BloatedGuppy said:
T0ad 0f Truth said:
People don't make bad decisons if they know they're bad for them.
People make decisions they know are bad for other people
ALL THE TIME. It's one of the many reasons we have police, and a legal system.
No, they don't. There's a difference between doing something actually "bad" and percieving it as being bad. There's even a difference between doing what other people say is bad, and weighing the pros and cons of a decision and deeming it necessary for the "greater good."
Some people don't even think good and bad are concepts with any meaning in them at all. There are just things and people will think one way or the other about them.
When someone actually thinks something is bad without any sense of it having a good, either for themselves in terms of pleasure, or as a means to an end, they don't do it. It'd be like deciding to eat something you don't like for no reason.
Not to give it another chance, not to appease someone, not because it's somehow right to eat the food you don't like, or its healthy, or eating it will make you stronger, but eating it to eat it as if you liked it. People don't do they. People don't do things they actually think are bad.
If they see it as bad they've weighed, by some criteria that may be flawed, it as having a good component to it, or somehow being the best choice.
What people do, and their reasoning for doing it are very different. Some people just aren't very good at that reasoning bit.
We don't have police because people are twirling their mustaches as villains to be a villain for the sake of villainry. We have police so people don't kill, steal, or cheat you because they've deemed it to be good by some rationality unique to them. Even if it's as simple as "I want to do it" and that consideration is more important than any other considerations. It's still a desire for a percieved good.
Because I cannot for the life of me conceive of circumstances that would legitimize reading someone's personal messages over their shoulder for the length of an entire football game. At the bare minimum he was guilty of having his curiosity piqued to the point where he felt justified violating someone's privacy. In the society I live in, that's a shit thing to do. Which means you've acted like a shit. This man might rescue orphaned puppies in his spare time, but all I know of him is that he appears to believe spying on strangers is excusable. I'm not an "ends justify the means" person, particularly not when he had absolutely no idea what he was spying on when he first started reading. He wasn't "trying to help" when he started spying. He was just spying.
And I can't concieve of circumstances where cheating would be morally meh and complicated and different based on intention and circumstances to the point where it may be wrong to judge, but this isn't. What he did is wrong, and despite being on opposite sides of this debate, I'm not an ends justify the means person either.
What I'm saying is that at a fundamental level if things are wrong, they're wrong based on the same criteria. If the woman did wrong by cheating then she did wrong by cheating and intentions circumstances whatever don't matter.
The guy who
did do wrong by spying, did wrong by the same criteria of wrong as a violation of rights or the categorical imperative (Am I right to assume we're using right and wrong in the Kant sense?)
If we're judging both people who did wrong (might in the case of the woman), by these criteria and it's wrong to judge the woman for it, why is it right to do it to the guy because his intentions or circumstances are less empathetic?
So if your girlfriend or wife was out somewhere, and some random guy just decided to spend a couple of hours creeping her phone over her shoulder, you'd be perfectly okay with that? It's not really BAD. What if she's misbehaving? He could totally crack the case wide open!
No, I'd not be okay with it at all. I'd be irrationally pissed, but that's neither here nor there. I'm not a saint at following my own philosophy always. I make bad choices (for the complicated reasons I mentioned above!).
If you have a morality that takes intent and circumstances into account the way it does actual actions, then if he was stalking my girlfriend because he thought she was intending to hurt someone (in the loose sense following the story above), then his intent might well be good but his execution is wrong and paranoid.
Does that make him bad? Not really, it makes him ignorant of what's good and what isn't. Does it make him an asshole? Who knows. Asshole is just an insult term that references the character and habits of a person, not individual acts.
What I'd say would be down about that issue, drawing from sentimentalism and stoicism, is I'd stop him from hurting my girlfriend if I could, take steps to prevent him from further invading her privacy if I could, and if I couln't do anything in the worst case scenario not let emotions or ideas about things outside of my control being good or bad affect my actions, thoughts, judgements anymore than they would in the disinterested hypothetical way they are now.
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