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Mirzhan_Irkegulov comments on I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions - Less Wrong Discussion

26 Post author: Multiheaded 25 January 2012 05:43PM

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Comment author: Mirzhan_Irkegulov 01 March 2015 08:44:23PM 0 points [-]

Agreed. Most people don't follow consequentialist ethics and believe it makes sense to punish evil. Most people use meaningless words like blame, fault, virtue, human nature, responsibility to describe people (not all usages of these words are meaningless, mind you). Most people reason in terms of good and evil as if evil is an inherent property of a person and not just a convenient description of some observable phenomena.

So most people are completely OK with killing and torturing people they consider evil, otherwise nobody would join armies of any country and there would be no solitary confinements and revenge. Of all people I asked, only a tiny minority was not OK with executing this infamous child rapist and murderer. Just ask your average Joe, what he think about some local pedophile or a terrorist, who killed dozens of people in an airport? Should they be treated with decency because they are human beings? No, Joe would say let them rot it a cell, or castrated, or publicly humiliated, or whatever.

Thinking that killing is ethically OK is not non-conformist, it's very bloody mainstream. Non-conformism is thinking that killing is bad even if everybody thinks it's good. It requires conscious evaluation of consequentialism to realize that Hitler doesn't deserve a stubbed toe.