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Actions Speak Louder than Words #BlackLivesMatter

Just as an aside, while people generally use both kinds of reasoning, it can be seen as a privilege to more heavily rely on non-consequentialist reasoning, particularly in situations where one person is much more likely to have bad outcomes than another. A privilege that white people such as myself must understand may get someone in different circumstances (ie. A black person) put at higher risk of being killed. Which moral system we apply can and should change in extreme circumstances. When we reach or even get close to our utopia, then we can talk more about how all prejudice is bad. Not doing so now is not what is keeping us away from that utopia.

@Jeff Bauersfield: I was thinking of the consequentialist vs. non-consequentialist approach while writing some of my posts. But as a former non-consequentialist, I also think that a discussion like this really illustrates the limits of non-consequentialism, for some of the reasons you stated. Fixating on your principles being consistent without regard for how they affect others just feels very vain to me, and like it defeats the purpose of having morality, which should be about how it relates to the material world and not your own personal sense of your conscience. (I'm also a materialist, can you tell?) And I think that vanity is why it's associated with privilege: it can make it very revealing that you came up with your code doing thought experiments rather than with weighing problems in your own life.

Here's a consequentialist reasoning. Murdering all retired people will relieve stress on the economy which will raise the living standards for everyone else. Retired people after all have zero productivity (exceptions can be made for those that do work), don't have much time to live anymore and the suffering their relatives will have over their passing will be less than the suffering of people who would otherwise spend their lives in poverty.

And no, it doesn't matter whether that's actually the case. A consequentialist who believes that to be case will feel justified to proceed while a non-consequentialist will not.

I'm curious why you advocate eliminating the entire institution rather than preventing the bad apples from spoiling the rest. We haven't gotten to the point where the whole bunch is spoiled as Swanson (and many others) proved.

Quote:

The cops who are neither violent/racist/crooked nor enablers of the same seem to be so few and far between that they make movies about them on the rare occasion that they come along.

I'm curious where your statistics come from. Care to share some numbers?

I am not equating race with profession.
I am equating prejudice with prejudice because the underlying principle is the same--drawing far-reaching conclusions from a relatively small number of data points.
to repeat my example from earlier, a "little white lie" and perjury in a capital trial have obviously different consequences and it is a bit silly to equate them, but at their core they are both lies.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't see any difference between those two statements. "Part of a problem" sure sounds like "bad person" to me.

The former statement, about holding all police responsible for the actions of the violent and racist ones, bothers me to a great degree. I don't believe in punishing A for the actions of B.

Just to be clear I did not take any of the comments as some sort of a personal attack. I simply used my own experience with law enforcement, as in my family's history, as an example. I was pointing out the fallacy, in my opinion, of making a sweeping blanket judgment against any group. Which is something I have spoken out against on a wide variety of topics. I was in no way trying to claim any sort of victim hood nor excuse anything. I simply have never personally seen where such blanket judgments have ever helped a situation or provided answers that could result in positive change. On any topic.

Edit: To clarify, I totally agree power matters in physical confrontations, but I don't see how it is relevant to rhetoric, which is what we are talking about here. My prior statements of power being irrelevant have all been in the context of discussion, like calling for the defunding of all cops. They had nothing to do with real-life physical confronations.

The reason I am sticking to the principles that I am is because they strengthen the postions of we who are advocating for change. If we choose to call out all cops rather than the bad apples who risk spoiling the rest then those who would oppose us have a valid point of attack they can use against us.

And yet why is in that many states have stand your ground laws? Which I don’t think needs to be explained as to the can of worms that’s opened up.

In some instance these videos can take a least a month or more to surface, sometimes they’ll need a court order to get released to the public. Which to some can look like a cover up.

Good.

The problem with police is that violence is ultimately the only tool in their kit. Sure, they may be trained in techniques of nonviolent deescalation, but if that fails -- or even, if they think that it has failed, or suppose they don't even bother to try it in the first place -- then where do they go? To their monopoly on the supposedly "legitimate" use of force. And when cops routinely close ranks to protect each other, it doesn't matter what sort of training you received about "what behavior needs to be displayed" before you can escalate your use of force, because the truth about what happened will never come out anyway. And if the truth does come out, say, because someone filmed the incident, cops are still rarely prosecuted (much less found guilty) because prosecutors can choose not to bring charges, and police departments will helpfully provide them with a narrative of the event to justify that decision.

If you're a cop yourself, then you have your own perspective, and I have no doubt that you genuinely believe that you are doing good in the world and your community is better off for your service, and hell, maybe on a purely individual level, you're even right about that, I don't know. But the facts are: 1) cops kill a lot of people in America; 2) a disproportionate number of those people are minorities; 3) cops are almost never prosecuted, even in egregious cases that are caught on video. Whatever good an individual police officer might be doing, the police as an institution are rotten to the core.

"The current destructive path of looting, rioting and demanding that all police be fired" is exactly how some things have already been accomplished -- charges for Chauvin and the other cops present at George Floyd's murder, contracts with police departments severed (e.g. for cops to act as "resource officers" in Minneapolis and Portland schools, something activists in those places have been trying to eliminate for years to no avail), etc. Direct action works. It is often the only thing that works.

No, what is happening right now is a knee-jerk reaction that is being done to appease the protestors. The state government needs to find some way to appease the protestors until their jobs return and they no longer have the time and energy to protest. The local and state governments will create some new measure, such as forbidding their local police to use choke holds, in order to appease the protestors. Then, the local police jurisdiction will implement a change designed to boost the police's morale, such as paying them more, giving them more tools and/or more protection. This will likely be quietly and internally approved.

But anyway, this doesn't really disprove consequentialism so much as one particular application of it (and this is often the problem with these kinds of thought experiments). My argument would be that "economic productivity" is a really crappy way to measure the value of a life, and people have basic human rights regardless of how "productive" they are. (You could argue that I'm still appealing to abstract morality here, but I never said there aren't other reasons that could make people's lives less valuable.) And so I don't believe that eliminating people for that reason actually benefits society. It doesn't have to do with appealing to inner morality vs. consequences, because I believe the consequences themselves are not desirable.

My problem with that example you gave is less that they're a consequentialist and more the broader worldview that leads them to believe that that would be a desirable consequence. I feel the same way about the real example of Peter Singer, who believes that killing disabled infants is a good idea.

I am not equating race with profession.
I am equating prejudice with prejudice

I would not exactly agree with your point of thought, but I get what you're implying. I also fully admit as a white male my experiences are nowhere near the same as others. I am not ignorant of that fact at all. Let me ask you this though, If you say that this poison within the law enforcement system will always be there no matter how much training or change is given what would be your answer? No police? Abolish the entire thing and get rid of law enforcement? I'm not being facetious or passive aggressive here, I'm seriously asking. What would your solution be then?

@Jeff Bauersfield: I was thinking of the consequentialist vs. non-consequentialist approach while writing some of my posts. But as a former non-consequentialist, I also think that a discussion like this really illustrates the limits of non-consequentialism, for some of the reasons you stated. Fixating on your principles being consistent without regard for how they affect others just feels very vain to me, and like it defeats the purpose of having morality, which should be about how it relates to the material world and not your own personal sense of your conscience. (I'm also a materialist, can you tell?) And I think that vanity is why it's associated with privilege: it can make it very revealing that you came up with your code doing thought experiments rather than with weighing problems in your own life.

Jeff Bauersfeld wrote:

This is a system where the richest black man cannot escape the very same systemic issues as the poorest. It is baked into the system. That poison will always be in my body..

I agree with you that all white people are guilty of racism and all black people are victims of it, but I'm not sure I'd put it exactly this way, which I think denies intersectionality: the fact that oppression is a multiplication rather than addition problem. Race and class are deeply intertwined in American society, so there are absolutely examples of racism that poor black experience more than rich black people... even if it's true that even rich black people can't fully escape it. (Some people in this thread would be amazed at the number of Ivy-League-educated black professors I've known who've been pulled over by cops for just "existing while black" in a majority white neighborhood. Often their own neighborhoods!) I'm personally a member of a lot of marginalized groups on paper -- female, lesbian, autistic -- but I'm able to ameliorate a lot of that because I have the class privilege to choose a place to live and profession where the stereotypes I'd face elsewhere are less of issues. If I were poor and did not have those same opportunities, I'd probably face a lot more everyday homophobia, misogyny and ableism than I do as a Ph.D. student living in a large and progressive urban area.

Jeff Bauersfeld wrote:

Just as an aside, while people generally use both kinds of reasoning, it can be seen as a privilege to more heavily rely on non-consequentialist reasoning, particularly in situations where one person is much more likely to have bad outcomes than another. A privilege that white people such as myself must understand may get someone in different circumstances (ie. A black person) put at higher risk of being killed. Which moral system we apply can and should change in extreme circumstances. When we reach or even get close to our utopia, then we can talk more about how all prejudice is bad. Not doing so now is not what is keeping us away from that utopia.

As an Asian (which I only mention since you brought ethnicity into this), I don't believe in consequentialism since in the secular point of view, the end is simply that. No matter how good or how bad a person's life is, none of that will matter after they die from a secular point of view. Saved a child? Too bad, that kid dies within 200 years anyways. Created an actual universal utopia? Too bad, heat death, vaccuum decay, etc. Things change if you believe in an afterlife or an eternal reincarnating universe that is affected by your choices, but most modern religions are non-consequentialist. I guess there's the multiverse theory and all, but it's extremely unlikely that anything done in this universe good or bad could add or detract to the meta-universial mechanism creates the various universes (at least that's how I understand multiverse theory). Consequences are even less relevant if you believe that every choice splits off into multiple different universes for each answer.

And just to add to that, non-consequentialists tend to ignore that their principles, while applied in a vacuum, weren't created in a vacuum. Humans, mostly privileged white ones, came up with them, and their thought processes are inextricably linked to their life experiences.