Comments on Father with “nothing to lose” takes lives with AK-47 in murderous rampage

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OK, then, you seem to agree that people have to pay their taxes and accept that sometimes their money will go to things they object to.  I also agree that if people were more engaged in the process, there would be less to be outraged about.

But there will always be people who disagree with how their tax money is spent.  When majority rules, minority has to live with it. 

I think we are stuck with this because the alternatives I conceive of are no less coercive, but indeed worse -- we could have rule of the minority.  I think we have to just accept qualified majority rule as the lesser evil, even when it forces us to support things we don't like.

Otherwise people who were compelled by circumstance to pay for things they knew they needed -- such as national defense -- would by extension be compelled to compensate for objectors' lack of financial support for the beneficial program.  When someone neglects his responsibilities, others are forced to pick up the slack, is what I'm saying.

Still when it comes to highly controversial and deeply divisive, morally-oriented disagreements over abortion and embryonic research, I would like to give people as individuals more flexibility in deciding whether they donate to things they might consider infanticide.

posted by Dyl_Pickle on March 19, 2005 at 4:15 PM | link to this | reply

Dylan

Finally getting around to answering your challenge below. It is funny how you drifted from a just peace to paying taxes!! You seek a moral justification for forcing a person to pay taxes for things he/she does not agree with.

I guess I am on the state's side here. You can't please everyone. I myself strongly object to many of the things the state is doing with my tax money. Every taxpayer strongly objects to something. But how many of us go beyond complaining to participate in the process, how many of us even take the time to just vote, a minimal effort? Not even half of us. It takes a controversial election, like last year's, to get half of the eligible voters to vote. This is abominable. If more people voted and otherwise participated in the decisions of government, they would have far less to complain about. We would be holding government officials more accountable. And I suspect the government would be doing more with less taxes.

posted by GoldenMean on March 10, 2005 at 9:40 PM | link to this | reply

Forgot something

Dennison, the example you challenge me to produce is shining forth in this very post. The "good" hero, Mark Wilson, risked his life to stop the "evil" man committing murder with an assault rifle. I would submit to that this heroic action probably arose from a remarkable mental STABILITY, and it certainly did not arise from a self-centered desire. Wilson disregarded his personal safety, and probably knew he could be hurt or killed, but he also knew he had a good chance to stop the criminal, because he had confidence in his abilities with a gun. I see no sign of mental instability or selfish desire in Wilson's actions. Quite the opposite.

posted by GoldenMean on March 9, 2005 at 6:01 AM | link to this | reply

Dennison

Did you participate in our debate over “evil” last year? You would have been a worthy contributor. Come to think of it, so would Dylan. I think you both missed out. But we can have a debate again. As to “good” and “evil”, I am not trying to defend the labels themselves, though they are so very convenient when people can agree on them. I am definitely interested in the motives behind the “good” or “evil” behavior, but these are hidden and difficult to address. You try to do so by blaming “evil” on “mental instability” or “a self-centered desire”. I blame “evil” on the conscious moral choice to take parasitic or predatory action against others. This is equivalent to your “self-centered desire.” It would seem to me that criminals and tyrants are the most extremely SELF-CENTERED people possible, willing to use or destroy other people as mere objects, trying to expand their personal power to dictate other people’s lives. Some “mental instability” may be there too, but I do not consider it to override the “conscious moral choice” element. So I try to judge the behavior itself. I don’t spend a lot of time worrying WHY people are doing it. In your example of the local soup kitchen volunteer, the action is beneficial, and the volunteer should receive “credit” for it, even if they are doing it to make themselves feel good.

It is curious that people objecting to the labels “good” and “evil” always try to remove the conscious moral choice involved, when I think that is the most important element (among other elements). I myself KNOW when I am trying to help or hurt others. Don’t you? It is a conscious moral choice for me personally. I know my intent, even though it rarely turns out exactly the way I planned. But if my intent and my will is strong enough, I will endure a lot of conflict, misery, pain and grief to help another person, or stop another person from doing harm.

posted by GoldenMean on March 9, 2005 at 5:43 AM | link to this | reply

There Is No Such Thing As Good and Evil

People point to these concepts as an excuse or reason behind their behavior, but they're really nothing more than concepts. I challenge you to produce ONE example of good and/or evil that we cannot sufficiently trace back to mental instability or a self-centered desire. Even a person who volunteers their time at the local soup kitchen does so to make them self feel good. Otherwise, they wouldn't do it. 

                                                                                              --D

posted by Dennison..Mann on March 8, 2005 at 10:21 AM | link to this | reply

Yes, even though you were appalled at my ruling out war with North Korea and Iran, I think you are right that peace without justice is not a good moral goal. 

I think I wrote in an essay months ago: "Peace without justice is the child of intimidation and coercion, certainly not a peace worthy of the moralistic defense some leftists give it,"  or something like that. 

A guy at William and Mary, writing in the school paper before the Iraq war, bemoaned the "peace at any cost" attitude of the anti-war people. 

I remember thinking that was a very apt and succinct description.  That is indeed what some are arguing for on the anti-war side. 

They think the absence of war suffices for peace, and in my view the desirable peace is that which comes from people living voluntarily under the rules and rulers that govern them. 

Of course, people have to be coerced when they are dangerous; that's a self-evident requirement for everyone (not just predators) to have freedom. 

This creates a problem with taxes, of course, because the person who claims a moral objection to compulsory taxation is breaking the law if he refuses to pay, so will have his property confiscated or be sent to jail. 

But he's not an imminent danger to anyone, so can we justify forcing him? 

No, but we can tell him that he may refuse to pay his taxes -- as long as he does not benefit from anything the taxes pay for.  So he may not use the roads, breathe the air which the state helps keep clean, or be safe because of the actions of the police and military. 

I'm being facetious, of course.  This is an area where there is no getting around using force -- states are necessary (even Ayn Rand agreed with that); states have to be funded; no one is entitled to benefit from that which he refuses to contribute to; but since everyone -- even the refusers -- automatically, inevitably, benefits from certain state functions, don't we have to force the refusers to pay up? 

How would you resolve this dilemma?  I'd be interested to hear your take on it.  It's a tough one, I think. 

posted by Dyl_Pickle on March 8, 2005 at 10:12 AM | link to this | reply

interesting

I will look into the Communitarians when I get a spare moment. I do like their other positions, though their anti-gun position smacks of extreme, unrealistic, utopian Pacifism. I will look for signs of this in their other positions. As I have written extensively in other posts, peace by itself, without justice, is not a worthy moral goal. We sometimes have a moral duty to fight conflicts, for ourselves and others, even to the death if the stakes are high enough. Our almost constant failure to fight these conflicts greatly magnifies the successes of "evil" (predatory & abusive) people in the world.

posted by GoldenMean on March 1, 2005 at 10:34 PM | link to this | reply

Golden,

I have become more hesitant to label myself anything such as liberal or conservative or communitarian; but reading the communitarian platform, I could not help but feel that it described my own understanding of the world better than either the Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, anything.  The communitarians are not political, but moral and social.  There is a diversity of political opinion among them.  Yes, I signed the platform even though I disagreed with their position on the Second Amendment.  That was because of my strong agreement with them on practically everything else.  They believe in both free markets and social commitment to the well-being of the disadvantaged; that the latter should not automatically be assumed an absolute duty of the state but that other organizations should be relied upon first; that schools should educate children in common values and not try to be value-neutral; that the two-parent home is best; that people should conceive of their self-interest as being tied to the interests of others, rather than just pursuing their own short-term self interest with no regard for its effect on the community.  Communitarianism is at once a corrective to the hyper-statism of the left and the hyper-individualism of the right.  Please, read more about it on their website and Amitai Etzioni's website and books.  You may find you agree with some of it.

posted by Dyl_Pickle on March 1, 2005 at 6:53 AM | link to this | reply

The assault rifle dilemma

Dylan, I am surprised you endorsed the "Communitarian Platform", and I hope you mean "endorsed" in the past tense and not the present. I never heard of the Communitarians or their Platform. Are they still around?

As to "assault rifles," let me clear up a possible confusion. The AK-47 in this story is most likely NOT a fully automatic rifle. Such rifles are available only to people who are given a permit by the BATF, after a thorough background check, with a $400 fee. I doubt if the villian Mr. Arroyo could have passed such a check, or could afford such a fee. His AK-47 was most likely a semi-automatic version (one trigger pull, one bullet), with a 20 or 30-round clip. I myself have 2 semi-auto AR-15's, one with a short barrel, one with a long barrel. This is the civilian version of the Army's M-16.

It is true that guns make it EASIER to commit crimes and kill people, but someone in a rage like Mr. Arroyo could have easily killed his ex-wife and son with a kitchen knife or a baseball bat, if he didn't have a gun. In my opinion, the greatest virtue of guns is that they give victims of crime the chance to overcome any advantage a criminal who is attacking them might have. Guns are the "great equalizer" in any life-threatening conflict. As long as criminals have access to guns (and they probably always will), we would be doing a great moral wrong to deprive law-abiding citizens of gun rights.

With that said, I personally would be willing to give up my AR-15's in an effort to keep news stories like this from happening, IF I COULD BE CERTAIN that assault rifles would be removed from all civilian hands, both law-abiding and criminal. Of course, we can never be certain of that. So I won't be giving up my AR-15's.

Instead, I think we must realize that people who become enraged and determined to kill others, will find a way to do it, with or without guns. And if they do it in my presence, I would much rather have a gun available to stop them with. If there are a lot of them, as in a riot situation or after a large natural disaster, then the business end of an AR-15 will either intimidate them or stop them.

posted by GoldenMean on February 28, 2005 at 9:44 PM | link to this | reply

Golden Mean,

I might as well make the Devil's advocate argument: if the shooter hadn't had the gun in the first place (in the U.K. or France, where gun deaths are rare, he probably wouldn't have had any gun, let alone an AK-47) Mr. Wilson never would have had to give his life in others' defense.  I do not necessarily buy this argument because there are too many uncertainties: could the shooter have bought the gun on the black market?--could he construct a bomb even if he were deprived a gun?--do restrictive gun laws leave home owners, particularly physically weak ones, without adequate defense when home invasions do happen?--etc.  

I endorsed the Communitarian Platform, which called for complete civilian disarmament, because they said that one could disagree with portions of the platform and still endorse it.  They said in their argument for gun control that potential killers are much more likely to kill when armed than when disarmed (apparently since 1991, when the platform was first established, they had used "then" instead of "than," and I promptly informed them of the error -- how could it have stood for so long? -- which they later corrected, thanking me).  But a civilian is presumably much more likely to be able to defend himself or herself -- against home invasion, rape, murder -- when armed than when disarmed.  And I note that by far more people have been killed by governments than all terrorist groups and criminals combined, so it is not necessarily accurate to assume that states are intrinsically more trustworthy with firearms than civilians. 

I look forward to discussing this and other things with you, and I'm glad you commented to my blog so we can get a more active discussion going again.  Talk to you more soon! 

posted by Dyl_Pickle on February 27, 2005 at 3:22 PM | link to this | reply

It's too bad, he was being gunned down for his heroic efforts, he had no luck that day! See you around, VOYAGER9940

posted by Voyager9940 on February 26, 2005 at 2:57 PM | link to this | reply