Hacker News Reader

Comment by roflc0ptic | Hacker News Reader

I used to think like this, but eventually I had the realization that

1. right now, we have norms against murdering people

2. if my team starts murdering people, we could probably get what we want

3. however, this breaks the norm against murdering people, and will encourage the other team to start murdering people to get what they want.

All of a sudden, people are murdering each other left and right. This is sometimes called "war". It is very bad.

View on HN

Aren't the killings already happening though? For example, the logging industry murdering tribal leaders and activists.

Yes, and that’s bad.

Normalisation of a bad thing is always worse than bad people getting away with it in specific conditions, for any specific condition short of “when they feel like it”.

Not defending killings on either side. That said, one side is already using all kinds of nasty tactics, including killings.

Environmental destruction is a problem that needs massive, urgent action. We have seen over and over that nicely asking corporations to behave doesn't work. I don't know what the solution is, but I wouldn't be surprised if fed up people take up violence. It will probably just worsen the situation.

It won’t necessarily make it normalized. But killing someone in some very special context can be morally right, I think. Euthanasia is a more common example, but I believe killing Hitler would be similarly non-controversial.

But it is an age-old question of philosophy.

https://askell.io/posts/2020/12/bad-isnt-good-enough Per this article, risking normalizing a bad thing is a pro tanto reason not to do something, but it's not an "all things considered" reason not to do something. As the sibling comment says, there are circumstances in which killing is widely considered acceptable. I think the ethical considerations here are complicated and worth serious investigation, although I do firmly come down on the side of "let's not murder people."

Wow, I had never heard of the 2014 case in Peru[0]. from the article:

> Global Witness has said 164 environmentalists were killed worldwide in 2018. About half were killed in Latin American countries including Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Guatemala.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/31/peru-logging-i...

Environmental activists also seem prone to early death in some oil and Gas rich third world countries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com