• stigsbandit34z [they/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    12 days ago

    You’re going to have a hard time convincing people that deaths caused with excel are comparable to ones caused by a plane

    This is actually extremely interesting from a sociological POV and while I can’t prove it, I’ve had this conversation before and somehow it’s always (conveniently) “different”

    • GnastyGnuts [he/him]
      ·
      12 days ago

      There's a quote from the Vietnam war (I wanna say Phil Caputo?) about morality being a measure of distance and technology. If you kill people up close with a bayonet, it's horrible. If you kill people from afar by ordering an airstrike (or denying people insurance coverage they need), it's more acceptable.

      It's a vision of morality where we judge actions by how icky they would make the perpetrator feel by doing them, rather than the harm the actions cause to the victims. The Master's morality, I suppose?

    • NephewAlphaBravo [he/him]
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      12 days ago

      It's different enough that we have a word for it: social murder

      But it's still murder

        • AmericaDelendaEst [comrade/them]
          ·
          12 days ago

          You put enough steps between things and all of a sudden people have to use their brains to see it all working together. Americans aren't really taught to use their brains

        • GnastyGnuts [he/him]
          ·
          12 days ago

          I think some of it is framed as "well the insurance company doesn't have to give you anything, so it's not murder to deny coverage when they don't really owe you anything anyway."

          But that just indicates the person saying it doesn't understand that our healthcare system is so fucked up because of the insurance industry. The price, the administrative bloat, the declining quality, all in some way directly traceable back to these piece-of-shit insurance companies and their fucking lobbyists.

        • Z_Poster365 [none/use name]
          ·
          12 days ago

          because if we take the conclusion they are equally evil to its logical conclusion, it leads to some very uncomfortable truths - including the absolute barbarity of the status quo. Most people feel uncomfortable as they follow that line of thought, so terminate it early and obfuscate it

      • Utter_Karate [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        12 days ago

        Except instead of killing one stranger to save five you are killing one person to earn $10 and saving no one and then repeating the process, letting you kill more people to earn more money. Still apparently a moral mystery to some people, but I think framing it around an operator of public transport starts to fall apart.

          • Utter_Karate [he/him, comrade/them]
            ·
            12 days ago

            Trolleys are wonderful and I use them in my daily life to get around. I don't want to be late because they're cleaning the Thompson cartiledge out of the tracks just because you can't frame your moral problems around high intensity lasers or something else that doesn't affect my commute.

    • Z_Poster365 [none/use name]
      ·
      edit-2
      12 days ago

      the entire liberal world order is premised on the idea that social murder is "different" than normal murder

      the central axiom is that letting someone starve or freeze to death outside has no perpetrator, nobody to blame, it's just a bad thing that happens naturally.

      If there's a large socialist state attempting to cover everyone's needs and if they miss 1 person, THAT is murder according to Liberals. But in a capitalist society where nobody is attempting to cover everyone's needs the deaths of thousands are just natural. Thus, to a Liberal, the morally correct thing to do is not even attempt to try and just let thousands die. Touching the trolley lever makes you guilty, so it's best to never try to improve anything.