But that would crush Danlalan’s whole point, and we’d have to start arguing again from a whole new angle…

You need to re-read my argument, this is the very essence of it.

You seem to believe there is some set of ethereal standards that exist independently of humans, and I would argue most strenuously that there is not. We humans, whole, unique and individual make all of this stuff up.

“But no mental map ever matches perfectly with the objective world.”I would say this is probably true. But this doesn’t mean we can’t try to get closer to a map that fits.

This is probably the most personal, private and important thing a person can do. Admitting the flaws in our existing maps is vital to improving them, and very few things are harder. And I can guarantee with absolute moral certainty and easily provide proof that all of our mental maps are flawed if you like.

“Whatever we might wish, human beings are not all noble and kind creatures by nature.”
You make a philosophical claim. I would tend to disagree with it.“We are not biological automatons, but we have innate tendencies.”
The question of whether we are or aren’t predetermined by our nature is also a philosophical question.

These are most decidedly NOT philosophical claims. I forward them as a scientific theories, for which there is a great deal of empirical evidence in support. They are, however, falsifiable. I call on you to produce any evidence, any evidence at all, that all humans are noble and kind, or that we do not have innate tendencies if you truly disagree.

Which brings us back to the fact that I’m still not against methods of enforcing a common framework. This doesn’t mean that I can’t be against the current methods that serve to uphold a current framework I am against.

Fair enough. No one would argue that the current system is not flawed, but it appears to be the best of all the options presented to date. If you have a better idea, please present it. There is probably a Nobel in it for you. If you’re going to tear down the house, you might want to have someplace else to live first.

“There is no right or wrong that applies to these elements that exists independently of our collective definitions of what constitutes right and wrong.” I’m not sure I understand. What exactly are our “collective definitions of what constitutes right and wrong”? Could you give an example?

Let me turn this around. Can you provide a single example of anything that is right or wrong independently of it being defined as such?

Again, We make all of this up. There is not a cosmic definition of “rightness”, just human ones.
Once you can admit that one persons definition of right can differ from another persons definition of right, we must either operate from collective, negotiated agreements or allow one persons ideas to be forced on everyone else. There is no third option.

I’ll let you respond to these before continuing. These points are vital to the rest of the argument.

If you pull some random fellow off the street and tell him, “Dude! I just saw a guy hit your sister in the face,” he would be outraged.

If you tell him, “Dude! I just saw a guy hit your sister in the face, and oh by the way the guy was a cop,” he’d say cops are heroes protecting us from evil and his sister must have brought it on herself.

Even if Failix would come back and just say “yeah, that was stupid, I guess I need to think about this some more” I would gain a lot of respect for him.

Nah, don’t worry I’d let you know. I may be young and pretentious, but I’m definitely not afraid of admitting mistakes.

Okay, Danlalan:

My logic wasn’t defined enough… but it isn’t a coincidence that I don’t respect soldiers and police officers, but respect other jobs (that could require physical violence like the ones you cite).
It has something to do with the fact that they defend a law, that isn’t necessarily in unison with their personal beliefs, but they are ready to put aside their individuality to blindly serve that law.
Soldiers don’t necessarily kill people or fight wars they want to. They still do it. We celebrate them as heroes when there really is no reason to do so. The Military should exist for defense, not invasion or attack, Soldiers don’t care though.

I think there’s a big connection between the points you both make…

So, Xopher:

“Teresa’s classic criticism of a certain particularly thoughtless subspecies of Libertarian”

It’s not only Teresa’s criticism of Libertarianism… I agree a 100% with what she says here. I’m not a libertarian if that’s what you want to know…(kind of felt like the elephant in the room)

To believe that a job needs to be done and yet disrespect the people who do that job by reason of the job itself is a form of caste snobbery.

Caste snobbery… like… I’m an elitist and dismiss cops because they often come from a different “caste” than the “elite” I presumably am?

Wouldn’t it be more hypocrite to pretend to respect people because you need them to do a dirty job you disagree with?

If you agree that the job must be done, then it follows that there must be people who do it, and there’s no justification for disrespecting the ones who do.

I think that line of thought leads to a fallacious conclusion. Something can be necessary to the continuing/maintaining/upholding of a current state/situation, and still be wrong.

If I think it’s wrong for (among others) the reasons I cited, isn’t it way more hypocritical to pretend that I respect it, just because I need it?
if you ask me, if I was ready to suffer the consequences of what would follow, if these people didn’t want to protect me because they happen to know I don’t respect them? Yes, of course. I regularly do face some of the consequences. E.g. Cops (not all) often guess that people in an anti-nuclear protest for example, are also people who aren’t likely to respect them. So they hit them.

I don’t want people to occupy such functions. But instead of going into hypothetical anarchies here (it’s not very productive), let’s say my wish came to be true, and people, didn’t want to do these jobs anymore, because they thought it was conflicting with their ethics/ideologies. Think about it, if we were able to achieve a society like that, we’d be already very close to the Buddhist-like society you’re talking about. At that point, maybe the job of policing would look completely different, and I could be more precise with my condemnations.
On the other hand, of course I don’t think that our current society would be necessarily better off with no policing at all. I’m not a complete moron.

We encourage people to take enormous risks for their lives, and abandon their individuality, to do something we wouldn’t want to do ourselves. that’s what I call hypocritical…

Sorry again for the late answer. I hope you still see this necro-post.

I’m wondering what the best long-term solution is for preventing this kind of shit. A few cases made into examples where the cops responsible get the book thrown at them? A statewide meta-police program whose only task is to investigate cop abuses? I can imagine the last one being very interesting when interacting with civilians for evidence: “It’s okay, ma’am, anything you say cannot be used against you.”

But it sure doesn’t look that way from the video. For one, the protester is restrained. I’ve never heard of or seen infiltrators be put in restraints, let alone left in them. The normal procedure is the cops snatch them, get them behind police lines or away from other demonstrators, and then release them. Second, the protester seems to be taking direction from the other cops, which wouldn’t make sense unless he really was a captive.

It’s completely in keeping with the way cops are trained to relate to these events, though. It’s just good, crazy fun to them. Like a frat hazing, or something. They might look like dispassionate robo-enforcers in their armor, but really they go out on the streets during a demonstration excited. Hoping to get some action, crack some heads.

I’ve been involved in anarchist protests where officers have shouted at us things like “can y’all please do something so we can beat you?”. They want to fight even more than the most militant activist, which goes a long way toward explaining their behavior.

There is no such thing as right or wrong
There is only pleasure or pain.
So when we say do unto others
As we would have do unto us,
Make damn sure the people you are dealing with
Aren’t into a good spanking,
Unless you enjoy a good spanking too.

The golden rule is shit, unless everyone derives the same pleasure from all actions.

I believe this is a more universal way of categorizing our actions. Right and wrong are concepts, pleasure and pain are metrics. Cutting peoples hearts out to appease gods is not always considered wrong, but inflicting physical or psychological pain on another human, against their free will, is the same in any context.

Consider two lies:

1. This car runs great!

2. Don’t worry, you’re ok.

Defining actions by the results, ie does this action produce pleasure for everyone or pain for some and pleasure for others, will always hold true.

Obviously, some find pleasure in pain, but this still conforms to my idea as the end result was pleasure for all involved.

Basing our sense of right and wrong on collective opinion can produce a pyramid covered in blood.

Now, necessity is another matter. Is it sometimes necessary to inflict pain? Yes.

Pacifism is not always a viable option, but should be considered as part of the solution in varying degree.

All things being equal, if the majority reacts with pacifism then they will prevail, but a minority faced with a violent majority determined to liquidate all opposition will need to decide how they wish to die, on their feet or knees.

Just as even a similarly determined minority with superior arms must also be violently resisted.

At any rate, whether resisting violence and oppression with pacifism or violence, we must be ready to die and our enemies must understand we are ready to die.

I could hear your thoughts from here, that’s why I put up the disclaimer. :)

Lets concentrate on 2 points, human nature, and the nature of right and wrong.

I am not saying that there are not philosophical arguments about human nature and innate tendencies, I’m saying that I am making my working hypotheses about these things based on empirical evidence, regardless of the state of the philosophical debate.(to steal someones quote: philosophy is either religion without god, or science without data) I highly recommend you read Hume.

from your link:

With regard to the Big Five personality traits as well as adult IQ in the general U.S. population, the portion of the overall variance that can be attributed to shared family effects is often negligible. On the other hand, most traits are thought to be at least partially heritable. In this context, the “nature” component of the variance is generally thought to be more important than that ascribed to the influence of family upbringing.

This is science, not philosophy.

The conclusions are based on statistical analysis of empirical data that makes a pretty clear correlative link between inheritance and “the Big Five personality traits”. I strongly encourage you to do more rigorous academic research on the subject than wikipedia, there has been an overwhelming amount of research done on this subject, and the results are in substantial agreement. While correlation is not necessarily causation, it certainly makes causation possible, and in the absence of other causative theories, even likely.

While there is considerable debate about how much influence genetics have, the empirical evidence is pretty clear that at least some portion of those traits which affect our behavior is inherited, and that it varies from person to person like any other heritable trait.

If you choose to disregard the evidence, please justify your decision.

And I am not saying that there is no right or wrong. The fact that we are talking about them means the concepts exist. And I personally believe the concepts are useful. It is determining what they are that causes all the argument.

Lets assume for a moment that you are correct, and things have inherent qualities of “rightness” or “wrongness” that are akin to concepts from physics, like spin, charge, or mass. The question still remains: how do we determine what those qualities are? In physics the qualities are determined via experimentation, observation, and the interpretation of empirical data. Absent the data, any assertion about those qualities is nothing but opinion and speculation, and almost certain to be wrong.

What test should we perform to determine what qualities of right or wrong any particular things possess, to avoid leaving them to opinion and speculation?

I await your responses before continuing. (and please, your thoughts, not links to other peoples thoughts)

I think that if anyone of us here were in the same position,surrounded by people with guns, we might be posing as well….although the agent provocateur thought crossed my mind as well.

When I was surrounded by angry police with guns, all pointed at me and mostly cocked, I didn’t give them anything but legally required compliance along with explicit descriptions of how screwed they were.

They believed me too.

(I also told them the bad guys were getting away. But that is where the situation deviates.)

This may be the crux of the issue. A Just Society is a platonic ideal. It cannot possibly exist by definition, because it is an ideal state that can only exist in our individual minds. I can agree with you that there is such a potential state, but I would contend that until we (and by we I mean humanity) can collectively agree about the definition of every element that goes into making A Just Society it cannot exist in reality. The real world is much messier. There are many, many states of reality that lie between two platonic ideals, in this case Just Society and Unjust Society. The same can be said for almost any set of concepts you care to name, like right and wrong. A dialectic process is useful for us as a mental tool for arriving at some conclusion, but it rarely maps well onto the real world.

We are a collection of individuals trying to make our way through life, and outside of the laws of physics and chemistry, there are no rules imposed on us by the fact of our existence. We are literally making up the rules as we go along. Our individual experiences and genetics make each of the subjective internal mental maps by which we navigate through the objective external world unique. But no mental map ever matches perfectly with the objective world.

Each of us has our own idea of what the definition of the elements that make up A Just Society are. Some of these are widely shared, some not so much. There is no right or wrong that applies to these elements that exists independently of our collective definitions of what constitutes right and wrong.

Whatever we might wish, human beings are not all noble and kind creatures by nature. We are not biological automatons, but we have innate tendencies. We are animals that have come from those earlier animals that produced the most offspring, which does not always lend itself to any innate tendency for nobility and kindness. We evolved living in small family groups, and when we started living in more extended societies about ten thousand years ago or so, the default ruler was the biggest(sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively), meanest guy around. Feel free to examine history for the ample evidence of this.

Constitutional Governments are by no means perfect but the alternative is letting the biggest meanest guy run things again. The direct lineage of our iteration of constitutional government is only about 800 years old. The US Constitution (a whopping 230 years old) exists to give us some common ground. If we wish to work towards A Just Society, as I do and you say you do, we need to have that common framework. Because, as has been noted, human beings are not all kind and noble creatures by nature, this means rules. And rules that we must have a method of enforcing. Which brings us back to cops.

Cops are, at the most abstract, the instruments of our collective will. These are unique individuals (like everyone else) who either personally hold the codified, semi-collective ideas specified by the state as personal values, or have agreed to forswear their individual ideas of what should be done at each moment in favor of the state specified ideas in the service of our collective endeavor to find A Just Society. These are the people who we ask to impose order (as defined by the laws) on the chaos of the rest of us arguing about each element that makes up A Just Society. Some of them are better at it than others.

You say “It has something to do with the fact that they defend a law, that isn’t necessarily in unison with their personal beliefs, but they are ready to put aside their individuality to blindly serve that law.” But it is the police that fail in their attempt to abandon their individuality that you are most angry about.

The guidelines that our collective gives police to act by includes the ideas of no excessive force, treating people with respect, acting with restraint and so on. But it is the ones who break with those ideas, substituting their personal beliefs and using excessive force, losing control and disrespecting other citizens that you despise.

You have agreed that police are necessary. I would argue that for our purposes there are three kinds of cops.
1)Police who have internalized our state-codified ideas of right and wrong, and who follow their internal, personal ideas in their conduct.
2)Police who successfully abandon their personal ideas of behavior and follow the state-codified ones.
3)Police who ignore the state codified ideas and act on their personal ideas of right and wrong even when it departs from the state-codified ideas.

From all you have said, I cannot see how you can possibly logically have any issue with the type 1 cop.
The type 2 cop presents a far more interesting case. This is an individual doing a job we all see as necessary to achieving our collective goals, and who manages to act as we wish rather than as they wish. This requires a kind of internal discipline that few of us have.
I would argue that both of these types of police deserve our respect.

It is the type 3 cop that causes all of the trouble. This cop I have no respect for, this is the cop who punches girls on bikes and beats prisoners in handcuffs, and all of the other bad things that cops have been known to do.

Does this make sense to you?

As someone in the last thread said, these are good people doing a hard job. You can’t really begrudge them a pleasant photo op here and there.

Indubitably! We would probably find them charming were we to meet them socially.

Right and wrong are resultant opinions, based on our perceptions of the net effect of our actions.

Absent measuring the net effect of our actions, does this action result in a net increase or decrease in suffering, right and wrong are both transitory.

i don’t presume guilt and i don’t presume innocence, but there’s not enough information in that 0:26 for me to understand the context. halp!

I’m not saying that there aren’t scientific facts that let us define and predetermine human behavior. I’m just saying that they allow different philosophical conclusions.

“It is determining what they (right and wrong) are that causes all the argument.”

Precisely.

“Absent the data, any assertion about those qualities is nothing but opinion and speculation, and almost certain to be wrong.”

It’s not like we have no data. You were the one who wanted to tell me that human history was empirical evidence for the badness of human beings. All I’m saying (like you stated yourself) is that we can’t conclude from that data whether human beings are in a state of nature, good or bad. In other words, is it their environment that corrupts them, or their (human) nature, or both?

“how do we determine what those qualities are?”

I agree that whether something is right or wrong, is not as easy to determine as in natural or formal sciences. But I believe there is a right and wrong in social sciences too, and we can find it, it may take more than thousands of human generations to come close to a “right”, but if it exists and we don’t come off the path, we can reach the goal. How? Experimentation. Natural, formal, and applied sciences can help in finding a good environment for human beings. E.g. [damn you godwin] is scientifically (natural sciences) wrong, so we don’t even need to experiment with it. Unfortunately we also have the experience of it. Now I think it wasn’t right, whatever right is, this wasn’t it.

“I highly recommend you read Hume.”

I don’t know about you, but I was forced to read it in ninth grade.

“I strongly encourage you to do more rigorous academic research on the subject than wikipedia”

First, there’s nothing non-academic about wikipedia. Second, I was just showing you that you were saying things that aren’t seen as common scientific knowledge, but common philosophical questions. Also, you didn’t even need these to make your points. Now, all you’re doing is contradicting yourself.

“I’m saying that I am making my working hypotheses about these things based on empirical evidence, regardless of the state of the philosophical debate.”

Your working hypotheses was: “Whatever we might wish, human beings are not all noble and kind creatures by nature.” (correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s what I understood.)

Empirical evidence (Big Five): “Agreeableness – a tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others.” (from wikipedia)

It’s not that I don’t enjoy philosophical debates, but I don’t understand what your point is. Just tell me what you want to prove already. That we need a society? I totally agree, we need human societies to fight the difficulties of our environment in order to continue existing, we need a social contract and a strong common framework. So what? I still don’t like cops.

Xopher,

“Conversely there is no scientific correctness or incorrectness to “it’s wrong to do violence to others.” That’s a moral judgment, not a fact.”

It depends, in certain circumstances it’s wrong, in others it’s the only right thing to do. I see what you mean, and basically agree. But I think certain “moral judgments” can be superior to others, and closer to a state of correctness à la “bingo!”.

“Speaking of puns, did you get my joke about Bayatus?”

Wait! I’m still trying to figure it out. ^^

Foetusnail,

“Nothing is inherently right or wrong.”

Prove it.

“Right and wrong are resultant opinions, based on our perceptions of the net effect of our actions.”

I could’ve argued that it’s my opinion that cops are assholes based on my perceptions of the net effect of my actions and it wouldn’t have made me right.

Personally, I think that as long as we DO need police (and I certainly think we do), automatically disrespecting anyone who chooses that job, on whatever grounds, seems hypocritical as long as you choose to live in society.

This goes back to Teresa’s classic criticism of a certain particularly thoughtless subspecies of Libertarian: the ones who think all restrictions on them are bad and immoral, or even count as “violence.” As she has pointed out to them (not that they listen), there’s a social contract whether you like it or not; that contract covers most of the reasonable places to live; you can either act as a signatory to it or remove yourself from its territory. It is not reasonable to expect to get the benefits of the contract without consideration (that is, accepting its restrictions and obligations).

My objection to your formulation (the one beginning “All cops are people who chose a job…”) is similar. Do you believe that our society could get along with no police at all? If so, how? How would we prevent the subset of people who really do want to kill you and me and take our stuff, or enslave us or our loved ones in filthy basements, or blow up buses full of schoolchildren from doing so? Posses? Vigilante groups of self-empowered citizens? We’ve tried those things, and they are much worse than having an organized and legally controlled quasi-military organization (that is, the polics) take that responsibility.

If, like me, you do NOT believe that society can get along without police short of achieving the social nirvana of really having NO people who would do violence, or steal, or [insert long list of acts bad enough for society that we outlaw them], then how can you in good conscience disrespect all police? If you agree that the job must be done, then it follows that there must be people who do it, and there’s no justification for disrespecting the ones who do.

To believe that a job needs to be done and yet disrespect the people who do that job by reason of the job itself is a form of caste snobbery. I detest and loathe caste snobs, and treat them with as much disrespect as my training in courtesy will allow. Are you simply a caste snob? I’m hoping that your position is actually more nuanced, and that you’ll be willing to explain it.

By the way, the italics in the previous paragraph are important. I feel that the behavior shown by the police in this video needs to be investigated, and that if it proves to be what it appears (to me; others have more benign interpretations), they should be punished. I believe that the police need to be held accountable for their actions; I believe that they need to be watched more carefully and regulated much more closely than is presently the case. I favor the “on duty == on camera” idea as a partial solution.

But, while I wouldn’t talk to the police without a lawyer present no matter what the circumstances (beyond “Officer, which way is it to 59th Street” and so on), I will treat them with the respect every human soul deserves, until and unless they earn my disrespect.