The Zen of Quakerism (2016)

I would comfortably say I completely share this conviction. I would not like to find myself in a position where that conviction was tested -- such as that you describe -- but not killing is almost universally understood to be a fundamental law of civilised society.

One can defend oneself and others in a myriad of ways that do not involve murder.

What methods are you referring to? Pepper spray? Aiming for the leg?

> that do not involve murder.

By definition if one is defending oneself, one is not committing murder.

Despite the fact that I think you understood what they were saying perfectly fine, you can substitute "killing someone" (or "taking another life", etc.) for "murder" in their above sentence if it helps you.

specproc: I have to say I'm fortunate enough never to have found myself in that situation. Is this something that happens regularly in America?

We all know it's not common in any industrialized society for a parent to have to kill to protect their child's life. And asking laurent_du about the American experience may not be productive as he or she may never have been to America.

Regardless, the frequency of a situation is not relevant to a discussion of what a person would or should do in that situation.

As we used to say in the military, "the enemy gets a vote, too". You may find that your non-lethal methods of self defense come up short when the enemy is equipped with a knife or gun. Or at the state level, perhaps a ballistic missile. There have been plenty of victims of those in the media recently. What non-lethal methods would you recommend they use to protect themselves?

If you want your society (and by extension your belief system) to survive, there must be a segment of that society that is at least willing to engage in lethal violence, if only as a last resort. You do not get to hide behind others who are willing to do your moral dirty work and declare yourself morally superior to them. That's like a meat eater looking down on slaughterhouse workers because he bought his meat at the store (I say this as a meat eater myself).

Murder and manslaughter occurs in every country. Violence is hyperlocal and can be entirely stochastic. There are simply broken humans everywhere.

>One can defend oneself and others in a myriad of ways that do not involve murder.

Too much fiction, not enough fighting experience. There are myriad ways in which you cannot effectively defend yourself and cannot flee in these lose-lose scenarios. There largely wouldn't be victims, if this were true.

Violence is abhorrent. Frequency is relevant because one can base one's life and actions on principles of nonviolence, and deal with such extreme situations in the unlikely event they ever come up.

It's a dumb playground question, like would I cheat on my wife if $FAMOUS_HOTTIE came on to me.

One can live one's life by not being violent, by not working in violent industries, by not owning weapons, by seeking and promoting solutions that do not involve violence in one's community and national politics. This is a morally correct life.

Sure, one day, someone might try and kill my child. I hope it never happens, and I hope that situation could be resolved without anyone dying.

But say, somewhere in this long tail, I killed to defend, I don't believe that would invalidate how I've lived the rest of my life.

Only extremists create their principles from extreme cases.

Dumb drunk guy swung at my face, I took it, a bunch of bystanders jumped on him and hauled him off. Pretty much end of story.

I've plenty of fighting experience, the ones that have ended badly for me have been the ones where I've fought back.

Obviously not the trolley problem-esque situation from the context, but my core point is that one cannot construct morality from extreme hypotheticals.

Isn’t that what happens when we codify limits of behavior, which are often extreme, into laws or religious texts which then govern a population?

Even if you don’t consider law as de facto defining morality, moral lessons from literature to oral tradition are often handed down as metaphor through stories of finding balance between extreme outcomes.

Where we run into trouble is where we say, well here is an example of a case where this extreme behaviour may be countenanced.

There may well be such cases! If I had a gun (I don't) and someone was attacking a loved one (fortunately rarely if ever happened) with intent and ability to kill (definitely never) and the only way I could stop them because of the specific situation was to kill them (waaay down the tail now)... perhaps, I don't know how I would react in that situation.

Here's where ethics becomes like programming. I could sit down and come up with a list of cases in which I felt it appropriate to kill, and code all the edge cases. This is inefficient and sorta silly, and I guess how I chose to interpret the comment that started this thread.

I could come also up with a clever algorithm which balances harm done and harm prevented (or good caused) based on a range of parameters. I think this is more what GP was pointing to, a teleological ethics. But what model? What parameters? What loss function? Which libraries?

My position here, at least on violence is deontological. If everyone can write their own crufty (and inevitably closed-source) solution to the problem, then bad actors can (and do) code it so they get the results they want when they need them. The result is a violent world.

The cleaner, more elegant, and more ethical code simply prohibits harmful outcomes altogether. I suspect derivations from this initial simplicity in religious texts and interpretations are malicious code added in later updates.