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> You can save thousands of people, but murdering someone still should mean a life sentence. I've struggled with this point of view since my early teens, and p

> You can save thousands of people, but murdering someone still should mean a life sentence. I've struggled with this point of view since my early teens, and possibly even earlier. There is no amount of good one can do to compensate for even the slightest misdeed. As much as I may agree, however, it's probably the most damaging and destructive moral framework you can possibly have, because it just consumes anything positive.

empthought 8mo ago
This sounds more like scrupulosity than a moral framework. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrupulosity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrupulosity
- hexer292 8mo ago
  People have always told me I'm too hard on myself. Then again, I've made mistakes to know I wasn't hard enough on myself. If you're worried about causing a negative effect on someone and then you do, the solution isn't to not worry about that.
  - watercolorblind 8mo ago
    As someone who has been quite hard on myself too: To err is to be human. If you minimize your life to minimize negative impacts on others, you are hurting yourself (and your friends and family). If you make a mistake, learn from it and try to be better. None of us are born with the skill and knowledge to do the right thing all the time, and sometimes there is no right thing, just different tradeoffs with different costs.
    - HWR_14 8mo ago
      > If you minimize your life to minimize negative impacts on others, you are hurting yourself (and your friends and family). Mind expanding on that?
      - empthought 8mo ago
        I'm not the commenter, but I interpret it as: The benefit that others get by you reaching your potential is greater than the risk to others of you making space for yourself to reach your potential.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
ztjio 8mo ago
This is pure nonsense. The moral distance between a good deed and the level of bad deed that receives a meaningful penalty, socially (e.g. felonies) is enormous and there is plenty of fungibility of good vs. bad actions in that space. That said, it is strange to even consider being good, which is generally a rather easy thing to be, to be some kind of task you should be paid for even virtually. Being basically good is the trivial cost to avoid becoming anti-social. Why should a social group even tolerate you otherwise? With that in mind, as mentioned before, I think you'll find that social groups are highly tolerant of many misdeeds.
- hexer292 8mo ago
  Moral distance is an interesting concept, because it implies two acts are comparable at some level. If someone cured cancer, do you think they couldn't be tried for murder?
  - ztjio 8mo ago
    No? I don't see how you arrived at that, it seems entirely non-sequitur. I guess you deeply misunderstood what I meant by "moral distance." I'm simply trying to give a name to the idea that there isn't just a binary good vs. bad, and that some things are vastly worse than others. You might choose to represent it on a simple scale where bad is in the negative and good in the positive. In such a case, moral distance would be the distance between the two points on that scale. That's all. This representation would have no impact on whether a single individual can do things that exist on polar opposites of such a scale. In the context of my comment the point is more about the distance between saying something rude and killing someone, it would be a large distance despite both being negative, and the tolerance levels would likely start somewhere in the negative side of the scale, though in reality you're going to be dealing with much more complex perceptions of good vs. bad behavior and social tolerance of it. But when you compare to the law that's going to have more of a concrete boundary. But it's still not 0 on this scale.
  - fc417fc802 8mo ago
    It depends on if your question is about legality, morality, social stability, privilege of some sort, or perhaps something else. If someone offered to cure cancer, but only if you permitted them to commit a single specific murder, is that a reasonable trade? All you've got there is yet another trolley problem.
skeeter2020 8mo ago
forget about murder, you make a terrible comment or single mistake in your young adulthood and you are done for ever. Kids are not allowed to make mistakes anymore.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- embedding-shape 8mo ago
  That's not true though, no one "Has their life ruined forever" because of one off-hand comment. Eventually, social media moves on, and people stop haunting you, if that's what you're encountering. Great way of avoiding 99% of the harm with that, is literally getting off social media, if that ever happens to you. Most people around you in real-life won't know about it, nor recognize you, or anything else, unless you had a pattern of bad behavior for a longer period of time. But you can still make mistakes, even online, and eventually people forget about it.
  - skeeter2020 8mo ago
    >> Eventually, social media moves on, and people stop haunting you, if that's what you're encountering. That's only true if you fade with your misdeeds. Try doing anything that raises your profile and watch them jump back to the surface.
    - nemomarx 8mo ago
      People will talk about it, but how much does it really matter? Many actors and other figures credibly accused of sex crimes or whatever just wait a few years and then start getting work again. Kevin Spacey seems to be going alright as an example. The gap years certainly hurt, but at a sufficient level of money and power you're broadly fine I think. The real risk of cancelling is for people without money and status who could be shunned by family or friend groups mostly.
    - embedding-shape 8mo ago
      No, it's true if you want to remain a normal person, instead of becoming a celebrity or "celebrity-lite" or whatever we call them today. But yeah, if you try to become a "public figure" or similar, then people will try to find skeletons in your closet, but it's always been like that, and very different from "you make a terrible comment or single mistake in your young adulthood and you are done for ever" which was the initial claim.
fwip 8mo ago
Good does not cancel out bad, but bad does not automatically outweigh all good.
- hexer292 8mo ago
  How would you compare the two? I think no matter what the good was, you're still left with "yeah, but x happened".
  - fwip 8mo ago
    Quick aside - you can also do the inverse, excusing whatever bad because "x good thing still happened." That framing probably feels more obviously incorrect to you, because of your outlook. One metric is just by if people still want to hang out with you. Sure, you made a mistake and hurt their feelings before. But they're still your friends, and still talk to you because they, on balance, predict that interacting you will be good for them. Said less cynically - they genuinely like you. Or - if the "you" is too difficult to accept (as it often is with mental health issues), you can see it in relationships of people around you. Human beings are messy, and relationships (of all types) even more so. We all have brought both joy and sadness to those important to us. Trying to avoid harm above all else, will necessarily also reduce the joy you bring to others - you become withdrawn, isolated, cautious in all interactions. Separately - hurting another person is not always a sign of a moral sin. Accidents and misunderstandings happen, no person can predict every result of their actions, and also - sometimes two people are genuinely in conflict, and there won't be a happy end to it.
- worthless-trash 8mo ago
  In the eyes of the law, it clearly does.
  - account42 8mo ago
    Are you sure? Judges and juries consider the perpetrator's character beyond the bad deed all the time, both to reduce or increase the penalty.
selcuka 8mo ago
> I've struggled with this point of view Because it is much easier for people to universally accept a system where good or neutral deeds are expected by default, and misdeeds are punished. It is very difficult to construct an alternative system that humans could internalise. Where would you draw the line? What about saving 50 people, and then killing 49? Should they cancel each other, too?
- hexer292 8mo ago
  There is no line. Killing one person while saving a thousand is just as bad as killing one person.
  - Filligree 8mo ago
    By that metric, doctors doing triage at a disaster site should be jailed.
    - darkwater 8mo ago
      This is even more out of touch of the comment you are answering to.
  - btilly 8mo ago
    This is a failure to think, disguised as moral judgment. If a police sniper shoots a mass shooter in the middle of their mass shooting, that's a hero. Not a villain.
    - kelnos 8mo ago
      To be fair, though, some moral frameworks (not mine) proscribe that any killing is bad, even to save oneself or others. I don't mean this as a "gotcha", but as a reminder that morality is a human invention, and different humans will take different moral stances on things.
    - HWR_14 8mo ago
      There is a clear difference between "I had to kill someone to save 50 lives" and "I saved 50 lives, so I'm allowed to murder one person as payment"
unwise-exe 8mo ago
I intend to do this very bad thing. How much karma do I need to accrue in advance, so that I don't go into the red from doing it?
- hexer292 8mo ago
  I guess my point is you will always be bad as a result of doing this very bad thing, no amount of karma can counter it.
  - codebje 8mo ago
    You can't just "do good" like it's a spreadsheet, managing your karmic balance as the parent comment joked. You're only worrying about your personal consequences in that model, not the harm to others. But I think it should be possible for a human to reflect on their actions, find remorse, and strive to do better in the future. They will always have done a bad thing, but they might not always be a bad person.
Nursie 8mo ago
> I've struggled with this point of view since my early teens, and possibly even earlier. There is no amount of good one can do to compensate for even the slightest misdeed. I think there's a hole in the thought somewhere. If you save thousands of people and murder one, you should serve time for that murder, but you should still be appreciated for your other work. The error is thinking of actions and life like a karmic account balance, even though it's an appealing metaphor, people are complex beings and seeing them reductively as good or bad is probably wrong. Scott Adams was an asshat in later life. I don't know all the controversy he stirred because I drifted away from paying attention to him years ago. He gave me a lot of laughs, he had some great, fun insights into office life, he has some weird pseudo-scientific ideas in his books, and then he devolved into a bit of a dick. Maybe a lot of a dick. His is a life that touched mine, that I appreciate in some ways and am sad for in others. Bye Scott, thanks for all the laughs, thanks for nurturing my cynicism, but it's a shame about what happened with you after twitter came along.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
_carbyau_ 8mo ago
> because it just consumes anything positive. I was perhaps not as clear as I'd wish. The next dot point after you quoted me was meant to convey that equally, the good actions cannot be cancelled/consumed by bad ones. Life is a complex thing.
21asdffdsa12 8mo ago
? What strange moral posturing is this? Of course there is good that can exists in parallel to bad deeds. Invent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process fertilizer that feeds the planet and your contributions to poison gas are forgotten. Not forgiven. But science and progress are decoupled from whatever a person contributes. And even a disgusting person, while it should be kept from power, should be capable to contribute to science and progress. Even a insane nazi can feed half africa, while the most saint like person, may give humanity nothing. The value society assigns is not the value a person has. The value is determined by the objective outcomes the person produces. Werner von Braun has done more for humanity then all of the socialist icons combined. He is still a disgusting person. Imagine humanity like a spacestation. Science and Industry forming the hull, society on the interior, hard physics on the outside. The things a EVA worker contributes to all life inside the hull, can be substantial while he is a useless drunk on the inside. And somebody with a fishbowl over his head, cosplaying astronaut on the inside contributes nothing. Somebody yelling - redistribute the spacesuits, its cold in here - does more damage to society, then the useless drunk ever will.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

empthought 8mo ago

This sounds more like scrupulosity than a moral framework. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrupulosity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrupulosity

hexer292 8mo ago
People have always told me I'm too hard on myself. Then again, I've made mistakes to know I wasn't hard enough on myself. If you're worried about causing a negative effect on someone and then you do, the solution isn't to not worry about that.
- watercolorblind 8mo ago
  As someone who has been quite hard on myself too: To err is to be human. If you minimize your life to minimize negative impacts on others, you are hurting yourself (and your friends and family). If you make a mistake, learn from it and try to be better. None of us are born with the skill and knowledge to do the right thing all the time, and sometimes there is no right thing, just different tradeoffs with different costs.
  - HWR_14 8mo ago
    > If you minimize your life to minimize negative impacts on others, you are hurting yourself (and your friends and family). Mind expanding on that?
    - empthought 8mo ago
      I'm not the commenter, but I interpret it as: The benefit that others get by you reaching your potential is greater than the risk to others of you making space for yourself to reach your potential.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

ztjio 8mo ago

This is pure nonsense. The moral distance between a good deed and the level of bad deed that receives a meaningful penalty, socially (e.g. felonies) is enormous and there is plenty of fungibility of good vs. bad actions in that space. That said, it is strange to even consider being good, which is generally a rather easy thing to be, to be some kind of task you should be paid for even virtually. Being basically good is the trivial cost to avoid becoming anti-social. Why should a social group even tolerate you otherwise? With that in mind, as mentioned before, I think you'll find that social groups are highly tolerant of many misdeeds.

hexer292 8mo ago
Moral distance is an interesting concept, because it implies two acts are comparable at some level. If someone cured cancer, do you think they couldn't be tried for murder?
- ztjio 8mo ago
  No? I don't see how you arrived at that, it seems entirely non-sequitur. I guess you deeply misunderstood what I meant by "moral distance." I'm simply trying to give a name to the idea that there isn't just a binary good vs. bad, and that some things are vastly worse than others. You might choose to represent it on a simple scale where bad is in the negative and good in the positive. In such a case, moral distance would be the distance between the two points on that scale. That's all. This representation would have no impact on whether a single individual can do things that exist on polar opposites of such a scale. In the context of my comment the point is more about the distance between saying something rude and killing someone, it would be a large distance despite both being negative, and the tolerance levels would likely start somewhere in the negative side of the scale, though in reality you're going to be dealing with much more complex perceptions of good vs. bad behavior and social tolerance of it. But when you compare to the law that's going to have more of a concrete boundary. But it's still not 0 on this scale.
- fc417fc802 8mo ago
  It depends on if your question is about legality, morality, social stability, privilege of some sort, or perhaps something else. If someone offered to cure cancer, but only if you permitted them to commit a single specific murder, is that a reasonable trade? All you've got there is yet another trolley problem.

skeeter2020 8mo ago

forget about murder, you make a terrible comment or single mistake in your young adulthood and you are done for ever. Kids are not allowed to make mistakes anymore.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
embedding-shape 8mo ago
That's not true though, no one "Has their life ruined forever" because of one off-hand comment. Eventually, social media moves on, and people stop haunting you, if that's what you're encountering. Great way of avoiding 99% of the harm with that, is literally getting off social media, if that ever happens to you. Most people around you in real-life won't know about it, nor recognize you, or anything else, unless you had a pattern of bad behavior for a longer period of time. But you can still make mistakes, even online, and eventually people forget about it.
- skeeter2020 8mo ago
  >> Eventually, social media moves on, and people stop haunting you, if that's what you're encountering. That's only true if you fade with your misdeeds. Try doing anything that raises your profile and watch them jump back to the surface.
  - nemomarx 8mo ago
    People will talk about it, but how much does it really matter? Many actors and other figures credibly accused of sex crimes or whatever just wait a few years and then start getting work again. Kevin Spacey seems to be going alright as an example. The gap years certainly hurt, but at a sufficient level of money and power you're broadly fine I think. The real risk of cancelling is for people without money and status who could be shunned by family or friend groups mostly.
  - embedding-shape 8mo ago
    No, it's true if you want to remain a normal person, instead of becoming a celebrity or "celebrity-lite" or whatever we call them today. But yeah, if you try to become a "public figure" or similar, then people will try to find skeletons in your closet, but it's always been like that, and very different from "you make a terrible comment or single mistake in your young adulthood and you are done for ever" which was the initial claim.

fwip 8mo ago

Good does not cancel out bad, but bad does not automatically outweigh all good.

hexer292 8mo ago
How would you compare the two? I think no matter what the good was, you're still left with "yeah, but x happened".
- fwip 8mo ago
  Quick aside - you can also do the inverse, excusing whatever bad because "x good thing still happened." That framing probably feels more obviously incorrect to you, because of your outlook. One metric is just by if people still want to hang out with you. Sure, you made a mistake and hurt their feelings before. But they're still your friends, and still talk to you because they, on balance, predict that interacting you will be good for them. Said less cynically - they genuinely like you. Or - if the "you" is too difficult to accept (as it often is with mental health issues), you can see it in relationships of people around you. Human beings are messy, and relationships (of all types) even more so. We all have brought both joy and sadness to those important to us. Trying to avoid harm above all else, will necessarily also reduce the joy you bring to others - you become withdrawn, isolated, cautious in all interactions. Separately - hurting another person is not always a sign of a moral sin. Accidents and misunderstandings happen, no person can predict every result of their actions, and also - sometimes two people are genuinely in conflict, and there won't be a happy end to it.
worthless-trash 8mo ago
In the eyes of the law, it clearly does.
- account42 8mo ago
  Are you sure? Judges and juries consider the perpetrator's character beyond the bad deed all the time, both to reduce or increase the penalty.

selcuka 8mo ago

> I've struggled with this point of view Because it is much easier for people to universally accept a system where good or neutral deeds are expected by default, and misdeeds are punished. It is very difficult to construct an alternative system that humans could internalise. Where would you draw the line? What about saving 50 people, and then killing 49? Should they cancel each other, too?

hexer292 8mo ago
There is no line. Killing one person while saving a thousand is just as bad as killing one person.
- Filligree 8mo ago
  By that metric, doctors doing triage at a disaster site should be jailed.
  - darkwater 8mo ago
    This is even more out of touch of the comment you are answering to.
- btilly 8mo ago
  This is a failure to think, disguised as moral judgment. If a police sniper shoots a mass shooter in the middle of their mass shooting, that's a hero. Not a villain.
  - kelnos 8mo ago
    To be fair, though, some moral frameworks (not mine) proscribe that any killing is bad, even to save oneself or others. I don't mean this as a "gotcha", but as a reminder that morality is a human invention, and different humans will take different moral stances on things.
  - HWR_14 8mo ago
    There is a clear difference between "I had to kill someone to save 50 lives" and "I saved 50 lives, so I'm allowed to murder one person as payment"

unwise-exe 8mo ago

I intend to do this very bad thing. How much karma do I need to accrue in advance, so that I don't go into the red from doing it?

hexer292 8mo ago
I guess my point is you will always be bad as a result of doing this very bad thing, no amount of karma can counter it.
- codebje 8mo ago
  You can't just "do good" like it's a spreadsheet, managing your karmic balance as the parent comment joked. You're only worrying about your personal consequences in that model, not the harm to others. But I think it should be possible for a human to reflect on their actions, find remorse, and strive to do better in the future. They will always have done a bad thing, but they might not always be a bad person.

Nursie 8mo ago

> I've struggled with this point of view since my early teens, and possibly even earlier. There is no amount of good one can do to compensate for even the slightest misdeed. I think there's a hole in the thought somewhere. If you save thousands of people and murder one, you should serve time for that murder, but you should still be appreciated for your other work. The error is thinking of actions and life like a karmic account balance, even though it's an appealing metaphor, people are complex beings and seeing them reductively as good or bad is probably wrong. Scott Adams was an asshat in later life. I don't know all the controversy he stirred because I drifted away from paying attention to him years ago. He gave me a lot of laughs, he had some great, fun insights into office life, he has some weird pseudo-scientific ideas in his books, and then he devolved into a bit of a dick. Maybe a lot of a dick. His is a life that touched mine, that I appreciate in some ways and am sad for in others. Bye Scott, thanks for all the laughs, thanks for nurturing my cynicism, but it's a shame about what happened with you after twitter came along.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

_carbyau_ 8mo ago

> because it just consumes anything positive. I was perhaps not as clear as I'd wish. The next dot point after you quoted me was meant to convey that equally, the good actions cannot be cancelled/consumed by bad ones. Life is a complex thing.

21asdffdsa12 8mo ago

? What strange moral posturing is this? Of course there is good that can exists in parallel to bad deeds. Invent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process fertilizer that feeds the planet and your contributions to poison gas are forgotten. Not forgiven. But science and progress are decoupled from whatever a person contributes. And even a disgusting person, while it should be kept from power, should be capable to contribute to science and progress. Even a insane nazi can feed half africa, while the most saint like person, may give humanity nothing. The value society assigns is not the value a person has. The value is determined by the objective outcomes the person produces. Werner von Braun has done more for humanity then all of the socialist icons combined. He is still a disgusting person. Imagine humanity like a spacestation. Science and Industry forming the hull, society on the interior, hard physics on the outside. The things a EVA worker contributes to all life inside the hull, can be substantial while he is a useless drunk on the inside. And somebody with a fishbowl over his head, cosplaying astronaut on the inside contributes nothing. Somebody yelling - redistribute the spacesuits, its cold in here - does more damage to society, then the useless drunk ever will.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]