Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
If you want a diamond necklace that you can't afford, it is necessary to steal it in order to have it.
It is not justified to steal it simply because it was necessary to meet your goals.
You are implicitly assuming that the necessity of self-preservation equates justification on the premise that self-preservation is a just result.
I don't agree.
If two soldiers are fighting for their lives against each other, it may be necessary for each to survive to kill the other.
But the family of the one that dies may not see their loved one's death as justified even if the family of the one that survived sees it that way.
Your self-preservation is worthless to me, and thus justifies nothing. My own self-preservation is literally worth everything to me - and yet if still does not justify my taking everything from you, even if I deem it necessary to achieve my own desires and goals, any more than my desire for a necklace I cannot afford justifies its theft.
There is a distinction between things like stealing bread to save a life where a necessary action is justified by the good that comes out of it and stealing bread to throw away in order to achieve a thrill. Both are necessary to their goals, but one has a goal that justifies the necessary action while the other does not.
I'm saying that there is no goal or good in existence that justifies the inherit evil of mass violence, even if there are a myriad of ways in which mass violence might be necessary to one's goals, with those ranging from ethnic cleansing to fighting tyranny.
Ok, let's stay within the confines of individual self-preservation.
If it is necessary for you to have a new organ to survive, but not enough are available through organ donation programs, does the fact that it is necessary to your survival mean that acquiring an organ from an unwilling donor (directly or though black market proxy) is a justified action?
How about a murderer that killed someone and left witnesses? If they are caught, it would mean they are sentenced to death. So it is necessary for their continued self-preservation to minimize the chances of being caught. Does that make their murder of the witnesses of their earlier crime justified?
Your pithy take on necessity = justification is BS at even a cursory examination.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't have freed the slaves. Just that neither the Union nor the Confederate killing of each other was justified. I'm not saying that the US shouldn't have fought in WW2. Just that bombing Hiroshima wasn't justified.
You are the one conflating necessity with justification. And as such you seem to not be able to wrap your head around that while I'm saying mass violence is never justified, that doesn't mean I'm saying the relative necessity for admirable goals means it was in the best interest of the US to have had a show of overwhelming force at the end of the WW2 conflict in mind of Stalin's USSR post-war or that Sherman was wise to burn crops as he marched through the South to reduce supplies for Confederate opposition.
Edit: Also, thank you for making my point about how the notion of justified violence is a slippery slope that can easily end up justifying atrocities by relativist moralizing there with the whole "by any means necessary."