Apologies for posting.
I should say by way of introductory remarks, that while this is an effort post, it is an effort post on a shitposting website, and thus ab initio a shitpost and therefore be taken in the correct spirit of levity in which it is intended. Don't get my thread locked.
Recent discussion on here has touched on the moral status of the execution of the Romanov family by Bolsheviks ahead of the advancing White Army1. While not exactly of practical significance given how few of us have Royal Families locked up in our basement, it did reveal several significant, (sometimes severe) differences in the philosophical underpinnings of the posters on this website.
A Moral Communism
Moral status as such actually has very little to deal with communism/leftist (in the Marxian vein) in terms of it's internal mechanism. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the rest of that intellectual lineage2. famously thought very little of moral philosophy. A communist is thus entirely at liberty to dismiss this entire discussion as idealism, and observe that within a Marxist framework, there are no 'good' and 'bad', merely a historically deterministic sequence of class antagonisms that will eventually resolve in favor of the proletariat and thus choosing to be a communist is merely choosing to throw one's hat in with the predetermined victors. This strand of amoral communism thus is not terribly interested in this discussion, and anyone here that adheres to that framework is excused from the discussion as having won the argument.
Given the rest of us do have moral considerations that prefigure our political beliefs, it's necessary for us to sketch out at least a scaffolding for what moral commonalities leftists share before going further, lest we fall into a morass of fundamentally incompatible frameworks stemming from different axiomatic premises. Speaking from my own personal position, I ascribe to leftist political positions as they offer me the greatest promise of granting a comfortable and dignified existence to the largest number of people possible. That in of itself does not make a moral axiom though, as achieving a large amount of something is valueless if the individual components don't themselves have value, and therefore, and a fundamental value informing my politics is the axiomatic value/sanctity of human life. So I am taking on as an assumption that generally speaking, want everyone to have dignified and comfortable lives3. If that position doesn't more or less describe you, you are also excused as having won the argument.
Justifying Shooting a Tsesarevich in my Pajamas
Which brings us to the Romanovs. In keeping with 3. above, and considering the minor children of royals not culpable for the systematic injustices perpetrated under the dictatorship of their parents, we'll limit our discussion here to the minors (Anastasia, and especially Alexei), though I think the general outline of the argument can be applied to pretty much all of the Tsar's issue. The entirety of the family, along with their retinue, were bulleted and bayoneted in Yekaterinburg about 10 days before white occupied the city. In attempting to defend the legacy of one of the most politically successful socialist projects in history4., this action has largely been justified on the left. Examining the commonly proposed justifications in light of our moral principles finds them universally lacking.
- It was necessary in order to safeguard the immediate success of the revolution against an individual with claim to the throne.
This argument goes that while we do value human life and dignity, our efforts to maximize these will sometimes require that certain human lives be forfeit, essentially turning this into a trolley problem5.. This argument differs in an important aspect from the trolley problem in that the trolley problem consists of single moment in time with clearly articulable and certain outcomes given at the outset. Leaving Alexei alive was in no way certain to doom the revolution to failure of significant struggle, as he could have been maintained in custody, and ascribing such outsized influence on the course of political affairs to the life of a sickly 13 year old is a profoundly anti-materialist approach to history. History is replete with challenges to establish socialist authority6., none of which stemmed from claimants to the Imperial thrown. Further, liquidating the Tsar, his children, and his brother did not exhaust the Romanov line, his cousin could and did proclaim himself Emperor-in-exile, and despite being old enough to actually head a restorationist intervention, none materialized. So the notion that killing Alexei was necessary fails to stand up to scrutiny 7.. It is also worth noting as an aside that the Romanovs were deeply unpopular, and to wit, were not the government the Bolshevik revolution occurred under, and supporters of the provisional government (domestic and international alike) formed the overwhelming contingent of the White forces, and the notion that a 14 year old tsarist claimant to the thrown would have had a meaningful impact on that colossal clusterfuck strains credulity.
- It prevented a longterm challenge to Boshevik control in a manner similar to Jacobite uprisings or the Bourbon Restoration.
Taking a more longterm view of the problem, it might be acknowledged that the Alexei presented no immediate threat justifying his liquidation, but, drawing from the history of pre-CIA regime changes, he presented a longterm likely/probable/plausible/possible threat in the form of an eventual challenge, and that acting in light of that possibility was justified if not strictly necessary. If we wish to examine this in light of our moral principles, we need to develop some notion of probability calculus; at what point is taking in innocent life now justified in order to avoid certain possible harms that have a certain probability of occurring. You can formalize this to ridiculous extents8., or you can take the legal systems more qualitative approach, of establish some standard of proof (you are, after all, justifying killing someone), where the execution is deemed justified if seems more likely than not/clearly and convincingly/beyond a reasonable doubt that it will prevent further, greater harm in the future. This lets you weaken the requirement that it is necessary to kill him to merely it is prudent to kill him. What is lacking though is any evidence that anyone has meaningfully carried out this process for any standard beyond plausible. The greatest extent to which this is established is that historically, there have been several restorationist insurrections, but no systematized historical study has been undertaken to quantify the risk of insurrection/coup in the presence or absence of an legitimate claimant.9.
Well perhaps we leave it there; a plausible narrative that places Alexei as the cause of some harm is sufficient in our eyes to justify his liquidation. The problem with this is that it is such a liberal standard that it can be applied to nearly everyone. There are scores of documented peasant rebellions throughout history, so by the same standard it is plausible that any given peasant may be at risk for launching a peasant rebellion down the line and thus, by that same standard, we are justified in liquidating them. Universalizing from this generic peasant^.10. to all peasants. And thus our system named aimed an providing dignity and comfort is able to justify pretty much any atrocity.
- The moral culpability of for the executions lies at the feet of the Tsar who created the system and not the executioners themselves.
This argument goes that it was actually the Tsar that placed him in position to be killed by standing at the top of a monarchical system that has ruined and ended untold numbers of lives. Had the Tsar dismantled that system before it came to blows, Alexei would have lived a happily inbred life as a continental European curiosity.
This argument plays fast an lose with the notion of fault to an extent that borders on the absurd. Within getting into the morass that encompasses the legal notion of fault, I'll observe that the executioners where in total control of the situation, given the Romanovs were in the zone of immediate material influence, while the Bolshevik leaderships were at a more distant proximity, and Tsar Nicholas II at the head of the Imperial State was a fleeting memory, having greatly influenced the events that now overtook them, but having no control over them. The Bolshevik's in Ipatiev House or those in leadership in Moscow alone decided who in that house lived and died, they knew that, and they exercised that choice.
- Unpleasant things happen during a revolution and we accept that as soon as they begin.
This is true, but once again, it comes down to the notions of control and proximity. As a leftist, I acknowledge that the struggle for political power may involve the world becoming a worse place (as judged according to my moral principles outline above) due to my actions to make it a better one. This is an abstract acknowledgement. It may also result in me taking actions that I find unpleasant or repugnant11. If it is the moral principles that describe motivate my political struggle though, it is fundamentally self-defeating to exercise my control over my immediate surroundings to knowingly act in a manner that results in an immediate degradation of the world around me (once again, as judged by my moral standards). My actions in the here and now, must be justified according to my principles in the here and now and my actions in the here and now. If 10 minutes ago I was standing in Yekaterinburg and the Whites are closing in, and now I'm still standing in Yekaterinburg and the Whites are still closing in, but now there is a brand new pile of child corpses of my making, then I have made the world a worse place.
No tears for dead peasants
It is reasonable to ask why go to such great lengths to challenge the justifications for the murder of Alexei (which is so emotionally remote to me as to essentially be fictitious). To which I offer the following justifications.
- It's ridiculous and therefore funny.
- Because eventually some of us may be in positions to make decisions that make the world a substantially better or worse place for others, and I want it be very clear what stands before us when making those decisions. No, none of us are going to decide whether or not an heir lives or dies, but we are going to decide how to treat with those around us, and want everyone to pause before they exercise what little control they have in the world around them before making it a worse place, justifying it with a glib aphorism or some half-baked argument.
1. The fitness for humor here is not considered, as something can be both morally bad and the legitimate target of well-done comedy. Like 9/11.
2. I was promised ice cream if I didn't say 'ilk' here.
3. To wit, one of the main justifications for political violence on the left is that it is directed at those preventing others from enjoying dignity, comfort, or well, life.
4. Such as it is.
5. which we may dub the Yekaterinburg Streetcar Defense
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Rebellions_in_the_Soviet_Union
7. One could alternatively take the logical form of necessity as a conditional, ~P -> ~Q with P being "the legitimate claimant to the imperial thrown is killed" and "Q" being "the revolution is successful". Given the contra-factual nature of ~P, the truth value of this statement can't be evaluated directly, but given the analogous situation in China with PuYi, we can strongly infer that this conditional is in fact false and thus logical necessity is not present.
8. define xi to be each enumerated possible future in space X, p(xi) to be the probability of that future occurring, and h(xi) to be the number of lives ruined by Alexei in that future xi. Shoot kid if
9. To reach a preponderance of evidence standard you would need to establish P(Insurrection|Legitimate Claimant) > P(Insurrection), which the strictly materialist interpretation would hold P(Insurrection|Legitimate Claimant) = P(Insurrection).
10 Regular viewers will recognize this as universal generalization.
11 Orwell's description of the conditions of fighting in the Spanish civil war come to mind.
Alright I was probably gonna make a post about this if you weren't.
First, I have to say that I'm very surprised at the reaction I've seen where a lot of people seem to regard me as a monster for not taking the event that seriously. So I think it's important to frame it in it's proper place.
A lot of innocent people died on 9/11. You can say what you will about the bankers but you can't seriously claim that the firefighters or plane passengers deserved it. This event happened much more recently than the Romanovs, and there are people alive today with real injuries or trauma who could concievably see a post making fun of 9/11. You can say "America deserved 9/11" all day long, but did those specific Americans? I could just as easily say "The Romanovs deserved it" (though perhaps not those specific Romanovs). We can compare the scale of 9/11 to the scale of the Iraq war in the same way we can compare the scale of the dead Romanovs to the scale of WWI and so forth, and we can compare the cringey overreaction to 9/11 to the cringey overreaction to the Romanovs, given for example that Nicholas II was canonized as a saint not all that long ago. So I say that making fun of 9/11 makes you at least 1000 times more of a monster than making fun of the Romanov's deaths - and yet we (mostly) all do it and make fun of people who take it seriously. So let's put aside the absurd grandstanding of people calling me a monster or whatever and turn to a more levelheaded discussion of the moral philosophy.
OP's approach is one that is concerned with justice and legal principles. They contend that it is necessary to establish an objective, scientific study to show that benefit can be derived from killing the Romanovs before it can ever be acceptable to kill them. But when should such a study have been produced? During the war, they were a little busy. Before the war, it's a little difficult to publish an objective, peer-reviewed paper discussing the merits and flaws of killing the currently living children of the royal family. In general, I find this view that you're not allowed to estimate probabilities in your head without doing a formal study to be unreasonable and unrealistic.
OP then goes on to describe how if you say it's OK to murder the Romanovs then you also have to say it's OK to murder random peasants. As usual with responses to consequentialist approaches, this is extremely trite and can hardly be taken as a serious criticism.
My framework for approaching these questions is quite different. I am only concerned with the consequences of each course of action, with cause and effect. I reject the notion of justice as an end of itself - though I recognize it can sometimes provide a guideline for producing better consequences.
Of course, it is impossible to know beforehand what the consequences of each action will be, which means that you have to constantly rely on your best judgement. Estimation of the likelihood of various events must be made constantly, and often with limited information. If I had to produce scientific studies before saying that an event was probable, I'd be paralyzed with indecision and stuck doing nothing but trying to find and read through scientific studies about which grocery store I should shop at.
Let me use an example here. Should I kill a Nazi? Let's assume right now I can search online, find someone who is definitely a Nazi, and I can surprise them with a gun and have an almost certain chance of killing them. Well, based on notions of "justice" and "deserving," maybe I should (not sure what's stopping you, in that case). But if I look at the consequences of that action, it probably means spending a very long time in prison. However, if I have good reason to think that a specific Nazi is about to do an adventurism against innocent people, then my calculus might go in the other direction. The fact that the Nazi is a bad person is relevant only in how it factors into my calculus and helps me to predict their movements.
When OP suggests that if you start doing calculations like that you'll end up murdering a bunch of random peasants, I think that's only because they don't have experience making calculations or understanding how they work. Obviously, if you murder a random peasant because they might start a revolution, you'll likely piss off a lot of other peasants and increase the chances of revolution, making it counter-productive and bad by virtually any framework (unless you're an accelerationist I guess?). Why doesn't this occur to OP?
It seems to me that OP's worldview, whether consciously or subconsciously, is influenced by Christian mythology. The goal is to prove you're a good person so that you can defend yourself at the pearly gates. Meanwhile the devil is constantly tempting us to sin, we are naturally inclined towards evil acts, and so we cannot trust our own judgement to make exceptions to moral rules. If we murder the Romanov children, it is because deep down we want to murder children, and we're making rationalizations to release the demiurge.
But I reject that framing. I say that I don't have some beastly urge to murder children that I'm repressing, and I think the same is true of the vast majority of people. I'm not concerned with proving myself at the pearly gates, I'm concerned with producing the best outcomes. I trust my own judgement, which I have cultivated, and I think doing so is unavoidable - even if you defer to others' judgement or to some principle, it is still your judgement that leads you there.
If you want to argue that the specific choice of murdering the Romanov children was bad, based on what outcomes could be reasonably expected for the action to produce, that's a conversation we can have. But like you say, it's not like any of us have royal families in our basement so it's not the most relevant question, and what it really points to are the differences in our moral frameworks.
GOOD post
You're absolutely allowed to estimate probabilities in your head without doing a formal study, but when the subject in question is murdering children, you have obligation to be methodical about that process, and to absolutely show your work. Otherwise your are absolutely engaging in the "I had reasonable belief that my life was in danger and thus I acted justifiably in using deadly force" game of modern American policing. Your best judgement after spending 30 seconds mulling over the issue is entirely insufficient. People often have bad judgement, and so when all you need to justify doing something is "someone's best judgement", you are setting yourself up for a world of trouble.
I'm getting tired of saying this to people, but show your work. I'm not claiming that you must murder a million peasants just because it's justified, I'm showing that this standard of reasoning lets you murder any peasant, and so you're then welcome to deploy this reasoning as a pretext for killing motivated by any other axe to grind. This is adequately demonstrated in history as evidence by what happened to 20,000 polish intellectuals when the soviets rolled through in 1941.
You say things like "likelihood" and "calculation", but given you can't point to any actual math or statistics, it seems to me like you're trying to borrow legitimacy and rigor from these fields, when in fact you really mean "judgements".
Maybe all the other peasants hated this guy, so in my judgement (not calculation), it doesn't effect the chance of revolution. So in that case it's justified?
As a westerner, of course it is, and given that I imagine you're a westerner too, so is yours. But everything you say after this has no relation to or connection to my position, given that I don't think there is any such thing as a 'good' person or any need to justify oneself in the afterlife.
If I just went out a murdered a child and claimed it was justified, I agree with you that I'd better have a damned good explanation for it when I could've just sat at home playing video games. But we're talking about this in the context of revolution. There were far more important things to consider, and it's in no way worth the time or energy to contemplete the moral philosophy and historical data for this decision when every day you're making decisions that affect the life or death of thousands, perhaps even millions of people. In the amount of time you might spend figuring out whether to kill them or not, you might be able to find a marginally better troop deployment that saves 100 people's lives. Expecting a full on scientific study in that context is pretty absurd imo.
And what about your framework? It's easy enough to justify harming others when your actions are based on "justice" and "deserving." On the previous point you mentioned that making snap decisions makes me sound like a police defender, but another police defender line is to argue that a killing was justified because the victim had done something wrong in the past, "They were no angel." I can point to countless cases in the historical record where violence was argued to be justified on the basis of the moral inferiority of the victims, while ignoring the consequences of said violence.
In reality, anyone can act in bad faith in the context of any moral framework. There's shitty people who do shitty things and claim cover on the basis of "The ends justify the means" and there's shitty people who do shitty things and claim cover on the basis of "They deserved it." You can't throw out consequentialism just because some people invoke it in bad faith.
I use the words interchangeably, yes. Statisticians don't have a copyright on the word "likelihood," sorry.
No, you have to make a full judgement of various factors. If you want to make the case for murdering peasants under a consequentialist framework then I expect you to put more effort into it than that if you want me to seriously engage the question.
It is relevant because I at least find the assumptions I mentioned necessary to understanding your position. I don't deny that my worldview is influenced by a Christian framework through lingering brainworms I've yet to uproot.
I mean if this decision is not that important, not important enough to justify putting to much thought into it, just a throwaway decision, then surely the immediate consequentialist decision is to not shoot the children according to our moral framework. In order to justify shooting the children you have to develop some future spanning narrative, and if you can be bothered to do that, you might as well be bothered to consider the question fully.
I actually agree that this reasoning is unsound, and so I don't use it (my footnote 3 being it's close cousin that the victim is currently doing something wrong). I actually wouldn't have shot any of the Romanov's, but given that many people here do believe that past misdeeds justify reprisal (we'll make no excuses for the terror blah blah blah), I didn't think this would be a side argument worth having.
And there are good people who can be made to do shitty things because someone stands at the ready with a pat, half-baked consequentialist justification for them. This comes up every time liberals want to intervene in some country, and our response to them is the same as my responses in these threads. "Show your work", in which case their arguments all fall to pierces.
No, but they, probability theorists and logicians are the only ones who can handle them in a formalized way. Everyone else is more or less eyeballing it, which if we're trying to make decisions that optimize future outcomes seems like exactly the sort of thing you'd want to avoid.
That's ridiculous.
"Maybe we shouldn't kill the kids, they weren't responsible."
"Yeah, but if we don't, the monarchists might use them to strengthen their claims."
End of discussion, versus "Ok let's go do a historical survey to verify that possibility and also break out the philosophy textbooks." Your point is incredibly bad faith. It didn't take a bunch of sitting around theorizing to come up with a justification, it was immediately apparent and easy to express in a single sentence.
This is one of those cases where I literally could not agree with your point even if I wanted to. You're essentially trying to argue that everyone but the groups you named should forfeit their agency as a moral actor. "Should I ask this person on a date? Better go find a statistician!" Extreme level of field arrogance.
Great, so the standard of evidence required is literally "can anyone say anything in favor of doing this terrible thing" in order for it to be justified, and as soon as that justification is offered, any follow-up questions could be dismissed as "we don't have time".
Absolutely not, they are welcome to use whatever systematized thought process they like or none. But if they're going to engage in fraught moral decision making that have grave consequences for other people, they should absolutely engage in a degree of epistemic humility instead of coming up with some pat 30 second justification for their decision and then insisting to everyone else that they have in fact done their homework.
In that context, yes, as long as it seems reasonable at first glance. The decision wasn't very important, and they did genuinely did not have time. I've already explained how thay context differs from you or me making the same decision.
I really think you have an extremely romanticized view of war and are giving royal lives disproportionate worth.
It was to certain people.
I don't want to come off as glib, but I think the mistake I am making in some people's eyes here (not necessarily yours) is that I am giving them any worth.
So was the life of every single individual soldier who died in WWI.
You invoked your field so I'm going to invoke mine. I studied physics and astronomy in uni, and one of the things that helped me with is a better understanding of scale. I'm used to differentiating between very large and very small numbers. For instance, we have a unit called a "barn," an extremely small area used at the particle scale, because hitting an area of that size is like "hitting the broad side of a barn." 10^20 and 10^21 are basically identical to most people, even though one is much, much larger than the other. Part of the reason I became a leftist is because after practicing working with numbers like that, I was able to comprehend some inkling of the scale of devastation caused by (for instance) the War on Terror.
I'm sorry but these things need to be considered in the context of scale. If you put as much empathy towards each Russian soldier as you are to the Romanov children, your mind would literally not be able to handle it (nor would mine). Scale and proportionality matter, and in the context of major events like WWI, the evaluation that the lives of 5 children have zero value is probably closer than the value you're ascribing to them. The difference between say 1/10^7 and zero is too small for the human mind to really comprehend.
No they don't, not when discussing individual moral actions we can take as individual moral agents, which is once again what I'm doing. If an individual had it within their power to save thousands of Russians on the battlefield, they absolutely had an obligation to do that, and yes if that meant letting the Romanov's die because you were too busy with your finger in the metaphorical body dyke, then yes that could would be justified. The people who shot the Romanov's were not so preoccupied with saving untold numbers of others that they had to liquadate the Romanovs. They were sitting around for several months, shot the Romanov's, and then went on to other things.
This goes back to my whole point that has nothing to do with the Romanov's. We are individuals operating within a specific zone of material influence, and we can make decisions to make that world better or worse, and the fact that other people elsewhere that I can do nothing about are using their agency to make the world a significantly worse place does not justify me taking such actions, even if they are comparably minor.
You keep coming back to "but you've got to see the big picture!", to which I am responding, no, you cannot actually see the actual big picture; no one can. You can, as an individual, see a very tiny picture, and be skeptical of anyone who comes in and paints a specific big picture for in order to justify making the actual, small picture, the only one you know reliably, substantially worse.
They literally were.
They were cheka functionaries, not higher-ups who had to take a break from manning the levers of state power. Lenin didn't hop on a train to squeeze some machine-gunning monarch time in between his emergency war committee meetings. If the decision was so inconsequential as to warrant no consideration by the higher-ups as you are saying, let the functionaries make a considered decision.
Ok, they considered it and decided to do it.
Sorry, I think I lost the plot a bit here.
No worries, I'm getting a bit muddled with all the parallel chains myself.
If they considered it and decided to do it, then they should show their work. Clearly that's not asking too much when literally murdering children is on the line, and if you're going to introduce political violence against children into your political toolkit you'll want clear safeguards on it beyond 'preventing a vaguely articulable possible future threat'.
So to be clear about what you want here, low ranking soldiers in the Red Army, roughly half of whom were illiterate and most of whom had little formal education, should, in the middle of the war, track down history and philosophy books somewhere (not like they had internet), read through them, debate, and conduct a formal study using objective, statistical modelling before making the decision on whether to kill to royal family?
Come on, you have to recognize how unreasonable you're being here.
They're welcome to use whatever methodology they like and were disposed to; I've merely offered suggestions drawing from my own background on how I might approach a studied approach to arriving at the most correct conclusion I could.
But they should absolutely enunciate that methodology and it's conclusions, or whoever delegated that authority to them should do so. Assign it to some clerk, I don't care. But I'm not particularly sympathetic to the argument that I'm making it too difficult to justify shooting children by requiring some thought beyond "ehh, we just sorta felt like it might save us some trouble down the line".
The standard you're using, which I'll (perhaps inaccurately) characterize as "it was judged as prudent toward safeguarding the revolution on an ad hoc basis" has absolutely no safeguards, and can go a long way to explaining the excesses of the Soviet revolution, which in the end was still a justified revolution. Surely you agree there's some better middle-ground between 'paralyzed with inaction overanalyzing every decision' and the path they ended up taking.
Sure, I agree that there's a line and I can agree that the Soviets crossed it at other points. But I don't agree that that's a reason to throw out ad-hoc reasoning altogether as it is often necessary. Personally, I think that even with all the time in the world, I would arrive at the same conclusion that killing them was justified, but also that it was perfectly reasonable to rely on ad-hoc reasoning in this case.
I don't really agree with this framing that, if only they had had a different moral framework, none of the excesses would've happened. I think a revolutionary context is likely to be bloody and contain excesses and people who get used to making decisions that make sense in that context will often make decisions as if they were still in that context, even though the material conditions have changed.
I don't believe you can find any moral framework or approach to decision-making that is both practically applicable during war-time and impossible or impractical for bad actors to exploit to justify doing bad shit.
Nor do I, it is often necessary. But in cases with grave implications for the lives of others and in the absence of a imminent need to make a decision, it falls short in providing justification for that.
So would you put any safeguards on when it unacceptable to deploy ad-hoc reasoning, or is that an additional, ad hoc consideration?
I suggest as an improvement to the system they used, that they do everything exactly the same but include an axiom about not intentionally shooting unarmed children. I don't see that as any less practical.
So, not in this case then since there was an imminent need to make a decision.
Ad-hoc reasoning is generally applicable and pretty much the default approach. If something seems important enough and you have time to consider it in more depth, you should. There are also good general guidelines and trends that are useful in making decision, like for example, "Don't kill people." You should also do self-crit and self-reflection to better understand your feelings and biases so you can identify when you're falling into a trap of making a bad decision. Meditation is a good tool to accomplish those things and to stay level-headed.
But there's no hard-and-fast rules, no. Even if I said there were, a bad actor could just ignore them, find some convoluted loophole, or just adopt a different framework entirely. The way to stop such things is not through following a strict code of rules, it's by having the self-awareness to recognize that you're being a bad actor and the self-control to stop yourself.
I mean if that's your standard, can you point to the decisionmakers actually doing this in this case?
No, they were in custody for a year prior to their execution, and even after deciding to execute them they dithered for over two weeks, and in the end there were 10 days between carrying it out and the occupation of the city by whites. They had something of an eternity, not trying to land a damaged airplane before running out of fuel.
Still not nearly enough time to meet the level of rigor you're asking for.
I'd be much happier if they did what you're asking for in terms of self-crit, bias reflection, and some meditation. But I don't see any evidence they did much of any of that.
You're right, they didn't. But that hasn't really been your criticism.
During the boiling point of tensions of a revolution, it's hard for people to keep a cool head. Even we on this website often get heated about politics and sometimes sneer at calls for civility and level-headed news. Perhaps we should do less of that, idk. I sometimes find myself conflicted between the two approaches myself.
I don't really think it's reasonable to expect that given the circumstances, though. Like it's hard to tell a Russian peasant that they need to stop being so angry, given the circumstances. Realistically, you don't get to dictate the exact nature of events, you can typically only push them in the direction of broad trends, like "continuing to suffer calmly" or "rising up in a wave of fury." Ideally though, there is a balance to be found, and especially after the war the balance is more towards cooler heads.
I think you could make a good case that socialist movements should do a better job at separating war-time leaders from civilian government during peacetime. To use another example, while things improved under Mao, there was probably someone more qualified who wouldn't have killed the sparrows.
Of course in the Soviets' case, it might have been risky to lay off the gas. Would a leader softer than Stalin have survived? Maybe it's worth it to accept a war-time leader just to make sure the project survives its initial years (at which point, when do you ask them to give up power?). Of course, in the long run the USSR collapsed but the causes of that are debatable. Definitely a question worth further study, I'd say.
I hate moral calculus, but have just a modicum of perspective here: Consider the whole population of the USSR and the catastrophe it would represent not just for most of them but for socialist movements around the world (particularly China) if a little Romanov went on to galvanize opposition. Even if we concede that it's literally only a 1/1,000,000 chance of happening, that still puts things clearly in favor of killing them because we are talking about many millions of peasants here whose entire lives depend on the Soviets holding out or else being, at best, reduced to basically the status of slavery and deprivation and perhaps all of their descendants for the next century or more as well.
But this number is just pulled out of thin air to give us the appearance of having done moral calculus. It might be only 1/1e⁹ or 1/1e¹². What you really mean is that it's justified because of any chance at all. But the risk of anyone leading a reactionary insurrection that leads to millions of deaths is nonzero, as evidenced by the fact that ahootind him didn't stop rhe civil war.
Except for the fact that such numbers are impossible to generate, for any decision in the context of a revolutionary civil war. That's why no one in history to my knowledge has ever used such statistical analysis to make such decisions. If I'm wrong about this, can you give me a concrete example of a time in history when moral calculus of the type you describe was used to make war time decisions?
I'm not the one who insists on the use of numbers like 1/1,000,000 in my argument for a justification. In my OP I specifically eschew this as unworkable and attempt a more qualitative standard instead. Everyone else is coming in and saying "if it's at least 1/1,000,000 it's still justified", but the they can't provide in actual methodology for reaching that threshold.
They are obviously using numbers derived from suppositions of the argument. They are in no way claiming those numbers are real or meaningful, and are using 1/1000000 as an intentionally absurd estimate to make a point
Also, how do you have this much time lol? I hope you are posting on company time
I'm a professor, so everyone who walks by the office just assumes I'm responding to emails.
LMAO. Incredibly
he means "vanishingly small", he's not using the number literally
But the probability of some joe schmoe leading an insurrection against the soviet are also vanishingly small. It wasn't Monarchists at the head of the White Army.
I actually don't think our moral frameworks are terribly dissimilar (you'll note my moral principles are framed in explicitly consequential terms). Where there is an appreciable gap though is our epistemic frameworks. You're using using an ambitious epistemology that gives wide latitude to meaningfully know how ones actions will effect the world, 10, 15, 50 years down the line, and thus they can call upon that knowledge to inform their moral decisions.
My epistemology is much more deflationary. I don't believe we can meaningfully know how our action affect the world beyond a much narrower time horizon, on the order of weeks in the absence of very well understood and tested dynamical models, and thus we can't call on long-term future consequences to justify immediate actions. This belief of mine comes from my experience in numerically modelling nonlinear mathematically systems, where trying to nudge the output one way can result in it crashes catastrophically to the other.
I can agree with that framing of our differences. I'm quite comfortable operating in contexts with uncertainty and imperfect information, and I see such things as an inherent fact of life.
If I accept your argument that it's impossible to predict things "10, 15, 50 years down the road" then obviously I should immediately abandon any notion of revolution. I would fully expect a revolution to make things worse in the short term, and the long term benefits are obviously beyond the scope of precise statistical modelling. I don't think your approach is tenable or consistent.
There's a pretty common mistake I see in a lot of contexts where people put too much weight onto factors where it's easier to gather clean, objective data. Sometimes things that are hard to study can be important too. Just because it's difficult to produce a study showing whether ending a royal line reduces the probability of counter a revolution doesn't mean it's not a reasonable concern.
In a very real sense you should, but not because it's impossible. Individuals are not the agents of world historical politics in a Marxist system, classes are. You as an individual don't get to decide if we have a revolution in 15 years or tomorrow, so placing the onus on yourself to achieve revolution is a surefire way to get ineffectual burnout or adventurism.
To borrow from Kuhn's schema, we live in a time of 'normal' politics as opposed to 'revolutionary' politics, so our day to day actions as individuals should be grounded in that reality. Thousands of leftists lived and died in Russia decades before the material conditions were right for revolution in '05 or in '17. That doesn't make their individuals lives useless, but it doesn't fundamentally limit the amount of change their individual actions could effect.
Do you think that the Bolsheviks used statistical modelling before rising up against the tsar? If not, do you think it was a good decision?
This is probably ancillary to your point, but the Bolshevik's didn't really rise up against the tsar, but against the provisional government. Lenin was still in Switzerland when the Tsar was deposed.
The peasants, then.
They were acting in the moment effecting what change they could to improve their conditions and address their concerns at that particular moment. They weren't attempting to effect or avoid a particularly future event 10-years down the line (a royalist intervention) and weren't engaged in such morally fraught decision-making (shooting children), so I'm absolutely comfortable with there exercising a lower standard of evidence for justifying their actions.
It took over 5 years of civil war to achieve victory.
The fact that you consider starting a war to be so much "less morally fraught" than shooting a handful of kids during a war is exactly why I keep harping on the fact that you have an extremely naive and romantic notion of what war looks like.
This might be the most absurd thing I've seen yet in this struggle session, and considering the comparisons to the bombing of Hiroshima and the War on Terror that's a very high bar.
Peasant's didn't start a civil war, they as individuals engaged in protests which culminated in the toppling of the tsar. The Bolshevik's seized power from the Provisional Government, which resulted in a 5 year civil war, but not a single peasant went out in Feburary and said "I think I'll start a years long civil war today.".
Individuals don't start wars; those are nation-state scale systemic actions. Which is how you get hilarious situations like in 1914 where no one with any power actually wanted a contintent wide war and it happened anyway. Individuals do however shoot people.
Listen, at some point somebody made the decision to start shit, and you can't pretend that the war just dropped out of the sky with no individual actors contributing to it. I'm not interested in all this hair-splitting.
How about this, a random peasant 1 year into the war decides to join the war instead of staying home with their family, do you think they relied on statistical modelling to make that choice and do you think it was valid?
Oh sure they all contributed to it, but none of them decided to do it. You're assigning moral status to unpredictable emergent phenomena based on massively aggregated causality chains, while I'm assigning moral status to things people actually have control over, their actions.
I don't think they used statistics, and as I've said before , I don't think that is the only valid way of reasoning, but I imagine that decision was made carefully and not on an ad hoc basis given the gravity of it. And I still think that decision had less gravity to it that that peasants possible decision down the line to shoot two unarmed kids.
Their actions contributed to the massively aggregated causality chains in predictable ways. Just because it's harder to draw an exact objective line between the actions and the consequences doesn't mean it's not there. Again, things can be hard to measure and quantify and also be important.
And I still think that's naive. War is hell, if you're doing it you have to fully commit and you're gonna be involved in some fucked-up shit.
Famously not. Not without the benefit of hindsight.
Involved in yes, not the perpetrator of, no.
Calling for revolution and trying to instigate it makes it more likely to happen.
I'm not really sure what I can recommend to you to understand it better. At the very least, you're likely gonna be turning a blind eye to some shit. War is seriously fucked up, to say it's not morally fraught is nonsense.
Not without the confluence of several, far more impactful events that exists largely beyond the scale of an individual.
Yeah, but every individual can abstain from or even actively work to prevent it's most fucked up excesses. Several of the guards in question here literally refused to participate in the shooting, and a US helicopter pilot was prepared to fire on his compatriots during the My Lai Massacre, which was the moral thing to do.
I said more likely. The impact might be small, but it's still there.
Can, but often won't. The soldiers who refused to participate also didn't stop it. If they'd tried, maybe they get shot, or maybe they'd have had to shoot someone who would've otherwise stood by their side in battle. How bad does it have to get for you to make that choice, to take that risk and accept the consequences? For most people, the answer is, "Pretty fucking bad!"
Not even that necessarily. Certain systems (think back to your quantum stuff) are threshold based, where activities have 0 effect until other factors proceed it. Your and my calling for revolution right now is more accurately modeled as have no effect on its probability, than as having a small effect on it's probability.
But should. Which after all is the entire point of the post as described in the final section.
I suppose you could argue that the effect is negligible but I still wouldn't say zero. If you went back in time and killed Lenin, the same class antagonisms would exist and things might unfold in a similar way, but it's impossible to know exactly how much of an effect it would have. Materialism does not mean that individual actions don't matter at all.
You can say people should behave in war-time all you want but that doesn't mean that you can reasonably expect them too. If you create conditions in which you can reasonably expect atrocities to occur, you don't get to wash your hands of it, at least not in my book.
Anyway this has kinda drifted off topic. I guess I assumed that you were both pro-revolution and believed it was possible for individuals to make revolution more likely, but if you don't believe that then you can, to borrow your phrasing, be excused from this line of discussion as having won the argument.