 12 years? Or is your defense that Cheney et al were criminals but GWB himself was just too stupid to be an indictable co-conspirator?
Or is it just semantics? A tree falls in the forest but nobody hears it – did it really fall? Cheney et al committed egregious war crimes and frauds but the Democrats were too weak-willed to prosecute? An unindicted criminal is a non-criminal?
The multi-trillion dollar war against Gog and Magog was perhaps the biggest blunder in American history (bigger even than the Massacre at Benghazi ) and you don’t even understand a little bit about it?? :smack: Ignorant cretins like you shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
Do you allow that negligence involves committing an immoral act?
Failure to apply due diligence can be immoral in my view. Oddly, I’d be more likely than most to people slack who are not on task in any given moment. But something like that doesn’t apply to choosing the wrong model of car or making an investment decision as a businessman. (Admittedly, those aren’t usually moral actions: I present them to contrast decisions that require investigation and ones that are made on the spur of the moment.)
I didn’t follow this story. But personally, I try to withhold judgment during the first couple of days after a news story first splashes (which admittedly wouldn’t have helped in this instance).
But yes, there is something immoral about shooting your mouth off without qualification. Though there is also a large chasm between, say, shooting your mouth off in a bar and acting in a decision-making capacity.
I’m keeping this general: with this OP any hijack is probably an improvement. There are variants of evil. Malice, but also indifference. Here is another.
Personally, I’d be inclined to take things even farther. I am sympathetic to the concept of negligent stupidity. Partly this is a way of curbing bad faith, or lying to oneself.
There’s a dictum, “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”
But I think ignorance of the consequences of one’s actions can sometimes be an excuse.
Example: I go out and throw a big heavy box of trash into the dumpster. I’ve done this some hundreds of times. But this one time…there was a dorky neighbor kid playing in the dumpster. I could have looked first before heaving the box in, and if I had, the kid wouldn’t have been injured. Was I negligent? It isn’t easy to say; there are various levels of expectations. Kids aren’t supposed to play in dumpsters…but sometimes they do. I’ve thrown heavy trash in there a hundred times…but this one time was different.
I don’t want the principle to be absolute…either way. There are some requirements for us to know what we’re doing, but there are also honest accidents, where horrible things happen without any moral failure.
In general, however, I agree with Bricker (little though it pleases me) that immorality is usually intentional. The guy who embezzles money from his company, the petty shoplifter, the murderer, the Nigerian Prince scammer, all know they’re doing wrong.
The guy who throws a cigarette out the window of his car…that starts a huge fire that kills eight people…didn’t intend to kill anyone, but he did intend littering. But the guy whose car’s muffler falls off, flying into traffic and killing someone, never intended anything at all bad to happen. (Let’s presume he kept up with the standard maintenance on his car. Mufflers do sometimes just fall off.) Where is his immorality?
Help me out here: give an example of somebody committing an immoral act, who is honestly unaware of committing an immoral act?
But I can’t see how that particular response was remotely insulting. You suggested that a parent leaving a child in a hot car was an example of immorality-by-negligence, and I replied that even that example was unclear; I offered an in-depth article on the phenomenon which supported the idea that such instances were obviously tragic but not cases where the parent acted immorally.
I can’t see the slightest cause you’d have for insult in that exchange.
I don’t think that’s exactly how I’d phrase it. But my point is at least in the same ballpark: you can’t prove that Scooter Libby was immoral and then say, without further explanation, “…and therefore George Bush was immoral.”
No, I will accept for purposes of this discussion that a person who commits a criminal act, even if uncharged, is a criminal.
So far, though, I have not accepted, nor have you credibly alleged, a criminal act from President Bush. (Note, by the way, that this thread was begun by some drooling moron demanding to know why Hilary Clinton wasn’t in jail, and there’s a thread in GD right now started by me inveighing against such a proposition. It’s funny to me that your tactic of asserting vague criminal conduct accusation against someone is so acceptable in the very thread that uses the same tactic against Clinton).
You have the historical awareness of a tree frog, and you’re told what to think by Mother Jones. But I am not surprised to hear your liberal instinctive desire to strip away my right to vote.
“Liberal instinctive desire to strip away my right to vote”? Traditionally it’s been liberals behind GOTV drives and conservatives working to trim the rolls (septimus’ invective notwithstanding).
And interestingly, you criticize my characterization as inaccurate speculation and you don’t criticize his expressly stated wish to remove my right to vote.
In Bricker’s world, if *one *liberal says or does something, it means that *all *liberals subscribe to those beliefs, despite all evidence to the contrary. And then he’s mortally offended, and will forever hold it up as proof that he’s right. It’s pretty much his shtick.
Evidence to the contrary would be some liberal criticizing septimus for his comment. All I see here are liberals criticizing ME for pointing out liberal septimus’ comment. I’m entitled to the inference: there is NO evidence to the contrary lying about.
Okay, I disagree with septimus. I don’t think Bricker is an “ignorant cretin”, and I oppose any hyperbolic (or other) attempts at disallowing his vote.
Because I was addressing the specific point in your post I disagreed with, although you may have noticed my characterization of his claim as “invective” which would be an odd way of indicating agreement with him.
But I’ll duly note the insinuation used to deflect attention from my own point.
Or is your defense that Cheney et al were criminals but GWB himself was just too stupid to be an indictable co-conspirator?
) and you don’t even understand a little bit about it?? :smack: Ignorant cretins like you shouldn’t be allowed to vote.