Look; if your obscuring and derailing this discussion the past few messages has been an attempt to disengage me, well, you have now succeeded.

In your quest for moral absolutism in a world very flawed, you have ended up supporting genocide while trying not to. Even Hannah Arendt in her critique of lesser-evilism doesn’t come to the conclusion one should choose the worse evil by not opposing it as you’re insisting here; but to always remember that the lesser evil is still evil, and do all that can be done so you won’t end up in the situation where you’re forced to choose in the first place.

You are not responsible for the system that’s forcing you to play by it’s shitty rules, and you’re not personally responsible for not managing to change it, or even for whatever the election result ended up being. But you are responsible for your own actions, and those you’re supporting here have been the ones enabling a lot worse outcome for the world. The bus is still headed off the cliff.

As I have sadly lost my faith in you taking part in this discussion with honesty, continuing has been rendered pointless. So: Have a good day! :)

Are… are you implying you’re envious of people in the psych ward?

So, I’ll invent another thought experiment then, since it seems like you’re not understanding what I am saying either. Let’s say I give a homeless person a thousand dollars, and tell them it’s because I want to help them. They’re happy, and use that money to get a hotel room and new clothes, and thus get a job and manage to return to partake in the society. What I did was good, yes? Now in actuality I erroneously believed that money to be cursed; so not only was I acting ethically wrong because I was lying, I was also acting morally wrong because my intent was malicious.

Your stance is, that what I did cannot be morally right, since I was indeed intending it to be evil, and that is what matters. My stance is that what matters is that what I did only had a good effect on the world. I am not denying other viewpoints exist, nor am I oblivious to them, I am taking the stance that causing the least amount of harm to living things is essentially the most important thing when considering what is a morally good action. (Edit// this is called “harm reduction”)

Now to be clear my stance isn’t “ends justify means” either as isn’t yours, because had I beaten up some terrible criminal and taken that money from them, it would only have made what I did in actuality even worse, and couldn’t be a moral stance to build a society on. Beating up people on the street for money is not maximizing good even if that money is given away in good actions, I’m sure we agree on that.

By moral purity I mean the willingness to do anything, as long as one perceives it to be the most morally good action they can personally take, no matter what actual consequences it causes. You did what you believed was right, and now the bus is headed off the cliff. Or am I still misunderstanding the core of your ideological standpoint?

It is empathetic towards Palestinians

This is again likely the key to our disagreement; you value the thought of empathy, but not the results of actions based on that thought. Not a single palestinian is any better now than they would have been, they’re just even worse off as fascist orange shitstain has only been approving what Netanyahu does and telling him, great, go on instead of at least not giving him everything. You have not chosen to help them, you have just chosen to doom them too and a lot more of the world to suffer even more, to seemingly satisfy your need to feel morally pure.

If you want to just critique different moral theories, then fine; mine’s clearly somewhere closer to Mill’s utilitarianism, though not exactly. What are you supporting here? Some form of deontology I assume, since not Hobbesian or Lockean take on social philosophy, and it doesn’t really sound like some modern take on virtue ethics either. Maybe we can save time then, and just go by what the smarter philosophers have already critiqued on each theory, so we can argue about the exactly same things but with more elongated language.

Of course even my take is ideological - as I said, they’re all ideological. This whole argument is not stemming from metaphysics, it’s that you clearly value the ideological level, while I care more about the practical results. As I wrote earlier, I don’t even disagree with your takes on genocide or anything, they’re all reasonable and logical moral stances, very ethical even.

The difference is you’re thinking that those ideas are what matters, while I’m valuing them as less than the physical reality of things. Actual, living humans (well, nature in general) are what I think we should consider foremost when making decisions - which, obviously, is a moral stance as well. But it is a moral stance our societies tend to be build on; as when they’re not… we get to the genocides and wars

The thing is; those moral systems and critiques of the problem are all ideological. We can argue about what’s good and what’s evil as much as we want, but in the real world people just suffer and die. We don’t have to and likely even can’t reach some consensus, but we can at least reach an understanding of what we both are trying to say, yes?

You value moral purity, and that is indeed a valid moral stance. But in the real world that has lead to valuing personal moral purity over human lives; that means more people will die, which in turn is what I consider a lot worse both in ideological sense and in the real world. Thus leading to this discussion

What you are failing to understand is, that this was the most realistic version of the trolley problem you could encounter; there was no option you could take, that wouldn’t have supported real world genocide; someone would have always died under the trolley. The three basic options available all lead to genocide; by choosing democrats you supported some real world genocide and ideologically genocide, by choosing republicans you supported even worse genocide in the real world and ideologically. By choosing neither, you didn’t ideologically support genocide, but you supported the actual worse genocide option in the real world.

You chose what you perceived as morally righteous by deciding not to ideologically support genocide, but by choosing that, you enabled real world consequences resulting in more actual genocide than what would have happened if you chose otherwise.

Also, quite ironically, philosophy was my second major in university, so maybe you should take that class instead. Lol

I agree with opposing genocide, I really do. But you have not opposed genocide at all; you have opened the door to even more genocide just to keep your own moral purity. Genocide is still going in Palestine, it’s going on in Ukraine, it’s going on in tons of places all around the world right now. And if NATO falters, it is going to happen in other places in Europe too since that’s what Russian imperialism causes, in Taiwan if China attacks there, and probably somewhere close India too, if they use the chance to get at it with Pakistan again.

In an ideal world there’s always the golden perfect moral choice, where nobody suffers, but we don’t have that. You seem think you’ve had that perfect choice, but it has not affected the world in a positive way at all, it has just allowed the evil to cause more harm. That is not a morally good choice

But to act like the Democrats aren’t involved

I haven’t seen anyone on lemmy actually claim that, and I certainly wouldn’t. But who is leading you right now is making all those things actively worse. Not a single palestinian has been saved because you’re willing to let some other people suffer instead, now we’re just all going to suffer.

Personally I think there’s a clear difference between “I let 10 people die” and “I let 100 people die”, and since in your country’s shitty voting system inaction or third parties is practically the same as choosing the latter, well… To change your system it has to start from the root level which you clearly know better than I do. But when election is ongoing - the bus is already running, you have only two choices. And now the bus is going off the cliff

Look, I wouldn’t care about USA politics since it is not my place to say, but what your psycho leader is trying to do, is essentially making Russia launch another attack on Europe. And I’m a finn, we’re in the front lines, and I fucking don’t want to have fight yet another invasion and even possibly your goddamn troops off Greenland as well. Maybe you only care about your country, but what you chose has a massive impact on the rest of the world, and now people in developing countries are dying because the dollar store dictator cut large amounts of funding, and a great war is threatening to happen in Europe again, which would mean even more people could die in unnecessary wars.

This all could have been avoided or at least postponed, which would have given more time to try to prevent all this insane shit. Or are you seriously suggesting your democrats would have also allied with Russia and threatened to attack Greenland?

But the bus is still headed off the cliff

Luckily you don’t have the worst version of it either, if you haven’t learned about it before. Plenty of awkward moments though, I’m sure lol

The common sentiment seems to be “I’ll rather live in a fascist dictatorship than vote democrats” while still thinking that’s any different from supporting republicans, so I guess I have to admit you do have a point…

Do you know history, have you read the stories of people living under true dictatorships? I truly hope I’m wrong, but even if it’s been bad there so far, now you might be in for a ride

But the bus is still headed off the cliff

Honestly, this post has really highlighted my face blindness to me lmao. I can barely see the difference between most of them

–more and more openly since even us randos overseas are hearing about it, and you might never get to vote again

But you could have bought four more bad status quo years to build that political movement! Now you don’t have even that, people there are getting murdered and dragged into concentration camps more and more openly since even us randos overseas are hearing about it, and you might never get to vote again

Let me try again: Two people are running for the leadership position. The other one says they won’t punch you, but you know they probably will. The other one says he’ll shoot you and your whole family. You won’t vote against the shooter because the puncher is bad and unreliable as well, so now you and your family get shot.

That demented clown was pretty openly saying he’ll turn USA into fascist dictatorship if he’s elected, and now he’s doing it and apparently speedrunning towards ww3 because he didn’t get the nobel peace price or some insane shit. And I still see people online arguing that voting against him didn’t matter?

Well your system clearly is completely fucked up, no denying that, you know and can clearly word it out waaayy better than some random internet person like I do. But the bus is still headed off the cliff, so what is the counter plan?