>Justin wrote:
> > >> >
> > In criminal law, recklessness (conscious disregard of a known risk, or,
> > colloquially. not giving a damn) or wilful blindness is tantmount o
> > knowledge or intent.
>
>Killing someone while driving drunk isn't punished with anywhere near the
>severity meted out to to a first-degree murderer.
That's an interesting fact about how the law treats similarly things differently. I've seen people sent to prison because they committed fraud, satisfying the intent requirement by being wilfully blind. What's the diff between driving drunk and killing someone, say, and shooting blindly into a crowd, not exactly meaning to kill someone but not caring if you do? The latter, if you kill someone, will get you a first degree murder conviction. I suspect that we are soft on drunken vehicular homicide. There's a article in Phil & Public Affairs some years ago by Bonnie Somebody, an U of Albany phil prof, that argues this point.
Be that as it may. I'm not sure I think that the Sudan pharma attack is the
moral equivalent of 9/11, even if you count the foreseeable deaths due to
it. In some ways, if you count the failure to restore the factory after the
"error" was known, it's worse. The body count is far higher, and the deaths
more lingering and slow. If you stop the camera at the destruction of the
factory, and discount the ater deaths and the refusal to make good the
destruction, it's not so bad. But why should you do that? Moreover, there is
the factor of the agent--with the pharma attack, a wealthy superpower with a
bad history; with 9/11, a small network of evil terrorists without other
power or influence. Shouldn't it count towards the badness of an act when a
big rich self-righteous bully does something awful? To the extent the law
permits, judges take this sort of thing into account in sentencing.
>
> > As opposed to the original calculation of expected utility.
> > >
> >
> > Anyway, as a consequentialist, you should care about the actual
> > consequences, not aboiut the intent. The road to hell and all . . . .
>
>If intent wasn't an instrument towards maximizing utility, this would be
>true. It would also be true there would often be no point in trying to
>modify behavior of any sort (moral or otherwise) because the agent's
>intentions would matter for naught. There's a reason I argued against the
>absurd bit of folk wisdom that, "the road to hell is paved with good
>intentions."
>
I'm not so sure it's an absurd bit of wisdom. Self-righteousness can be pretty lethal. In any case, the law generally doesn't care much about our intentions, at least ex ante. It modifies our behavior by giving us incentives and disintentives. Don't deal drugs because you will go to jail for a long time. Don't discriminate or you will have to pay a lot of money at least defending a lawsuit, as well as putting out compensatory and maybe punitive damages. So the way we operate belies your idea that you need to care a lot about intentions to modify people's behavior. Politics is like that too. It's best to assume that most pols are opportunistic slimebags who can be made to behave only by threats of losing elections, facing public embarassment, or having to deal with public disorder.
> > Moreover, the failure to make good the damage is if possible more
>culpable
> > than the original bombing, because then it was certainly known what was
>done
> > and what the likely consequences would be.
>
>True enough, although other wealthy nations would have the same duty . . .
>. it may be
>the case that we should expect people to rectify their own mistakes). Did
>anyone prevent Sweden or Germany from cleaning up the US's mess? I'd
>assume
>that they were just as capable of doing so.
Apart from the fact that Sweden and Germany are not, in fact, as rich as we are, there is the point that it doesn't get us off the hook to say that someone else might have cleaned up after us. That doesn't change the nature and quality of the act,w hich was the issue here.
jks
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