Comment 63609

By Freedom Seeker (anonymous) | Posted May 17, 2011 at 11:35:26 in reply to Comment 63564

Brandon said: "This is a pleasant idea, but if it were true, then we'd have no assault cases, would we?"

???? The fact that people commit assaults does not refute my assertion that assaulting someone else is unethical, it's simply evidence that some people sometimes act in unethical ways. This may be because they are not aware that they are acting unethically; they are not in possession of a personal ethical framework, or perhaps because they are aware that their actions are unethical but choose to commit them anyway for some other reason.

At any rate the fact that someone is acting in an unethical way is, I would submit, not sufficient justification for someone else to act unethically.

An example of ethical approaches to problem solving:
Lets imagine that we notice that there are a certain number of people willing to engage in "mugging", assaulting people to steal the money that they are carrying on their person.

A violence based (unethical) approach to addressing this problem would be to institute the penalty of arrest by the police followed by harsh prison sentences for muggers, in the hope of frightening them away from committing the mugging in the first place, or at least preventing them from committing additional muggings while they are imprisoned.

One possible non-violent alternative would be to replace cash with debit cards. When these are stolen a phone call to bank to cancel them renders them useless pieces of plastic, of no value to the mugger. Knowing that this is what is likely to happen following a mugging the would be mugger is much less likely to commit the assault in the first place. Just because someone is willing to be violent does not make the irrational.

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