I agree that you should “rat them out” and prevent the harm they would cause. But having strict moral rules doesn’t prohibit this, unless you have a rule against ever “ratting someone out” (which would be a poor choice of rule).
You seem to be making the point here that sometimes you can be tempted to do something for selfish reasons, but nevertheless it’s the right thing to do. I agree. But I’m not saying “Don’t ever do anything you’re tempted to do.” If you had a moral rule of “prevent harm when you can”, it would still lead to you exposing the person’s plan. In this case, the outcome is good regardless of whether you use a moral rule or judge the situation solely on its individual circumstances.
In contrast, I’m arguing that there are some situations where having a pre-existing rule results in a better outcome than judging the individual situation on its own.
Perhaps you see how calling something ‘morally neutral’ in one breath and ‘a crime’ in the next is a bit of a contradiction. For the purposes of this discussion I’m assuming all crimes are immoral.
The only crime he committed was one of intent, something you have claimed not to be concerned with, as below-
Declaring the hypothetical Shooter guilty of a crime when he harmed no one is tantamount to an admission that intentions matter as well as consequences; a negation of the above statement as well as your original premise-
Sure. This just means, still, that you feel that forming strict rules have better consequences than attempting case-to-case reasoning, which is consistent with consequentalism.
Fucking semantics. No, I’m using “crime” in the common meaning of “an instance of breaking the law”.
>You seem to be making the point here that sometimes you can be tempted to do something for selfish reasons, but nevertheless it’s the right thing to do. I agree. But I’m not saying “Don’t ever do anything you’re tempted to do.”
Yes, that’s right. I would say, then, that you think rules are safer than judgements made under tempting conditions, at least broadly speaking. I’m inclined to put the greater effort into understanding and counteracting tempting conditions, rather than into creating complete and versatile enough rules. But it’s a matter of degree in any case.
semantic |səˈmantik|
adjective
relating to meaning in language or logic.
We were speaking in terms of moral acts v. immoral acts, and suddenly you throw in ‘crime’. I can only view that as an evasion, and will resort to semantics-and pedantry-to bring this to light.
And it would seem that I have highlighted a contradiction in your method of judgement which would indicate that you do not actually base your moral judgements, entirely, on this claim-
You asked if someone watching Shooter should alert the authorities. I said yes, partly because he committed a crime. That was the extent of my usage of the word “crime”.
The trouble is that we were speaking in terms of a strict hypothetical situation, one in which the word ‘crime’ hadn’t been defined. You throw it out there, because you were cornered and didn’t want to explicitly state that an act could be immoral strictly on basis of intent, lest your pet theory of morality unravel. Fine. I attempted to define it, in context, and you basically say, “Oh no you don’t!” attempting to hide the contradictions of your view behind the vagaries of the word ‘crime’, a word that denotes something that is illegal, but not necessarily immoral.
This is an evasion-the intellectual equivalent of nana-nana-boo-boo. Say whatever you want, your stated system of judgment is flawed; I know it, you know it, anyone who’s read this thread knows it. It may be a niggling flaw, a technicality, but it’s still a flaw, and I’d suggest you amend your premise to rectify it (something I invited you do in my first post) or drop the premise all together.
Frankly I’m done here-this has been like playing tic-tac-toe with someone who insists on using wing-dings and curlicues.