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0 pointszibeski5556y ago0 comments

>> Where is the moral vagueness in the accusation?

The legal definition is wide enough to encompass a broad range of acts that people have differing moral intuitions about (even if they are all bad acts, some are markedly more heinous in a lot of people's minds). That leads to moral vagueness. Pointing to a legal definition doesn't change that.

If I went around calling you a killer, because you kill insects, or a criminal, because you had an alcoholic drink when underage, or a producer of child pornography, because you sexted your girlfriend a photo of yourself when you were 17, and then pointed to a dictionary or legal definition to show that I was technically correct, would you not still object that I'm using terms that are overly vague as to the morality of what you have done?

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eesmith6y ago· 2 in thread

> That leads to moral vagueness

By that logic, every law leads to moral vagueness. What's "child abuse"? If you spank your child, in some jurisdictions that's fine. In others it's illegal. For all I know, there may be some where it's okay so long as you don't leave bruises. Does that prevent us from making justified accustations of child abuse?

What's spousal rape? In some jurisdictions there is no such crime. In others it is a crime.

What's copyright infringement? Again, the details differ by jurisdiction. Different jurisdictions recognize different fair use or fair dealing considerations, and have different lengths of time for copyright protection.

> calling you a killer, because you kill insects

If I killed someone, and you call me a killer because of that, by pointing to the dictionary and legal definitions, can my friends defend me by saying that the definition is overly vague?

FWIW, I am a killer of insects - Killer is a not-uncommon nickname, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_(nickname) - I am a criminal because I've been ticketed several times for breaking traffic laws, I believe there is a strong argument against defining sexting as the production of child pornography, similar to the argument allowing some minors to have sex with adults of similar age.

I do not believe there is a strong argument in saying that sex with someone who is unable to grant consent is not sexual abuse.

soulofmischief6y ago

> What's "child abuse"? If you spank your child, in some jurisdictions that's fine. In others it's illegal. For all I know, there may be some where it's okay so long as you don't leave bruises. Does that prevent us from making justified accustations of child abuse?

How does it not? I was abused as a child, physically and psychologically tormented and coerced into taking drugs and participating in weird religious things I wanted no part of, and many people I've encountered, including my own mother, don't view what I've been through as abuse. I consider it child abuse but even the multitude of police who visited my dwellings growing up in rural Louisiana sided with my abusers.

This is an example of the independence and often disparity between objective morality and law. Law wants to emulate morality, but it never will. And thus we cannot use law as a roadmap for morality. That is what people are doing in this case, clinging to the arbitrary laws defined in their section of the earth instead of only making safe moral assumptions based on scientific inquiry.

Stallman has just lost a position that he has spent his whole life working towards in a misplaced attempt to play the devil's advocate for a friend whom he has trouble imagining a dark side of. For what, so we can be morally vindicated? After everything which Stallman has helped give us? What kind of purist authoritarian hyper-reactive world are we living in? Without Stallman the two of us wouldn't even be able to have this discussion.

eesmith6y ago

That's all fine and good, but Stallman argued that it was absolutely wrong to use "sexual abuse" in an accusation, not morally wrong.

Stallman's position appears to be that you absolutely cannot call what happened to you "child abuse."

Stallman doesn't seem willing to learn what others mean by "sexual assault" before making up his own definition and claiming that's the definition they were using.

Stallman has also spent his adult life as a sexual creep. This is an open secret. Your moral calculus appears to be that people are free to creep on others so long as the good they do outweighs the creep, and Stallman's good means he can be as creepy as he wants to, with no direct consequences?

If after 30 years the free software movement can't survive and thrive without Stallman then the movement has failed. The indirect consequences include all the people who left or never joined the movement because of his creepiness. Is that in your calculus?

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