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For what it's worth, I am actually aware of a funeral where the priest digressed into the idea that the deceased died on a road where people are known to drive
by shadowgovt 1y ago
For what it's worth, I am actually aware of a funeral where the priest digressed into the idea that the deceased died on a road where people are known to drive recklessly and this is the expected outcome of that behavior, and prayed that the city would take the necessary steps to make that road safer so that we had fewer funerals like this one. It did not go over well with the congregation. ;) Mourners usually want to focus on the individual, not how that individual fits into a larger societal structure.
> He was targeted and intentionally killed, for reasons that have no demonstrated connection to the issue.
Right, you get it.
> This is simply not comparable to an observation that some number of unspecified people might die as a result of a policy.
... You were so close to getting it. Your argument is like asserting that every instance of a class is its own unique thing and has no relation to the class. When the whole point of object oriented programming is that we can make sweeping changes to the behavior of instances with relatively small modifications to the class.
The class is policy. The instances are deaths.
Kirk was not only satisfied with but advocated for the current structure of the "GunRights" class. Then someone operating under the rules of an instance of that class killed him.
It's not right that he's dead. It's not right that any of the victims of gun violence at the hands of strangers died. But in Kirk's case, one must observe that he died as predictable consequence of the political philosophy he espoused. It's just usually other people paying the price for his philosophy, not him.
(Also, I'm fairly certain you know already that your mayor getting run over by a hitman metaphor breaks down because hitmen don't use cars. That's not the tool designed for killing people. There's another tool designed for killing people, one far more effective at it. Hitmen use that one.)
- zahlman 1y ago> Your argument is like asserting that every instance of a class is its own unique thing and has no relation to the class. No, it is not. > one must observe that he died as predictable consequence of the political philosophy he espoused. No, one must not observe that, because his death was neither predictable (unless you think the "hex" Jezebel placed on him was real and effective) nor a consequence. You are looking at a policy enabling an act (one which existed literally for centuries before Kirk's argument), and saying that this is the same as a political philosophy causing that act. > (Also, I'm fairly certain you know already that your mayor getting run over by a hitman metaphor breaks down because hitmen don't use cars. That's not the tool designed for killing people. There's another tool designed for killing people, one far more effective at it. Hitmen use that one.) Vehicular homicide can in fact be intentional.
- shadowgovt 1y agoI am not arguing cause. I'm arguing that the policy enabling an act enabled the act, and we therefore shouldn't be surprised when the act occurs. Are you surprised? Is that why you keep pulling this thread? To understand why you were surprised when you shouldn't be?
- zahlman 1y agoIf you are not arguing cause, then you should not use the words "predictable consequence" in reference to a specific incident, because that is equivalent to arguing cause. I am surprised, because I don't understand what you think the words mean.
- shadowgovt 1y agoA man argues that we don't need to salt roads in the winter. Argues it for years. Argues that nature takes care of roads and that actually it's important we leave them in their natural state. When people note that means people will die driving in icy road conditions, he declares that's the price you pay for natural roads and, anyway, it doesn't matter because most road fatalities are bad drivers anyway. He drives one winter, slides right off the road, his car wraps around a tree, and he dies. Did he cause his death? No. Conditions did. Conditions and some bad luck. Is his death a predictable consequence of the conditions, the conditions he argued were necessary to preserve? Yes. Do I feel sorry for him? It's hard for me, personally, to feel sorry for someone who got to drive on those icy roads he loved for so long before the dice rolled bad for him. But I've known too many, personally, who died on these roads, so my empathy on that specific topic is a bit burned out. It's reserved for those who advocate strongly that we could plow and salt these roads and then die anyway.
- zahlman 1y ago> Is his death a predictable consequence "Predictable" requires: "could a reasonable person have held a high prior probability of that man, specifically, dying in this manner?" No. The definition of "consequence" is conflated. The motte is "the conditions increased the probability of the event". The bailey is something like "the event follows from the conditions due to moral law". For example, when people speak of "consequences" for a crime, they refer to punishment. If we reflect the analogy back onto the original case, we're talking about situation in which our anti-road-salt activist lived in a world where the roads were already not salted, and had no direct control over that policy and negligible impact on the minds of those who do. Further, his words should have made him no more likely to die than anyone else driving on the same road. Except for the fact that the road is supposed to be analogous to the shooter, who in reality had consciousness and a motive.