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Vulture comments on White Lies - Less Wrong
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I knew you were a deontologist (I am a cosequentialist), but I had sort of assumed implicitly that our moralities would line up pretty well in non-extreme situations. I realized after reading this how thoroughly alien your morality is to me. You would respond with outrage and hurt if you discovered that someone had written a defense of throwing paint on people? Or pickpocketing? Although I have never practiced either of those activities and do not plan to ever do so, my reaction is totally different.
Pickpocketing is a perfectly practical technique which, like lockpicking, might be used for unsavory purposes by shortsighted or malicious people, but is probably worth knowing how to do and makes a great party trick. And throwing paint on people? Hilarious. It's not a terribly nice thing to do, especially if the person is wearing nice clothes or is emotionally fragile, but I think most people who can compose a cogent philosophical essay can also target their prankstering semi-competently.
Pickpocketing-as-theft is to lying-in-general as pickpocketing-as-consensual-performance-art is to, say, storytelling, I suppose I should clarify. I think we legitimately disagree about throwing paint on people unless you are being facetious.
In terms of pickpocketing, I agree that we seem to pretty much agree; I think that pickpocketing for the purposes of stealing what doesn't belong to you is rarely justified. I was not being facetious about the paint part, though.
A more realistic example would be something like "In Defense of Taxation to Fund the Welfare State" - which would be different from "In Defense of Lying", because even if I think that taxation to fund the welfare state is immoral, I don't think that someone who holds the opposite position is likely to hold me at gunpoint and demand that I give money to a beggar, but if someone who thinks lying is okay to the degree that OP does, there is a real risk of them lying to me in personal life. More generally, advocating something bad in the abstract isn't as bad as advocating something bad that I'm likely to experience personally.
You should try not paying your taxes on the grounds that you don't want to support the welfare state. If you persist, I'm quite sure at some point men with guns will show up at your doorstep.
Yes, but my friend who is advocating for a welfare state will not be among them. I have nothing to fear from him.
Other than that he probably votes for people who pass laws telling you how much of your money will be taken "for the beggars" and who have no problems sending men with guns to enforce their commands.
He only has one vote out of the many necessary to send men with guns after me. Even if he changed his mind and voted against the welfare state, the probability that anything would change is minuscule. The expected harm from him voting for the welfare state is smaller than that of him sitting next to me after not showering for a couple of days.
But if the pool of voters were much smaller, I'd take a more negative view of his actions.
There's still cash, right? Might have to change your line of work from bits to bricks too for that to work though.
There is, of course, cash, and the grey economy is not small. But it certainly has its limitations :-/
You lost me there so hard that I am wondering if we're talking about the same thing - throwing paint at people doesn't seem to happen in my corner of the world and I've never known anyone who got paint thrown at them, so maybe I'm misunderstanding something. So, to be sure, are we talking here about throwing paint, as in the stuff you paint walls with, at people, ruining their clothes, pissing them off, interrupting their day to get washed and changed and all? Is that what you find funny and defensible?