Let me put it this way, if one of your children grew up to be a murderer, would you stop loving that child?
No. But my child is someone I already loved. A
stranger who becomes a murderer is different -- I didn't love the stranger in the first place.
I think I have a problem with this "love" thing. I don't love strangers. Heck, I don't even love Nelson Mandella! What I feel toward Nelson Mandella is more like, say, admiration. So OK. But why would I admire a murderer?
If you're saying I should respect the murderer's basic humanity to the extent of not wanting him executed or tortured, then fine, I'm with you there, it's what I've been saying along. But to my mind there's a vast difference between not wanting someone executed and loving them.
Also, I think I disagree with at least what I interpret as the implications of this:
I was saying that we should recognize that we are all in the same boat and that all of us are capable of doing horrible things if the circumstances are right. I never suggested that what Dahmer and Mandella did with their lives was in any way equal.
I think all of us are capable of doing bad things, even horrible things, under certain circumstances. But I don't think we're all
equally capable of committing
equal degrees of horror. I don't think Nelson Mandella would turn into Jeffrey Dahmer under any circumstances -- unless you can stretch those circumstances to include mental illness so severe that Nelson Mandella is basically no longer Nelson Mandella. But that's pretty unlikely.
So let's say Nelson Mandella beats up some bikers at the Fourth of July fireworks. That's bad. But he's not going to kidnap and murder a bunch of young men. And to me, to say we're all capable of doing bad things loses much of its meaning if that potential badness isn't at least close to equal.
Nor can I agree with the idea that Jeffrey Dahmer and Nelson Mandella differ merely in the particular environmental circumstances they've encountered. Nelson Mandella has encountered some pretty harsh circumstances. But they're different people. I think one is hardwired to do more bad, the other to do more good. And therefore something in my attitude toward the two -- whether you call it love, respect, admiration, whatever -- is going to reflect that.
So isn't it enough to say I just don't hate Jeffrey Dahmer (and of course, like you, I'm just using Jeffrey Dahmer as a stand-in for all heinous criminals)? Why am I morally obliged to love him?
OK, I'm with you in the sense that in our society, we consider some things unacceptable. But I can't say that they're moral absolutes simply because it's only we that think so. We consider other people's morals wrong, but on what 'moral' high ground are we standing on to say so?
Whoa! Where did the first-person plural come from? I've been talking about what
I consider moral imperatives. I don't necessarily agree with what our society thinks is. I'm not even sure our society thinks cohesively enough about this to say that
anyone in it agrees about morals in anything but a vague way.
Everyone has his or her own moral imperatives -- that is, unless they're moral relativists, who would say that there
are no moral imperatives, that what's right and wrong change with the particular circumstances. Actually, I'm a moral relativist myself about some issues (honoring they father and they mother, for example). But I think that all that stuff is up to every individual to decide for him/herself.
We live in a Republic more than a democracy. We have high goals of everyone being equal and treated equally under the law, but we're still a ways from that actually being the case, so injustices abound. But that doesn' t mean we should totally abandon the experiment.
Exactly. That's why if there are inequalities in the system, we don't just shrug and say that's inevitable. We try to eliminate them.
But here's something I agree with you about, Delalluvia:
Somewhat less? I'm sorry Gary you only need to read the statistics of the percentage of what gender is in prison and who in the world commits the most violence. That isn't a sweetness and light bias - which I never claimed in the first place. And note, you only had homophobic remarks from women. How many have actually offered you violence?
Women are waaayyyy less likely to commit violent acts. This is not to say women are morally superior to men in any (other) way. It's even possible that women support
others committing violent acts -- war, capital punishment -- in equal proportions to men. They may have danced at 9/11. But when it comes to doing violence themselves, women are far less likely to do it.
(The one kind of violence women are more likely to commit is child abuse -- physical, not sexual. But one widely held explanation for this is that women tend to spend much more time around children than men do.)
