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> But now you're arguing for a bunch of policies supported by various sects of Black Lives Matters supporters, all of which could be summed up in various ways a

> But now you're arguing for a bunch of policies supported by various sects of Black Lives Matters supporters, all of which could be summed up in various ways as "reduce police interactions with black people". I think community-oriented policing is actually intended to increase police interactions by adding more non-adversarial interactions in order to establish trust. I don’t think “reduce police interactions with black people” is necessarily desirable if that includes things like ignoring 911 calls from black neighborhoods. In fact, that strikes me as deliberate failure to provide equal protection under the law, and could be even more ruinous to black communities than the status quo. “Reduce police interactions with black people” is yet another thing that might sound like a good idea at the time, but would ultimately lead, in my opinion, to unintended negative consequences for the very black lives it’s intended to protect. Even if your ideal solution would turn out to have fewer police interactions, setting that as a goal is just begging for Goodhart’s Law to manifest itself. Also, I think you’re minimizing nonviolent crime. DUI, car theft, burglary, and arson are all “nonviolent crimes”. We can’t just ignore them. A neighborhood where these things happen frequently is made more dangerous and impoverished by them. So when you talk about having more police presence in black neighborhoods resulting in more non-violent criminals behind bars, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you drive drunk through a black neighborhood, you might run over a black kid, and that black kid’s life sure as hell matters so I hope the police are around to catch you before that happens. If you’re talking about drug crimes and arguing that the enforcement of those laws is worse than the offense, then maybe you should just repeal those laws. And if I disagreed with you about drug laws I might argue the point with you. > People who agree that some form of action is necessary, cool! But people who think the status quo is fine and dandy, that's the group where I can't quite square things We got into this mess by agreeing that some form of action was necessary. Stopping to make sure we aren’t just making things worse is reasonable.

joshuamorton 6y ago
> We got into this mess by agreeing that some form of action was necessary. Stopping to make sure we aren’t just making things worse is reasonable. That isn't what I said. You can agree that the status quo is bad while being unsure of how to fix it (noticing flaws is a lot easier than finding solutions!). I'm speaking about people who believe the status quo is okay.
- philwelch 6y ago
  I think you can believe the status quo is better than the set of changes you are proposing without devaluing the lives of black people. “Okay” is a relative term. Fundamentally, no state of affairs on earth can ever be truly “okay” because humanity is imperfect. No human society is capable of perfect justice. No human society ever has or ever will achieve perfect justice. That means injustice will always exist. > noticing flaws is a lot easier than finding solutions Yes, thank you. That’s my point. We’re all noticing flaws in the status quo. And a lot of people, yourself included, are proposing changes to the status quo. Changes which, in and of themselves, will also have flaws. But I think, as a conventional shorthand for “the best of all possible worlds because humanity is imperfect and damned”, you can just say the status quo is “okay” in that scenario.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    > But I think, as a conventional shorthand for “the best of all possible worlds because humanity is imperfect and damned” Then I'd reject this on moral grounds: Which is a better society: that everyone is approximately equally happy, or that overall happiness is greater, but at the cost of an inequality in happiness based on birthright? I'd claim that the second system is inherently unequal and therefore we should prefer the first even if it is, in a strictly utilitarian sense, better.
    - philwelch 6y ago
      That’s beside the point though. I wasn’t making the argument that some people choose to trade off between different values in different ways. I was making the argument that, even if you hold those values constant, you will never achieve any of them perfectly. To put it in concrete terms: every possible human society has some inequalities based on birthright. Or, as I stated it, perfect justice is impossible. It’s not a question of prioritizing certain values over others, although those questions can and do arise. It’s a question of achieving any one of those values in the real world.
      - 6y ago

joshuamorton 6y ago

> We got into this mess by agreeing that some form of action was necessary. Stopping to make sure we aren’t just making things worse is reasonable. That isn't what I said. You can agree that the status quo is bad while being unsure of how to fix it (noticing flaws is a lot easier than finding solutions!). I'm speaking about people who believe the status quo is okay.

philwelch 6y ago
I think you can believe the status quo is better than the set of changes you are proposing without devaluing the lives of black people. “Okay” is a relative term. Fundamentally, no state of affairs on earth can ever be truly “okay” because humanity is imperfect. No human society is capable of perfect justice. No human society ever has or ever will achieve perfect justice. That means injustice will always exist. > noticing flaws is a lot easier than finding solutions Yes, thank you. That’s my point. We’re all noticing flaws in the status quo. And a lot of people, yourself included, are proposing changes to the status quo. Changes which, in and of themselves, will also have flaws. But I think, as a conventional shorthand for “the best of all possible worlds because humanity is imperfect and damned”, you can just say the status quo is “okay” in that scenario.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  > But I think, as a conventional shorthand for “the best of all possible worlds because humanity is imperfect and damned” Then I'd reject this on moral grounds: Which is a better society: that everyone is approximately equally happy, or that overall happiness is greater, but at the cost of an inequality in happiness based on birthright? I'd claim that the second system is inherently unequal and therefore we should prefer the first even if it is, in a strictly utilitarian sense, better.
  - philwelch 6y ago
    That’s beside the point though. I wasn’t making the argument that some people choose to trade off between different values in different ways. I was making the argument that, even if you hold those values constant, you will never achieve any of them perfectly. To put it in concrete terms: every possible human society has some inequalities based on birthright. Or, as I stated it, perfect justice is impossible. It’s not a question of prioritizing certain values over others, although those questions can and do arise. It’s a question of achieving any one of those values in the real world.
    - 6y ago