> I never "underplayed" the importance of this, which would suggest some sort of "well, yeah that's bad, but no big deal".
Okay, you don't think you're underplaying the importance of a person's support of torture, but in saying things like this you are lumping all a person's transgressions together:
> if you are going to write someone off every time their decision has a downside
This is absolutely not "every time," this is the time the guy used his influence to provide public support for the institution of torture by America instead of using his influece to condemn it.
Incidentally, I'm not talking about writing someone off. I'm talking about excluding him from the very enthusiastic category person we should admire as an exemplar of good which pg created for Ronco. (seriously, he invoked the Bible)
> they can't win, no matter how good they are, and so the existence of such downsides isn't a strike against their goodness at all, any more than a politician is evil for recognizing the existence of tradeoffs between funding for hospitals and funding for schools.
I agree that if we regard all moral transgressions as being equally serious then it makes no sense to draw the distinction between good and bad acts, or perhaps even good and bad people. I just think that is an absurd premise.
> Why the focus on the case of the outcomes being equally bad?
A choice between equally undesireable alternatives is usually what is meant by "dilemma." Some of that is just the dictionary, but more intuitively it's just not usually worth arguing about the cases where one choice is regarded as worse than another.
> That's the same thing I'm criticizing on your part. You could equally well play the game of "he advocated letting millions of people die! Bad!"
In much the same way that I do not believe all moral transgressions are equally serious, I do not believe all arguments are equally sound.
Okay, you don't think you're underplaying the importance of a person's support of torture, but in saying things like this you are lumping all a person's transgressions together:
> if you are going to write someone off every time their decision has a downside
This is absolutely not "every time," this is the time the guy used his influence to provide public support for the institution of torture by America instead of using his influece to condemn it.
Incidentally, I'm not talking about writing someone off. I'm talking about excluding him from the very enthusiastic category person we should admire as an exemplar of good which pg created for Ronco. (seriously, he invoked the Bible)
> they can't win, no matter how good they are, and so the existence of such downsides isn't a strike against their goodness at all, any more than a politician is evil for recognizing the existence of tradeoffs between funding for hospitals and funding for schools.
I agree that if we regard all moral transgressions as being equally serious then it makes no sense to draw the distinction between good and bad acts, or perhaps even good and bad people. I just think that is an absurd premise.
> Why the focus on the case of the outcomes being equally bad?
A choice between equally undesireable alternatives is usually what is meant by "dilemma." Some of that is just the dictionary, but more intuitively it's just not usually worth arguing about the cases where one choice is regarded as worse than another.
> That's the same thing I'm criticizing on your part. You could equally well play the game of "he advocated letting millions of people die! Bad!"
In much the same way that I do not believe all moral transgressions are equally serious, I do not believe all arguments are equally sound.