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130 points

You cannot achieve any good by hurting people.

People are so convinced that if we’re more cruel to criminals, they’ll stop committing crimes, or if we’re harsher to workers, we’ll work harder, or if you’re tough on border controls, immigrants will go away. It does not work and it cannot work.

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1 point

Unless they’re cops. Just get rid of those.

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3 points

I’d argue that cops existing also counts as “doing harm” to the people who would be cops. I remember a while back when I learned about how cops are trained (stuff that causes them to see everyone as a potential criminal who wants to kill them), I felt profoundly sad because as well as the harm that the cops cause as a result of this, it also just seems like a terrible way to live. I honestly feel sorry for cops

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4 points

What about eliminating nazis?

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7 points
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killing nazis makes the ones you weren’t able to kill more steadfast in their beliefs, (so it becomes harder to make them stop being nazis without killing them) and it makes it easier for them to convert others into becoming nazis (such as using it as ‘proof’ that they are oppressed)

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1 point

Well, (my vegetarian friend’s least favourite dumb philosophical question:) Is Death Even Actually Painful?

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1 point
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Is Death Even Actually Painful?

Isn’t that more of a scientific question?

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11 points

Idk, if someone’s trying to do a mass shooting, a little intervention could do some good.

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24 points

Less good than helping the shooter before they went over the Rubicon…I think that’s the point.

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1 point

Alright but there are people who currently exist who are already over the Rubicon. Ideal future utopias aside, force must be met with force.

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12 points

That’s entirely fair.

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4 points

This is a fair point, as far as it goes, and I’m happy to accept ‘mass shooters curently engaged in a mass shooting’ as an exception to the rule!

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5 points

Sadly, it often works for personal profits.

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4 points

To quote a theorem from one of my engineering courses:

An optimized system can consist only of optimized subsystems.

This means any time you’re preparing to make something small worse, for the global good, it’s a mathematical fact you’re about to do the wrong thing.

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