And another:
"all the same our shadier policies are not a cause for self-righteousness."
I think I saw a similar joke elsewhere, but I can't wait until the rule that "overstating the scale of a moral horror is worse than comitting the moral horror" moves into other contexts. For instance,
Prosecutor: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you just saw the defendant, after repeated denials, admit that he he ran down five nuns and didn't stop to check on them or call for medical support.
Defense: Your honor, I object. The defendant only denied committing the crime once, there was nothing repeated about his denials. Furthermore, he only admitted to running over four nuns. He claims the fifth one was run over by a different car while trying to avoid him.
Prosecutor: I apologize profusely and move to have the case dismissed on all counts.
Let us never speak of a nuclear holocaust. The Holocaust was a targeted campaign; a nuclear weapon does not discern between Jew, Muslim, or Christian.
Stupid, no?
Oh, and WD I picked up the Ethicist slack for you last week.
Tangential, but the entire argument seems reminiscent of this.
I'm not really down with 3, except as it applies specifically to people who say something like "But Gulags were labor camps! At Gitmo we're not working the prisoners!" (Which, believe it or not, I've seen said.) The thing is that nuclear war would be destruction on a scale at least comparable to the Holocaust, whereas the scale of our prison camps is nothing like the Gulag.
That said, this pales to insignificance beside the other points made. (I like dsquared and Jimmy Doyle's points as well, and Katherine is thought-provoking. Remember when Abner Louima said that the cops who raped him with a plunger were saying "This isn't Dinkins time, it's Giuliani time," and later he admitted that that was something friends of his had heard cops say? Bad, bad, lying Louima, right? But without the shitstorm that that lie helped generate, would the cops have been brought to justice at all?)
Someone who knows what they're doing, web-wise, should set up a quiz in which participants try to separate quotations from The New Republic from those selected from The Weekly Standard. Strangely, of all the fairly bad things that have happened over the last five-odd years, the decline of TNR is one of the more saddening to me.
Another thought--I also see it said that the US camps aren't used to detain political prisoners. What justification does anyone have for believing that? AFAICT we sometimes put people in the camps because our local allies/informants say they're terrorist suspects. Should we really be confident that no one ever exploits this to get rid of people who are politically inconvenient?
TD -
I've now responded in your comments and (redundantly) on my barely active blog.
Matt,
The point in #3 that you said you were down with was, in fact, the point I was trying to make. I have not read TNR's article; in fact, this was the only argument I had heard so far.
I understand that other points about how awful the Gulag was (Gulag, being a Russian acronym for the whole political prisoner work camp system, was never plural in Soviet Russia. In Soviet Russia, the Gulag pluralizes you.). Are Guantanamo and Abu Gharib, from the accounts we have read and seen and heard about, any less morally reprehensible? Is our paranoia about being attacked any more justifiable than the paranoia of Stalin? If Guantanamo were a work camp building a land bridge from Cuba to Florida, would the Right Wing claim that it wasn't torture to do that, but rather a Very Good Thing (TM)?
and yes, re #11, I understand the scale of things is rather different, but I would contend that systematically torturing one person to death is just as morally wrong as systematically working one hundred thousand to death.
"The reduction of an evil from two instances to one is as important as its reduction from one to zero. One mark of an ideologue is to deny this." Another mark of an ideologue is to be me.
Perhaps I'm just being myopic, but I assumed that AI's use of the term gulag meant a system of prisons outside juridical control into which individuals deemed "enemies" could be disappeared.
I would say our fear of being attacked is more justifiable than the paranoia of Stalin. We are in danger of being attacked (maybe Stalin was too), and ought to try to take some steps to prevent it from happening (well, I'm sure the analogy breaks down somewhere).
What we're doing about it in the prison camps is of course nothing like justifiable--we're all in agreement here. And I'm a little queasy about saying that the fact that the prison camps are ostensibly meant to serve a good end is a relevant moral distinction.
I think the important distinction here may be about scale in this way: When the prison camps reach a certain size they take over the society. The USSR was a Gulagized society, which the US isn't yet; nor are Iraq and Afghanistan (we don't have enough control over those countries to Gulagize them if we tried). But one of the big reasons to make a huge fuss about due process is to prevent the Gulagized society from coming into existence. It's easier to send a whole lot of people to prison camps without trial once you've set up a system that lets you do it to a few (dsquared and Doyle's point, I think).
Wow, 13 is really consequentialist for Nozick. We don't think the moral difference between a double murderer and a single murderer is as significant as the moral difference between a single murderer and a non-murderer, do we?
No, my gut feeling would be the murdered has crossed some boundary with the first killing and then only somewhat aggravates it with the second, though that might suggest a mis-calibration of my internal moral intuition scale as much as anything else. But wouldn't we affirm that any reduction in the number of people murdered by an equivalent number is equally good?
Also, the quote is from Anarchy State and Utopia page 266, and of course refers to reductions of instances of poverty.
"murdered murderer" "aggravates it the offense"
Actually, I would probably affirm that reducing the number of people murdered in a given jurisdiction from one to zero was more significant than reducing it from two to one, because I think risk sensitivity is rational. But that rests on factitious circumstances--actually it doesn't, since I would also affirm that it's important to be secure that you won't wind up poor, and worse to be the only poor person than one of two (I'd have to look up ASU to see if he's addresed that point).
In general I would say that, other things being equal, reducing some harm by an equivalent number is equally good, so long as it's not a case where you're actually doing the harm or some such. But I'm a bit of a consequentialist, anyway. Shouldn't Nozick be all about the means and not the end state?
Well, the point I was making was that when it is systematic, death of a few is no better than death of 100,000. At least morally. I'm having a hard time justifying it to myself, but I will say this. A world in which nobody is systematically killed is a much better place than a world in which any person is systematically killed. If not, where do we draw the line between "only slightly heinous" and "horrible atrocity towards mankind?" Is it something like pr0n? Do we just know it when we see/hear about it?
I think there's a vague boundary between "atrocity" and "absolutely horrible atrocity" and "world-historical crime against humanity." But, as has been pointed out, the people who are whining about how they got compared to someone committing a world-historical crime when they're only committing an atrocity are not on firm moral ground.
And Apo's 14 gets at a very good point--it feels like a gulag if you get disappeared into it, I'm sure, no matter how many people are with you.
Well, Nozick is clearly committed to:
1) the permissible means towards any goal are severely limited by the negative rights which all people have
2) the justice of particular distributions of wealth is based entirely upon the process that produced that distribution and not at all on who has what.
The quote is in a section where he's talking about how people who believe that poverty reduction is a desirable end should just give their own time/money to reduce individual instances of poverty rather than using taxation to try to reduce all instances of poverty. So maybe it's best read as, "Provisionally accepting that the world would be in some sense better with less of circumstance x existing,..."
All this playing around with different names has led to more unsigned comments than you can shake a Tripp at.
Re: point one.
I'm not sure Jacob is completely right on this one, although, man, does it warm my heart to see an honest-to-goodness libertarian declare that it is inappropriate to describe as "Stalinist" welfare programs of which one disapproves. I think there is an equal danger in insisting on the absolute singularity of evils like the holocaust or the gulag at its height. The result is to close ourselves off to similarities that are extremely morally important e.g., the point about "it feels like a gulag if you get disappeared into it, I'm sure, no matter how many people are with you" and also to create this unhelpfully vast category of political crimes that are alarming, but not so alarming because they are not comparable to X.
The quote is in a section where he's talking about how people who believe that poverty reduction is a desirable end should just give their own time/money to reduce individual instances of poverty rather than using taxation to try to reduce all instances of poverty.
And this guy calls others ideologues?
22/25: right, I'd suppressed that part of the argument. (As in, it's so profoundly irritating my brain won't let me remember it.)