quantifying moral responsibility

[Sava]

this is how the reason for the thread started:

do you think democracy makes people morally responsible for the actions of the people they elect?

this was kind of a shower thought

in some way, that pretty much means all of us have some degree of responsibility because both parties are ****stains

but say the president kills one person... the moral responsibility would be spread to all of us by ratio of people who voted the guy into office

so if obama killed a guy in 2009, walked in on michelle sucking his dick or something and just lost it and killed the guy... say that happened

then the responsibility for any obama voter in 2008 would be 1/66,882,230 of a single murder (depending on how deaths are treated, killing in war okay? or less bad? i dunno the answer to that... for the sake of argument say killing someone is treated the same no matter what... i probably disagree with that, as i suspect most would, but it's not really the issue... if you want to guess the value of such things, feel free to speculate)

but if the actions of the administration leads to a million deaths, the moral responsibility to the single voter would be 1/66.88223 of an actual murder


how many times more bad is murder than like stealing?
at least 100 times?

so that's kind of the moral responsibility of another commandment

by the way, can morality be quantified? if so, then numbers are god, right?

well god is everything, so that includes numbers i guess

okay but still, the process for judgment must at least be that good... like if you are being officially judged, seems like it ought to be fair to get an exact figure instead of just "UR BAD NOW BURN"

because even for ****ty people, that's unfair

like hitler shouldn't be treated like oj simpson

hitler deserves a lot of punishment

oj... yeah a lot, but not as much as that

so even for the sake of organizing the denizens of hell, you'd need that kind of accounting

[Sava]

also, if you want to pick out individual statements you disagree with, whatever

but try to focus on the issue at hand

i know some of you have issues with seeing the forest for the trees

[loinburger]

If a guy is running for President and he says "I want to kill all of the Jews" and you vote for him then you share part of the blame when he's elected and kills all of the Jews (and even if he's not elected then voting for him would be a Bad Thing). If instead the candidate says "I'm going to lower taxes or raise taxes or do somethingoranother with taxes" or whatever and then you vote for him and he's elected and he says "Just kidding I'm going to kill all of the Jews" then you wouldn't share any of the blame.

[Lorizael]

Additionally, what kind of moral responsibility does an Apple customer have for the deaths of, say, Foxconn employees?

[Sava]

Additionally, what kind of moral responsibility does an Apple customer have for the deaths of, say, Foxconn employees?

Good question

[Sava]

If a guy is running for President and he says "I want to kill all of the Jews" and you vote for him then you share part of the blame when he's elected and kills all of the Jews (and even if he's not elected then voting for him would be a Bad Thing). If instead the candidate says "I'm going to lower taxes or raise taxes or do somethingoranother with taxes" or whatever and then you vote for him and he's elected and he says "Just kidding I'm going to kill all of the Jews" then you wouldn't share any of the blame.

What about voting for a candidate who plans on continuing, say, the use of armed UAVs against targets overseas?

[Lorizael]

I think there's a reasonable expectation that a president is going to kill some mother****ers when he gets into office. It's kind of a rite of passage. Your vote merely determines which president will do the murdering, not whether or not murdering occurs. Thus, I don't think a voter has any moral culpability until a president has killed more people than an average president would be expected to kill in the same time frame. Of course, such a criteria leads to a sort of inflation, where future presidents have to kill a lot more people to exceed the previous average. But that has to be balanced against population growth as a whole; there are a lot more people to kill now than they're used to be.

[loinburger]

What about voting for a candidate who plans on continuing, say, the use of armed UAVs against targets overseas?

That's getting tricky, and the motives of the voter come into play - there's a big gap between a naive "UAVs only ever kill Bad People so I support their use" and a sociopathic "UAVs only ever kill Brown People so I support their use"

[Sava]

Murder inflation. That's great. There's a ton more people alive today than at any point. Does life expectancy factor into this? Is a 2014 murder not as bad as an 1814 murder?

[Lorizael]

If life expectancy does factor into it, then murder now is worth more, because you're eliminating more years of life per person murdered. Of course, that makes geronticide virtually guilt-free.

[Sava]

True. Killing older people is worth less? Though, at 6 billion people compared to say 200 million (whenever that was), that's 30 times. Seems like that would be a bigger factor?

[Lorizael]

Yeah. 200 years ago we had about a billion people, but life expectancy wasn't 10, so murder then would be worth more.

[Sava]

I kinda want to incorporate this into a grand theft auto mod somehow

[loinburger]

It would be a more realistic mod if killing a hundred hookers = killing one yuppie = insulting a cop

[Lorizael]

I'm curious if there was ever a point in history at which life expectancy was increasing faster than population. If so, then we can find the critical point at which human life was at its most valuable. Presumably, that would be the correct golden age for wacky luddites and nature freaks and reactionaries to pine after.