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You use an extreme example as a red herring. There are very few aggressive napalm-obsessive maniacs (outside the military agencies), but there are tons of regul

You use an extreme example as a red herring. There are very few aggressive napalm-obsessive maniacs (outside the military agencies), but there are tons of regular folks who do no harm to anybody, but are constantly threatened by quirks in the laws. Do you know for 100% sure that you have paid all your taxes and filled all the forms correctly and never misspelled or accidentally lied in some gov. paper? So that if someone would want your ass, they would never find anything in your history against you? With such amount of laws, regulations, police abuse and complex expensive judicial system, you can never feel safe. So please don't think that some abstract triple-arsonist is your biggest threat. Your biggest threat is IRS. When your govt wants to kill some arabs, they will force you to pay for that and you cannot unsubscribe. And then you, not the govt will receive terrorist bombings in response. And while I don't think that taking drugs is a good idea, I don't think paying for fighting them should be compulsory on the part of general population outgunned by the police and brainwashed in public schools.

sliverstorm 14y ago
He was speaking in clear absolutes, so I think an extreme example is a perfectly valid way to open.
- oleganza 14y ago
  Ok, correction: I think ethics is akin to medicine or nutrition. It really helps if you consistently apply it everywhere in order to prevent extreme scenarios. And when they occur, and ethics do not help, it's not a failure of ethics, but your failure to use ethics to avoid situation when someone actually threatens you with a nuke. To say that general rule "do not use violence" does not work in extreme cases, is like saying that medicine is useless because it cannot make you perfectly healthy when you have a heart attack. But it is useful because it helps you to prevent heart attack in the first place. And if you ignored the knowledge and now having a heart attack, then how can you say that it is useless?

sliverstorm 14y ago

He was speaking in clear absolutes, so I think an extreme example is a perfectly valid way to open.

oleganza 14y ago
Ok, correction: I think ethics is akin to medicine or nutrition. It really helps if you consistently apply it everywhere in order to prevent extreme scenarios. And when they occur, and ethics do not help, it's not a failure of ethics, but your failure to use ethics to avoid situation when someone actually threatens you with a nuke. To say that general rule "do not use violence" does not work in extreme cases, is like saying that medicine is useless because it cannot make you perfectly healthy when you have a heart attack. But it is useful because it helps you to prevent heart attack in the first place. And if you ignored the knowledge and now having a heart attack, then how can you say that it is useless?