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I'm not sure "clearly wrong" is so clear. Consider a police officer detaining two people who were fighting in public, when one of them was acting in self-defen

by strken 3y ago

I'm not sure "clearly wrong" is so clear. Consider a police officer detaining two people who were fighting in public, when one of them was acting in self-defence. This is the kind of thing I imagine when I hear "clearly wrong", but the authority figure is acting on the higher principle of maintaining public order, and may not have the necessary proof to let one person go. It could be more important to prioritise the immediate safety of everyone involved and sort out the details later, even at the cost of detaining the victim for a short time. There's not always time to explain what's going on, and an explanation would be a distraction from calming down the main conflict. On the software side, consider a presentation given by a co-worker who recently got off bereavement leave, where there's a significant error in one of the slides that makes it seem like the design of the whole component is fatally flawed. Your boss tries to move on from the slide without giving you time to criticise it, because she knows your co-worker is emotionally vulnerable right now and wants to address the flaw in private. Your boss can't necessarily explain this in public because doing so would cause the same problem she's seeking to avoid. When people talk in the abstract about authority being clearly wrong, I'm never sure whether it's a case like these ones where higher moral principles are at stake.

mindslight 3y ago
> It could be more important to prioritise the immediate safety of everyone involved and sort out the details later I'd say there is a higher principle involved, and per your justification the authority's action is not clearly wrong. I deliberately avoided specific examples due to the inevitable lines of people that will jump in to justify authorities' actions, but surely you can imagine some of what you consider to be clearly unjust by authorities that people will nevertheless defend? > even at the cost of detaining the victim for a short time. I'd say this is where things start to go wrong, as people start to defer to unjust authority and just accept its collateral damage, rather than demanding eventual justice. In this situation, the victim has been harmed by the officer and the state, regardless of the officer's actions being the most prudent from their perspective. Justice would be that victim being made whole, rather than externalizing the true cost of policing in a perverse reverse lottery.
- strken 3y ago
  Yeah, it's an interesting moral quandary and you run into questions of who, exactly, is responsible for making a victim whole again. I was talking more about the immediate issue of the arrest rather than the follow-up, though. An impression I have from some autistic former co-workers is that, when faced with a situation where there was a surface-level injustice and a more abstract justification for the injustice, that they would often not see the justification. This was particularly bad if it involved social cues like "that crowd of drunk people looks unpredictable and the police need to stop the fight so nobody else gets involved, so I shouldn't argue with them now", or "Bob looks like he's about to cry and is getting defensive, so we should back off this line of questioning". If you miss the murky social details then you're going to read those examples as clearly unjust.
  - mindslight 3y ago
    People can certainly be wrong, and following authorities will actually get you the right answer most of the time. Like I've gone somewhat critical of police in a sibling comment (and very critical elsewhere), and yet I still recognize that the large majority of what police do is prudent, proper, and justified. IMO it's important to hold both of these perspectives in one's head. So your common imagined autistic case doesn't really speak to my general point - cases where authority is actually wrong and yet people line up behind it anyway with all sorts of justifications. These topics tend to get highly politicized as one tribe lines up behind the injustice and the other lines up behind the authority, but surely regardless of your latent tribe you can see that the phenomenon exists.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  There are a lot of situations in which I'd argue in favor of what you're saying. Breaking up a fight isn't one of them. Not sure how many fights you've seen in real life but they are not professional boxing matches with relatively evenly trained matched opponents. Somebody is usually losing and losing badly. Somebody could be hurt or killed with even a moment's hesitation. Should firefighters have to pay restitution for trampling your garden while preventing your house from burning down? Or paramedics for slicing off your clothing while attempting to save your life? Do you think that paying restitution for these sorts of situations would have unintended negative consequences such as making emergency situations more expensive or even thwarting them entirely by making them unsustainable? We should aggressively police our police, and the whole system is kind of broken in general, but I think we should save the restorative and punitive action for situations in which police or emergency services have actually done something wrong.

by strken 3y ago

mindslight 3y ago

> It could be more important to prioritise the immediate safety of everyone involved and sort out the details later I'd say there is a higher principle involved, and per your justification the authority's action is not clearly wrong. I deliberately avoided specific examples due to the inevitable lines of people that will jump in to justify authorities' actions, but surely you can imagine some of what you consider to be clearly unjust by authorities that people will nevertheless defend? > even at the cost of detaining the victim for a short time. I'd say this is where things start to go wrong, as people start to defer to unjust authority and just accept its collateral damage, rather than demanding eventual justice. In this situation, the victim has been harmed by the officer and the state, regardless of the officer's actions being the most prudent from their perspective. Justice would be that victim being made whole, rather than externalizing the true cost of policing in a perverse reverse lottery.

strken 3y ago
Yeah, it's an interesting moral quandary and you run into questions of who, exactly, is responsible for making a victim whole again. I was talking more about the immediate issue of the arrest rather than the follow-up, though. An impression I have from some autistic former co-workers is that, when faced with a situation where there was a surface-level injustice and a more abstract justification for the injustice, that they would often not see the justification. This was particularly bad if it involved social cues like "that crowd of drunk people looks unpredictable and the police need to stop the fight so nobody else gets involved, so I shouldn't argue with them now", or "Bob looks like he's about to cry and is getting defensive, so we should back off this line of questioning". If you miss the murky social details then you're going to read those examples as clearly unjust.
- mindslight 3y ago
  People can certainly be wrong, and following authorities will actually get you the right answer most of the time. Like I've gone somewhat critical of police in a sibling comment (and very critical elsewhere), and yet I still recognize that the large majority of what police do is prudent, proper, and justified. IMO it's important to hold both of these perspectives in one's head. So your common imagined autistic case doesn't really speak to my general point - cases where authority is actually wrong and yet people line up behind it anyway with all sorts of justifications. These topics tend to get highly politicized as one tribe lines up behind the injustice and the other lines up behind the authority, but surely regardless of your latent tribe you can see that the phenomenon exists.
JohnBooty 3y ago
There are a lot of situations in which I'd argue in favor of what you're saying. Breaking up a fight isn't one of them. Not sure how many fights you've seen in real life but they are not professional boxing matches with relatively evenly trained matched opponents. Somebody is usually losing and losing badly. Somebody could be hurt or killed with even a moment's hesitation. Should firefighters have to pay restitution for trampling your garden while preventing your house from burning down? Or paramedics for slicing off your clothing while attempting to save your life? Do you think that paying restitution for these sorts of situations would have unintended negative consequences such as making emergency situations more expensive or even thwarting them entirely by making them unsustainable? We should aggressively police our police, and the whole system is kind of broken in general, but I think we should save the restorative and punitive action for situations in which police or emergency services have actually done something wrong.