I’m pretty sure we could come up with various individuals and groups of people that some users of this forum would prefer not to exist. There’s no clear and unbiased way to decide which of those individuals and groups could be the target of “philosophical questions” about the desirability of murdering them and which could not. Unless we’re going to allow the question as applied to any individual or group (which I think is untenable for numerous reasons), the line has to be drawn somewhere. Would it be ethical to get rid of this meddlesome priest should be suspendable or worse (except that the meddlesome priest in question has been dead for over eight hundred years).
And I think drawing the line at we’re not going to allow hypotheticals about murdering discernable people[1] is better (and poses less risk of viewpoint suppression) than expecting the mods to somehow devise a rule for when that content will be allowed and consistently apply it. I think the effect of a bright-line no-murder-talk rule on expression of ideas is modest because (1) posters can get much of the same result by posing non-violent scenarios (e.g., leaving someone to drown in a pond is neither an act of violence nor generally illegal in the United States) and (2) there are other places to have discussions if the murder content is actually important to the philosophical point.[2]
By “discernable people,” I mean those with some sort of salient real-world characteristic as opposed to being 99-100% generic abstractions (especially if in a clearly unrealistic scenario, like the people in the trolley problem).
And I think drawing the line at we’re not going to allow hypotheticals about murdering discernible people
Do you think it is acceptable to discuss the death penalty on the forum? Intuitively this seems within scope—historically we have discussed criminal justice reform on the forum, and capital punishment is definitely part of that.
If so, is the distinction state violence vs individual violence? This seems not totally implausible to me, though it does suggest that the offending poster could simply re-word their post to be about state-sanctioned executions and leave the rest of the content untouched.
On point 4:
I’m pretty sure we could come up with various individuals and groups of people that some users of this forum would prefer not to exist. There’s no clear and unbiased way to decide which of those individuals and groups could be the target of “philosophical questions” about the desirability of murdering them and which could not. Unless we’re going to allow the question as applied to any individual or group (which I think is untenable for numerous reasons), the line has to be drawn somewhere. Would it be ethical to get rid of this meddlesome priest should be suspendable or worse (except that the meddlesome priest in question has been dead for over eight hundred years).
And I think drawing the line at we’re not going to allow hypotheticals about murdering discernable people[1] is better (and poses less risk of viewpoint suppression) than expecting the mods to somehow devise a rule for when that content will be allowed and consistently apply it. I think the effect of a bright-line no-murder-talk rule on expression of ideas is modest because (1) posters can get much of the same result by posing non-violent scenarios (e.g., leaving someone to drown in a pond is neither an act of violence nor generally illegal in the United States) and (2) there are other places to have discussions if the murder content is actually important to the philosophical point.[2]
By “discernable people,” I mean those with some sort of salient real-world characteristic as opposed to being 99-100% generic abstractions (especially if in a clearly unrealistic scenario, like the people in the trolley problem).
I am not expressing an opinion about whether there are philosophical points for which murder content actually is important.
Do you think it is acceptable to discuss the death penalty on the forum? Intuitively this seems within scope—historically we have discussed criminal justice reform on the forum, and capital punishment is definitely part of that.
If so, is the distinction state violence vs individual violence? This seems not totally implausible to me, though it does suggest that the offending poster could simply re-word their post to be about state-sanctioned executions and leave the rest of the content untouched.