Freg3000 said:
Come again?
[Not trying to be confrontational so don't flip out at me ok 😀]
I am my own person. I do not kill ducks. I am responsible for my own actions.
Some crazy man is his own person. He does kill ducks. He is responsible for his own actions.
Hi Freg.
You're not being confrontational and I'm not going to flip out (I don't think).
It seems to me there are three fundamental ways to think about our relationships with other people -- we can think of ourselves as above the other (as those who want to physically injure this man, even if they're in jest), we can think of ourselves as equal to the other, or we can think of ourselves as being in perpetual responsibility to the other (that the other person, in fact, is an ongoing call to our own responsibility to them).
When I was in college (and going through a spiritual crisis) I read the Jewish ethicist Emmanuel Levinas. His fundamental argument was that, after the holocaust, we must recognize the human in all human beings, especially those who act in such a way that seems to defy their humanity. In other words, the greatest crimes are possible when
I or we begin to think of others as sub-human.
Another way of saying all of this -- where does justice have its roots? Levinas would argue that justice must have its roots in charity and in love -- and that, while justice must be served, it must be served in light of mercy, compassion and charity (justice must be served with the human in mind).
In L's own words:
"...For me the suffering proper to compassion, suffering because the other suffers, is only one aspect of a relation that is much more complex and much more complete at the same time: the responsibility for the other. I am in reality responsible for the other even when he or she commits crimes. That is, for me, what is essential in the human conscience: all men are responsible for one another and 'I more than anyone else.' One of the most important things for me is this asymmetry:
all men are responisible for one another and I more than everybody. It is Dostoevsky's formula ..."
Or, a more clear statement of his ethics as regards
any other person
"I do not have the right to leave him alone at his death" (this statement obviously has broader metaphorical implications).
I'm not asking you to buy any of this -- but this way of thinking dramatically reshaped my life. I do believe that we are all responsible for this man's actions, even if that responsibility only manifets itself in a justice that has its roots in charity and mercy. Perhaps most fundamentally -- in this time, when it's so easy to look at others and think of them as less than human, it's vital that, as the empowered, we recognize that every human being demands to be recognized as human (not as inhuman, not as sub-human or or as a "monster"), and that every human being demands our mercy and our charity.
All this from a recovering Catholic who found a spiritual home in the philosophical.
(The quotes are lifted from a series of interviews Levinas gave, collected in
Is It Righteous to Be?).