Violence is Wrong

The environmental / human violence distinction Larry made a promise to his girlfriend that he would eat a salad every day. She even makes a salad in the morning of the first day, and leaves it in his fridge. When his girlfriend arrives back at his house, to find the salad still in the fridge, Larry replies "I didn't cause the salad not to enter my digestive system! It was an act of nature; the laws of physics, gravity, are what held the salad in it's spot in the fridge." It is in the trolley problem, that a major point of contention between Con and myself becomes clear. Does 'Action A' (leaving the trolley controls alone, and allowing five people to die) constitute 'inaction'? I will reiterate my argument regarding inaction from Round 2, that consciousness is by definition action, so any conscious being is always engaged in action, never inaction. Following from that logic, every choice is an 'active choice', and if something is within a person's power to change, but they choose not to, they have (when talking in terms of morality, rather than physics) 'caused' it not to change. There is no important distinction between 'Action A' and 'Action B'. Con himself made the distinction that morality dictates that we look at things purely in terms of human choice. It then follows that we should look at problems like the trolley example through that lens. The person clearly has two choices, one leading to five deaths, the other leading to one. I contend that both are equally 'active', since there is a negligible difference in the effort involved to enact them, and the person is fully aware of the consequences of either choice. If it were, for instance, very difficult to pull the lever to change tracks, blaming the course of events on nature might be more convincing. To remind us of the distinction Con made, it is this: "A) Destructive acts irrelevant to human causality found in the environment (#3, 4 in his list), and B) Actions taken by humans to injure other humans (#1, 2)." For this to be valid, Action A must be totally irrelevant to human causality; here I have argued that it is not. Whether the five people die directly depends on human causality. In fact, the very fact that the dilemma is presented in terms of a 'moral choice' implies that human causality is involved in either outcome. Otherwise, it would not be a choice. To reiterate my conclusion regarding this section, both choices are violent action, but the preferable one is the less violent. The greater good versus rational self-interest Con posits that there is no contradiction between his advocation of the 'greater good', and the rational self-interest philosophy which supposedly forms the standard by which all morality should be measured. In the trolley dilemma, for example, Con advocated that the less people dying should necessarily be the more moral choice. However, how can this be, if there is not necessarily any difference in personal utility between the two choices? The answer should not be whichever causes the least deaths, but whichever option the guy at the controls gains the most profit from. There is no distinction of personal utility even made in the first place in that instance, so by making a moral distinction at all, when personal utility is irrelevant, Con is contradicting his rational self-interest stance. Is living more violent than self-destruction? Con characterizes life in such a way that makes it seem that we're choosing a more violent option by continuing to live; "In order to counter-act this natural violence, we must do violence to our environment in return, sometimes against other individuals (#B)." Indeed there is some harm done by continuing to live, to others through pollution even just by breathing out, and to nature by eating plants, and so on. However, this is an extremely small amount of violence, while the violence involved in self-destruction is devastating. By continuing to live, we are opting for the less violent option. Sacrificing '#B' for '#A' Con implies that humans must sometimes use violence against other humans, and that this will somehow counteract violence done by nature against humans; "...I believe in an overall decrease in violence against humans found in nature (#A) AND humans (#B), even if that requires an increase in violent human interactions (increasing #B) to accomplish such a goal' Con's logic is clear; in the trolley example, nature is about to cause violence against some humans, and a human comes along and turns it into human/human violence, but also drastically reduces the amount of 'net violence' involved. I will show further issues with this logic below.. What is 'nature'? While Con's characterization of nature might at first seem to make sense, it is actually an obtuse amalgamation of several different concepts: - That which is entirely irrelevant from human causality. - 'The natural world', the universe. - All non-human parts of the universe. Rather than attempting to navigate such a disorienting picture of nature, I propose that nature is simply something like: "the physical world and everything in it (such as plants, animals, mountains, oceans, stars, etc.) that is not made by people" http://www.merriam-webster.com... ...and that humans are a part of nature. We therefore may end up with a much simpler distinction in moral actions, which Con's distinction is superfluous to: If a person has both the ability and knowledge necessary to change something, and does not, they are responsible for it not changing as such. This kind of distinction is absolutely necessary for any judgement regarding moral choice, as we must be able to blame someone equally for the things they don't choose, otherwise there is no variation in morality between choices. This concludes my Round 3, thanks for reading.