Is violent action in defense of the environment, justifiable?
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Violent action in defense of anything but your family is never justifiable.
@Blondesjon
why is family special?
i mean other than the apparent primitive primal instincts.
@ragingloli . . .If you have to ask, you’ll never know.
refresh the page, i edited the response.
Again, why does a close blood relationship make violence justifiable, but other relationships do not? The only thing that comes to mind are indeed primal instincts, but you don’t use instincts to try and justify other things, like, using the territorial instinct to justify violence when someone enters your private space without asking, or the reproductive instinct to justify forced sexual contact.
So I say that if you say that violence is never justified except to defend family, then being faimily does not justify violence either.
@ragingloli . . .It’s a rough fucking world outside of mom and dad’s house. Lofty ideals don’t feed a family and they sure as hell don’t protect it from those that don’t share those ideals.
@Blondesjon
So you can’t or don’t want to answer the question.
Fine, but then say so, and spare me your condescending mockery.
@ragingloli . . .I gave you an answer. It’s not my fault if you don’t like it.
anger is the path to the dark side young padawan
@ragingloli the only thing I can think of is that you’re supposed to love your family, and love makes you do extreme things (justified or not).
Violent action is never justified.
@Facade
Yes, but this love is based on primal instincts. Love in general is based on instinct, and I don’t think that this love justifies violence. Even less that love for family is somehow more a justification than other kinds of love.
@ragingloli well, the difference is really pretty clear. defense of self and loved ones is defense against someone intent to do you or your family harm. extend that to the defense of any person against someone intent to do harm to that person – i think equally clear.
now, violent action against someone intending to catch a whale, let’s say. if you’re a greenpeace person attacking corporate whalers, seems plausible, but, what if the wrong doer is an Inuit attempting to catch a whale to support his tribe in accordance with tribal traditions. what really is the difference? if violence is justified, then blow the Inuits out of the water, right?
no, not so clear, and violence is rarely the answer.
@avalmez
Only clear in light of instincts and athropocentric preference, e.g. the belief that human life is more worth than anything else, which itself is based on instinct.
Why is violence to defend a human from harm justifiable, but violence to defend the whale from harm not?
Maybe the attacker of the person is a cannibal from the jungle and eating young women is part of their tribal tradition.
Really the only reason for the difference in justification is the instinctive belief that humans are more worth than anything else, and in case of blondesjon, that the own family is more worth than every other human.
I don’t think violence in the cause of protecting the environment is ever justified.
@ragingloli so if a dog were to stray across the path of your vehicle, would you swerve into a ditch in defense of the dog if that was your only option? i agree with the basic idea that humans in general need to be more appreciative and caring of the environment. and i think corporate whaling need to come to and end. and, if i saw a cannibal looking to some young woman as his/her next meal, i’d defend her life over his/her. i don’t think violence is a prior the right approach to defending the environment.
@avalmez
Yes I would.
Cars nowadays are incredibly save, so chances are I would get away unscathed.
The Dog would surely die if hit.
@ragingloli you, sir/madam, have lost any credibility from my perspective.
@The_Compassionate_Heretic Don’t you know that its rude to point. It creates a violent disturbance in people’s emotional environments.
@lloydbird I’m not pointing. I’m holding up two sugar lumps.
@avalmez
how?
The dog would live, I would live, only the car would be damaged.
@ragingloli so it’s a deep dark storm drain kind of ditch and you’re driving the 70 MPH speed limit. now what? you won’t come out let alone unscathed.
It’s unjustifiable if for no other other reason than that it’s completely ineffective. Even if you could make a moral case for it, the fact remains that this kind of action inevitably turns public opinion against environmental causes, so in the end it isn’t even a “defense” of the environment at all, just another outrage against our sensibilities.
Not if it’s not effective. If violence could stop humans from making species extinct and devastating the planet in the many ways humans do, and there were no clear non-violent way to achieve the same result, then I’d call it justified and well worth it. After all, humans are doing massive violence to non-human species and environments, and are in no danger of extinction except from themselves, so if doing violence to them would effectively reduce the violence they do to everyone, it’s not only justified but potentially an overall reduction in violence. However, I think violence is usually not as effective as non-violent means, especially at safeguarding..
@lloydbird I’m going to PM you because it is not relevant to the discussion.
@avalmez
“you won’t come out let alone unscathed.” That is debatable. There is still a good chance that i would get out alive, given that I open the door quickly.
I know you want to put me before a “my certain death or the dogs certain death” problem, then i would choose my own existence.
But I would acknowledge that this decision would not be based on any kind of reason, but on instinct alone and thus be without rational justification.
ok, but argumentative imo
of course, this is ignoring reflexes, which would most likely cause me to swerve to avoid the dog anyway.
No. That does not, in any way, justify violence.
I was just reading about Joaquin Balaguer, the president of the Dominican Republic who was quite the environmentalist, but also killed many of his political opponents to stay in power. He (well, not personally) also shot loggers.
For the sake of argument, what if peaceful methods of environmentalism fail us? What if the only way to save ourselves from catastrophic climate change was to make it so that any politician who supported the destruction of the environment had mysterious accidents that prevented them from continuing to live? Would not killing them justify the deaths of the millions who would starve under climate change?
Isn’t treating the environment with violence causing a lot of the problems? How is that then the solution..
I don’t think so. Here’s one example: when I was a kid, growing up in socialist france, I was often intrigued by the level of hatred directed toward SUV owners. There was no global warming hysteria then, but there was a lot of class warfare, of hatred of the “rich”, and SUV drivers were systematically included in the “rich” category, for some reason.
Today, whenever I hear people’s arguments against SUVs, and against “polluters” in general, I sends me back to these puzzling childhood experiences, and these people sound just as disingenuous in their attempts at covering up the real reasons behind their outrage.
So when you tolerate violence in defense of the environment, in most cases you merely justify class warfare and hatred of others.
@Jack_Haas – Many French people also have very different aesthetic tastes from the USA, observations on waste and gluttony are timeless, and it’s only pop culture that looks at climate change as a new craze – greenhouse gas emission concerns, as well as oil overuse concerns, are several decades old.
@benjaminlevi – Yes, I think there is a moral imperative to protect the environment from the destruction, which in the current situation far outweighs the need to keep some humans safe. Frankly, I think humans have massively overpopulated; they could lose 90–99% of their population and be in no danger of extinction provided the cause abated. Even from a human perspective that only cares about humans, humans are in danger of killing themselves off with their own destruction of their home planet, as well as causing the experience of human existence to be more and more difficult and unpleasant.
@ragingloli France had a socialist president from 1981–1995, and a socialist majority government for most of that.
funny how the people on this website, presumably living a comfortable western lifestyle, think violence is never justified, yet this lifestyle is only possible because of their respective country’s savage history of violence. From the ruthless eradication of the American indigenous people, all the way through to contemporary Iraq, violence utilised to secure resources, natural or human from all corners of the globe. The bourgeois mentality stubbornly refuses to acknowledge this glaringly obvious correlation.
@Jack_Haas i hate SUV’s too, it has nothing to do with being disingenuous, i dislike the mentality of the drivers and their complete indifference to the use of fossil fuels and the environmental and political ramifications.
@mammal
It could have been achieved without the bloodshed, in peaceful coexistence and cooperation with the natives, and indeed, american culture could even have inherited the respect for nature from the natives.
On SUVs, I agree. I mean, they are ugly, they are uneconomical, unecological and their existence is pretty much pointless. Contrary to what they look like, they are pretty much useless offroad.
If you want to drive your kids to school, get a hot hatchback or a saloon car. Want to transport stuff, get an estate. Want to drive fast occasionally, get a sports saloon, like an M5. There really is nothing an SUV does that cannot be done just as well by any other kind of car.
@mammal I’m confused…you’re arguing that if someone lives in a country with a history of violent exploitation, then they have no business rejecting violence? Or are you arguing that violence has worked marvelously well in the past, so those who have reaped its benefits should think twice before dismissing it? Hard to tell if you’re making a pro- or anti-violence statement.
@Zaku as someone who was born and raised in france and has dealt with french people on a regular basis for over 30 years… LOL!!!!!
No, an extremist is an extremist and that’s polarizing which is limiting = less effective.
The “environment” makes all life possible (a point which is sadly and all to often missed). So we can strip this aspect of the question away and just ask whether violence in the defense of human life, all human life. or even all life is ever justifiable.
Also, violence can be just limited to property damage.
Either way, all we have to do is find a single case where the answer is yes to violence, and the “ever justified” gets satistfied. I can readily imagine multiple scenarios where less human life is lost by resorting to violence in defense of the environment, so I would have to answer yes.
For instance, make yourself a subsistence hunter in a forest in a corrupt third world country with a government or local police who profit from allowing the illegal take over of your land for the resources it contains. Your family’s life, livlihood, culture and entire existence depends directly on that forest and there is no legal recourse for stopping their destruction.
Would you condemn the forest dwellers for resorting to violence, or is it justified? How is this any different from defending one’s family and property from an intruder at night in the first world?
All too often people see some imaginery line between the environment and every aspect of their own existence. The only difference between us and the forest dweller is that we live on the resources from over the hills and far away.
Yes, Critter38!
And the difference I see in your forest dweller example is that not only is the hypothetical government an outside force coming to destroy their family’s livelihood, culture, and existence as they know it, but (unlike, say a warring tribe) this attacker is overwhelming, determined on elimination, and yet supported by a system of ideas that have the outside world agreeing that the government is legitimately doing something ordinary and rightful, that would be illegal, abnormal and/or extreme to interfere with.
No. Besides, in this case nonviolent action is more effective in the long run.
i guess as justifiable as violence to protect your country (ie, war) or your society (death penalty) or your family (intruders). my opionion on all those is irrelevant since my opinion remains simply that.
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