So maybe society got it wrong. Maybe you're getting it wrong. Maybe they didn't fully understand things back then, maybe you don't fully understand the actual options society faced.
I'm not arguing that society always gets things right. I'm arguing that single-handedly deciding it got things right and therefore doing whatever you think is best is something society can't condone.
The greatest thing humanity understood over the last 500 years, however imperfectly, is the idea of being able to live side by side and not kill each other, even when you strongly disagree about things. Before that people were killing each other over differences in religious interpretations, differences in ideas, etc. People always disagree about things - but we learned to live together, and in democracies, learned how to work together to steer society to (hopefully) better places. You really want to unwind that?
This isn't hypothetical. I'm asking a direct question - what would you do with a father who, say, kills a doctor who performed an abortion on his daughter? From the father's point of view and ethics, the doctor literally murdered is grandchild. Do you cheer him on? Excuse him? I'm genuinely curious how you answer.
> Society is unhealthy. We agree on that. Why do you think it’s so? Is it just something that happens randomly, or is there an underlying reason?
I think the underlying reason is what I said about - that people are forgetting the fundamental idea of being a unified society, living together and even loving each other, without necessarily agreeing on everything. Even when the disagreements are profound, hurtful and run very deep. I think Western society has misplaced its sense of purpose and sense of being virtuous - so of course it's easy to slide into "well everything sucks, of course we should just ignore the law and do whatever we want".
I keep agreeing with that and you keep arguing it so this all seems like a complete waste of time.
There are plenty of circumstance where it’s legal to release lead into places where it would affect people. Sometimes outright not forbidden, and sometimes technically illegal but barely enforced. Examples of the former include leaded gasoline (still legal for some application) and coal power plants (they exhaust all sorts of nasty stuff, including lead). For the latter, consider Flint Michigan, or you can find random cases such as Smith Foundry where they exceeded limits for years and consequences were light.
I recognize that it’s a lot easier to draw a causal line for a gun than for pollution. I don’t think it should matter aside from the increased difficulty of proving guilt. I recognize that it does influence perceptions, but I don’t think it should.
Interesting thing about living longer, healthier lives than ever before. In the US, that leveled off about 15 years ago. Lately it has started getting worse. Health care costs continued to rise steadily. Insurance bureaucracy gets ever more onerous. And the wealthiest people in society continue to get vastly more wealthy.
You could say that people are still a lot better off than they were 50 years ago or whatever. And you’d be correct. But people really don’t like it when things get worse. They especially don’t like it when the pain isn’t shared by the upper crust.
Would you rather have a health care plan that provides quick, easy access to leeches, or a plan with a million forms, an annoying call tree, and opaque decision making, which gives you proper medicine 90% of the time and leeches 10% of the time? The second one is the objectively better option. But the people who offer that plan will probably be lynched. You can acknowledge that and work with it, or you can insist on treating people as rational and get absolutely nowhere.
“Murder is wrong” is a tautology. “Murder” means a killing that is wrong. (Either morally or legally depending on context.) The question isn’t whether murder is wrong. Everyone agrees on that. The question is which killings morally count as murder and which don’t. And don’t say “they all count!” Almost nobody actually believes that and you probably don’t either. People draw the line in different places but you can almost always find some circumstance where they’d say, yeah, that killing was acceptable. It’s a little surprising that a bunch of people think killing an insurance CEO is on the other side of the line, but it shouldn’t be surprising that there is a line.
Society is unhealthy. We agree on that. Why do you think it’s so? Is it just something that happens randomly, or is there an underlying reason?