Annoyingly enough, the Quakers -- despite being doctrinaire pacifists in all other areas -- answered this question with a resounding "yes". Flogging, stocks, and various other brutalities (I don't remember if they used capital punishment, but I think they did) were routine in colonial Pennsylvania...
The central tenet of our faith is that there is that of god in every person, so it follows directly that violence against any person is violence against god, and therefore unacceptable. Quakers have put their money and actions where their mouth is - they have always rejected capital punishment, and have been very active in prison reform since the 1800s. They set up the Friend's Ambulance Unit so they could serve during the Second World War. Quakers also recognise that there are many forms of violence, and sponsor the Alternatives to Violence Program (AVP) training for schoolkids.
To get back to the original question about dealing with violent people, of course you need to use force against them, to prevent them doing more violence. But that force should be as non-violent as possible, to make it clear that society's norms are intact. Norway's treatment of Anders Breivik is inspirational - it is clear that his incarceration is in no way violent - there is no element of revenge, much to many people's fury. But imagine a Breivik sympathiser - seeing a civilised society treating him in a civilised way leaves very little to spur them on to similar acts.
And what about Daesh? They have successfully used resentment against the violence done to muslims to build a society where violence is the norm. This is not sustainable - it won't be long before the flood of recruits reverses, as they discover what arbitrary violence means to them and their loved ones.
My reference for colonial Pennsylvania is _Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America_, by David Hackett Fisher. Pennsylvania was a remarkable place, with a lot of very impressive accomplishments. Fisher is full of praise for their Old World-quality infrastructure, much of which is still in use today; he also points out their peaceful coexistence with the American Indians, their roughly equal rights for women, and their rehabilitative prisons, concern for animal welfare, and interest in vegetarianism. But there's also how they refused to bear arms and expected the British military to protect them -- and how they enforced sumptuary laws and the like with corporal punishments, and drove off the Scotch-Irish as being just this side of subhuman.
Admittedly, one could make a very strong case that the Scotch-Irish really were just this side of subhuman. They were lawless, xenophobic, and economically improvident, as well as scornful of the laws and customs of war; they committed savage atrocities in just about every war they engaged in, and were more or less responsible for the Indian Wars, the Mexican War, and the lawlessness of the Wild West. Andrew Jackson, who ethnically cleansed the Cherokees and the other Five Civilized Tribes, is still regarded as a hero in Appalachia today, and his atrocities are either brushed off or openly celebrated.
A large and politically powerful Scotch-Irish population would have poisoned Pennsylvania; the Quakers had the choice between self-destruction and rejection of their principles. They chose to reject their principles -- and then they kept preaching them, completely unmodified, as if they'd never rejected them at all.
I'm Catholic, so it's not surprising that I'd say this, but I'd say that Catholic social doctrine -- with its strict criteria for just wars, and various prescriptions for government and suppression of crime -- is a better choice than denying the necessity of violence and then having to improvise a solution when violence turns out necessary anyways.
I certainly do condemn pacifism, because it doesn't work; but at the same time, I'm pretty thoroughly impressed with most of the Quakers' accomplishments, and I certainly accept the importance of using minimal force and humane policies.
I should also add that I was too hard on the Scotch-Irish in my previous post. _Albion's Seed_ discusses the conditions that shaped them: for 500 years, from the foundation of Scotland to Prince Charlie's rising, every king of England except three invaded Scotland, was invaded by the Scots, or both; and in every one of these invasions, the Scotch-Irish bore the brunt of it.
Sorry to distract from the actual content of your well written post. I simply found this an interesting choice.
This acceptance of personal witness extends to our concept of god. So you often get Quakers discussing what each understands by "god". Some are very biblically influenced and imagine some kind of omnipotent "person", but the concept of a shared spirit that comes from ourselves makes more sense to me. For me "god" is not a person's name, and is not an entity that will be hurt if I don't dignify it with a capital letter.
But I'm very happy for you to do otherwise.
Capital punishment's issues primarily stem from the fact that you're using an exogenous body of collective action (the state) as a proxy to put people to death, with all the problems of public choice that come as a result.
If you're going to preach pacifism to others, you should be pacifist at home. As it is, the Quakers feel like they were using pacifism as a weapon...
The above seems to show that Quakers resisted the use of capitol punishment and its use increased as Quaker control of the colony waned.
The Quakers were perfectly capable of innovative thought, and of thinking through the consequences of their principles (thus relative sexual equality, concern for animal welfare, and encouragement of vegetarianism); but they were fine with using brutal violence against anyone who didn't accept their doctrine of nonviolence -- especially those from different cultures, and followers of different religions (or different Protestant denominations; they were particularly cruel towards the Presbyterian Scotch-Irish). This is why they get under my skin.
If you don't defend your culture you'll go extinct, the same way you don't want to be contaminated by outside ideas an ways of life that you worked hard to protect. Hypocrisy isn't quite the word I think you'd want to use. People get violent because they passionately want to protect something from what they deem as evil. They can be misguided in that sense but, ultimately they do have a point - those who do not defend themselves find commitments to their principles/ways of life and doctrines waning and their communities will suffer death by mixing and mediocrity.
Think of it like cultural entropy, they are trying to resist things that corrode their way of life.
This seems to be the opposite of history. Until recently, violence was one of the only ways for any civilization to persist. The advent of nuclear weapons changed that somewhat (but not if civilizations begin to use them). And most of the myths of a civilization seem to be a byproduct of their actions.
Being warlike enough to defend your society is one thing; being warlike enough to conquer neighbors who hate you, or to throw away lives and wealth in pursuit of glory, is something else. Sparta, Assyria, and the Aztec Empire didn't turn out so well, after all...
By that standard, we have extremely few dynasties who could be called "successful" these days. But I do agree that transitioning from very warlike to just somewhat warlike tends to help survival.
They fell well before the Macedonians, too: a commander of a minor city -- Corinth, I think -- noticed that the Spartans always used the exact same tactics, deployed his troops in a preposterous formation that ensured that the Spartans would lose if they changed nothing, and won decisively. The Helots immediately revolted and recovered their independence, and that was the end of Sparta.
Yet an argument based on Darwinism that we can't fight extinctions by compensating for maladaptation is so blindingly obvious ... Compensating for maladapted species will need an amount of resources that evolves exponentially over time, even if the numbers of the "saved" species don't increase. Therefore it will fail, it is only a question of time.
Atheists at least see that particular myths are utilitarian. To make a society work and produce, for instance. Or to make a society fight, like some other religions. But they fail to look in the mirror and see that their myths are utilitarian as well, and when they are true, that's not a great factor in their adoption. Belief systems are like computer viruses : correctness, correct use of the system, style of the code doesn't matter (in fact it is often an obstacle). What matters is whether the code spreads.
And just like atheist myths can be true, religious myths can be true. The bible contains quite a bit of true history, and I would argue at least a bit of good advice. It also contains lots of instructions for various things, from architecture to agriculture, and those instructions work, even if they can be said to not be perfectly optimal. Likewise, you can make an argument that the quran contains instructions for warfare that are certainly not stupid, even if some of those tactics make "realpolitik" look like two girls trying to feed bambi.
Of course the above is the non-cynical view of their position. The cynical view would be that conservation is not in fact done to help species, but rather to increase the luxuries surrounding rich conservationists. That conservation efforts are just a very expensive 50" tv, and the beneficiaries of conservation efforts will be chucked in the bin when something else catches our fancy just like said tv.
I didn't get that from the article. The author seems to have looked at how people justify violence and found they gave moral explanations. Whether their morality is relative or absolute doesn't seem that important to the argument.
'Eliezer once wrote a pretty neat sci-fi story dealing with exactly that issue. I highly recommend it; it gives a pretty nice workout for one's moral intuitions.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/y4/three_worlds_collide_08/
> There are plenty of implications for startups too, many of whom would not exist without a different conception of social norms than mainstream society.
Now this is a pretty good euphemism for describing Uber's business model. Thank you.
It's same as the question: Can I beat up retarded child because it bites, spits and screams.
Answer is, of course not, but you can and should overpower it and prevent it from harming themselves and others.
It's all silly pseudo-philosophical question as the one with the cart and the switch and killing one to save five. Question is framed so that people are tricked into doing math and forgetting that saving people is optional while not killing them is mandatory.
The realization that most violence is morally motivated comes with interesting quandaries when you consider what the response to such violence should be. Say that society successfully develops the norm that violence is never acceptable. What do you do with people who do not agree with this norm? Are you justified in using force against them? Does the state ever have a right to put people to death for what they believe, even if what they believe is that large classes of people deserve to die? What if it's just the threat that someone may wish to do another harm? Are police officers justified in shooting a suspect if it appears that he might have a gun and is reaching for it?
There are also interesting questions about whether you should respect moral norms that are part of your moral code but not part of anothers'. For example, many Native American tribes did not believe in property rights, instead believing that the land and everything grown from it was communal property for the benefit of all; European settlers took this to mean that it was all theirs for the taking. Several of Ayn Rand's books extoll the virtue of selfishness, holding that the only bounds to your conduct should be freely agreed-upon contracts with others: knowing that other people do not hold to this moral code, is it moral to behave selfishly to them until they explicitly defend their rights, or do you have an obligation to consider what's commonly held to be moral amongst people unlike yourself when dealing with them?
There are plenty of implications for startups too, many of whom would not exist without a different conception of social norms than mainstream society.