Not inherently, but it can be. The discrimination here would be bad (IMO) because it judges someone else as a bad person with only the knowlege of them being a police officer.

As TX is arguing, one's career choice is part of one's identity.

That's what I thought as well. What about people who change careers? Do we look for the common threads between the jobs to decide their identity, or does each job say something different.

And are we differentiating between a career, and a job? Or is there no difference?

Well, "career" is usually taken to mean a long-term profession (eg. "I've been a lawyer for 20 years"), while "job" simply means any job you have.

This post was last modified: 12-20-2006 11:28 AM by Einsteinmonkey.

I'm just trying to understand TX's position. I am having a hard time with the idea that the choice of career says all that needs to be said about someone's trustworthiness.

I know, and actually think I'm starting to understand, his logical position. However, people are not logical and don't always employ logic to things like choosing a job. From a purely logical point of view I might be able to agree with him, but I don't see that as being realistic.

For instance, to say that to be a priest necessarily includes wanting to do harm does not work for me. I know priests who might be disappointed that I have not chosen to remain a Catholic, but would not 'threaten' my soul. And I don't believe that their belief of what happens when we die has any effect on mine.

It seems that intent has absolutely nothing to do with our actions. It seems that he is saying that you can choose to be a priest solely for the reason of wanting to help others, but the act of being a priest makes this evil.

Regardless of the logical reasons for saying this have to be true, I don't know if I believe this.

Kren,

Yes to disprove an universal you need only one example. However what you have called inherent traits are merely accidental traits. For inherent traits to be disproved as is done with universals, you would have to show that squares actually contain arcs, no straight sides, etc.

BTW inaccurately labeling the descriptions as "absolutist" does not make them so. Perhaps a bit of honesty is called for..

Jim,

Can a shape be both a square and a sphere? The answer to this is the answer to your question, for exactly the same reasons. I am not saying that it supercedes being trustworthy, I am pointing out that necessarily it eliminates the possibility in exactly the same way that being a square eliminates the possiblity of being a circle.

[/quote]BTW inaccurately labeling the descriptions as "absolutist" does not make them so. Perhaps a bit of honesty is called for.. [\quote]

My bad. No dishonesty intended there. If it's not an absolute though, what is it?

Aside from that, what inherent traits prove all cops as unworthy of trust?

You are generalizing from an instance. If you will back up to where teachers are discussed you will find that in fact I am focusing not on careers but on actions and paths taken. That resolves all of the "issues" raised on this second page.

Kren,

Since I have repeated myself countless times, this time I just ask you to FINALLY please go back and actually read the previous posts.

BTW is a square being four sided with four right angles, therefore not a circle "absolutist?"

Actually if you would like to be specific you would say: "The (pseudo)discrimination here would be bad (IMO) because it judges someone else as an untrustworthy person because of the certain knowledge that they have taken a path of harm to others, control over others, and deception of others, and furthermore may well be advocating similar behavior and paths."

Notice that one need not name the job at all, and in doing so completely avoid the irrational bias you keep trying in vain to support toward police and priests.

This post was last modified: 12-20-2006 03:23 PM by TXStorm.

Fair enough, I had only been skimming through.

TX-

"Actually if you would like to be specific you would say: "The (pseudo)discrimination here would be bad (IMO) because it judges someone else as an untrustworthy person because of the certain knowledge that they have taken a path of harm to others, control over others, and deception of others, and furthermore may well be advocating similar behavior and paths."

I believe that those inherent traits are listed actually above.

Yet I do not think that everybody who becomes a cop has these things in mind when they become police officers. Maybe even a lot may, but definately not all.
I don't think that every cop thought, " I'm going to decieve, harm, and control others" when they went to the academy.
Maybe they just didn't realize as you do that the job necesitates that, or maybe they figured that controlling a mass murderer would be the best thing to do. Or maybe they could think that they were there to save lives and to protect others.

Basically, intention and trust have a common area. For instance, I can't trust anybody to be sure that I won't die while we walk down to the 7-11, but I can trust them to try to make sure no harm comes to me, at the best of thier ability. It's the intention therein that warrants the trust.

It is action and trust which matter, intention is irrelevent in this context. You can intend to do good all day long, but if you join the Klan (or police force, or priesthood) you fail miserably.

As for your list, I already addressed it pointing out that you still insist on calling per accidens traits per se traits.

Jim,

An explicit awareness of the desire to do harm is clearly not necessary. Again as I have been stressing so much to no avail, it is the actions and paths chosen that matter. I have not rested upon careers qua careers, that suggestion is a strawman, but rather harms.

This post was last modified: 12-20-2006 03:48 PM by TXStorm.

So, if somebody does wrong, with the intention of doing good, the fact that they have done wrong is the only basis on which to judge them?

The action is wrong right? Or do you call the action good simply because they are a priest or a cop?

Intention can certainly be negative, but remember that we are talking about actions here.

Actually, I was talking about intentions. In this case an occupation has nothing to do with it.

To quote myself...

"So, if somebody does wrong, with the intention of doing good, the fact that they have done wrong is the only basis on which to judge them?"

And I yet again pointed out that the intention to do good does not in any way at all change the nature of the action. The answer to the question as to whether actions are judged by the actions is of course yes, just as squares are judged by the nature of squares..

Actually, I don't judge that way.
Say you were working on a crane holding a large concrete pipe and you dropped it. Maybe it wasn't even an accident, you just dropped it... and it landed on some innocent person. Am I to judge you by the action which killed this innocent person? Your intention was not to kill them. Yet they did.
Or even if they were Shooting at somebody, trying to shoot thier leg so they couldn't run away, or run into a bulding with a gun or blah blah blha, and it actually killed that person instead. Am I to judge them as a killer?

My point is that intentions and the outcome of actions can be very different.

Yes they can be different, and you might have worn a different shirt today as well. Trivial facts are by their very nature irrelevent.

I guarentee that if I intend to give your sister or mother an orgasm, so I rape them, even if I am successful in giving them an orgasm you will still judge the action evil as you damn well should.

MMM... I don't know, a mistake is a mistake. If I cost someone thier life by total accident, I surely could understand someone WANTING to kill me for it, but I don't think it would be JUST to kill me for hitting the wrong switch.

I do understand that in the event of rape, something that must be prematurely planned, (even if for only that minute) is something anybody would judge anybody before.
The question was basically about accidental murder. Would a total accident result in a judgement the same as that of murder?

In as much as the action fits the criteria for murder it remains murder. Just as with the four sided figure with all right angles.

Actually I disagree with that.
Murder necesitates the intent to kill, where as an accidental death of someone else has no intent to kill.

Murder is the taking of the life of an innocent moral agent. You are adding intent because your conclusion is that intent is what counts. Therefore by adding intent into your inappropriate description of murder, you are creating a circular argument, and thus defeating your own position.

Not really.

Actually, I thought ( and now even according to wiki) murder is premeditative.

So if I happen to see an opportunity it kill someone who happens to be right in front of me, it is not murder? I have not meditated upon it, I have not planned it, nothing I have done meets the minimum requirements for pre-meditation..

It could be that WIki is offering the legal definition of murder, which only captures some murders not all.

This post was last modified: 12-20-2006 04:50 PM by TXStorm.

To be honest, this definition of murder should give a clue as to how I met someone I trusted who was a cop.

Either way, this premeditation notion is strange as well. Most of the time it's someone who PLOTTED AND PLANNED a murder of someone else. Yet even within the two miliseconds before your exampled murder actually happened, this person...
1, planned on killing someone at an oportunity.
or
2. Just happened to see this oportunity and at least plannet his action of stabbing or shooting or whatnot.

This is not the same as an accidental death of someone, hence the difference between accidental death and murder.

If you are relying upon time spans so short as to make conscious thought impossible to have occured you are eliminating pre-medititation as a possibility, thus undermining your entire line of argument.

There are differences between the direct well thought out intentional killing of someone and the accidental killing of someone. I have not denied this. However there are also differences between stabbing someone and drowning them. Will you argue, as you have been, that either stabbing or drowning therefore must not be murder?

Actually stabbing or drowning are of course both murder. The intent in both acts is the death of the stabbed or drowned.

The time span doesn't matter because the intent is the same as somebody plotting for months, the death of another.
Accidental death however has no intent of this and (IMO) should not be treated the same way.
This is because to judge all cases as the same thing you only judge on what happened, completely leaving out why it happened.

I do understand that most accidents are judged upon what happened, and not the intent. If I accidentally rear end somebody on the road, it's still my fault whether the intent is this or that. However murder is different (IMO) because why take the life of another innocent due to thier mistake? It only worsens the situation. Anybody who takes the life of another by complete accident will morally punish themselves most likely, and feel guilty about this, it may very likely hurt them for the rest of thier lives. Is this not punishment enough?

Okay so how do we determine if an object is a square? We check to see if it meets the criteria for being a square. We do not ask what the intention of the person who drew it was, we check the actual object.

So how do we determine if an action is murder, we check to see if the killing was the action of one moral agent against another moral agent, and then ask if the second was an innocent moral agent. If an action meets the criteria it is murder. There is no need nor sense in asking what the intention was with regard to mere classification of the action.

How you choose to respond to the murder may differ depending on the intent, but that is a completely separate issue from the simple act of determining what kind of action it was.

The issue of punishment is a separate one, but no I do not agree that no punishment at all, no negative consequences, is sufficient.

According to this, a murder and an accidental death are the same thing.

Just plain death of an innocent, by cause of somebody else.

The punishment is what is important here.
The reason is that we deduce what punishment is viable by weather or not the intent was to kill.
The difference between 1st degree murder and involuntary manslaughter.
Those terms of course are terms of our law, or government, however completely understandable to anybody.

Should the punishment be different for a 1st degree, as it would be for an involuntary manslaughter?


To keep this post along the same lines, one could say that if the punishment for a death is different when viewing if it was intentional or not, than any other punishment for any act is different if the act is intentional or not.

Or a cop or priest, though doing the same wrong, is to be treated differently upon whether thier intentions were TO do this wrong.

OR,

A cop or priest is judged as untrustworthy. The intentions have no part in the matter, the fact is that they do wrong.

This may be nearly the same as the difference between an intentional killer and a person who made a mistake.

This post was last modified: 12-21-2006 08:45 AM by Kren.

No murder and accidental death are not the same, for accidental death captures folks falling from cliffs without any other human interaction, and the like. Murder is the taking of the life of an innocent moral agent. While intent may play a role your reaction to the death, it in no way whatsoever ever changes the nature of the death.

I notice that you overlooked or ignored the analogy.

Okay, so again applying your reasoning, rape is not rape if my intent is to give the victim an orgasm.. unless of course you have multiple standards rather than any objective single standard..

This post was last modified: 12-21-2006 09:30 AM by TXStorm.

Sorry TX, as a Geometry teacher I don't like your use of the square is a circle (or sphere) argument. All of these objects are very simply defined in Geometry. The things you are comparing them to are not so simply defined - at least I don't believe so.

It's like saying (in my opinion) that to talk about the earth we can compare it to a tennis ball and that says all that needs to be said about it.

You are missing the analogy because of, well I really have no idea why. The methodology is what is compared and it is IDENTICAL. The use of the particular examples is BECAUSE they are simple. By employing the simple and easy to understand objects in the exact same argument we can easily see how the methodology works, and therefore more easily understand the emotionally driven issues here. I am in no ways stepping on your toes or invading your territory by mentioning shapes.

Murder is exceedingly easily defined, I cannot fathom what the motivation would be for claiming otherwise.

This post was last modified: 12-21-2006 12:21 PM by TXStorm.

Back to the question at hand.
Defining trust:

"Trust is the belief in the good character of one party, presumed to seek to fulfill policies, ethical codes, law and their previous promises."

I think this is something you can expect from someone regaurdless of thier job. If someone is a police officer or a priest, it does not mean that they must therefore break promises to you, or be unethical.

Of course, that definition provide by wiki may not be your definition of trust, (I would assume of course since "law" is mentioned) and perhaps a new definition is needed?

Uh.. so then we are indeed back to where we started because by your reasoning, nothing is unethical therefore everyone is ethical..

Of course that "definition" is insufficient. However look to what was offered and the conclusions you drew despite that "definition." Even though police are necessarily unethical, that is to say despite the fact that they necessarily cause harm to others (by intention since you keep introducing that), they remain unethical. (Same for priests btw)

Trust has to do with consistency (necessary but not sufficient condition), which is not mentioned. Sadly you cannot even trust a cop to always act in the most harmful way possible, for as you noted they do take rare positive actions in order to maintain the public illusion. So too with priests..

So we lack ethical behavior, lack integrity, lack consistency, and we have harm causing behaviors INHERENT (you seem to really want to continue to simply ignore this aspect) to those who pursue those paths. Where again does the trustworthiness arise from??

Actually I'm not trying to ignore the inherent harm causing behaviors, I just don't see them.
Maybe I'm masked by my own experience with police officers. I don't mean I've never seen an officer taking thier "liberty" of basically fucking with people who simply decided to walk down the street at night. I've seen worse.
But I've also seen police officers who have (in two cases, even at the risk of thier own jobs) put the protection of innocent people before the bullshit laws that have nothing to do with safety.

I agree on the aspect of justice, that it probably would be done even without our government. The fact is however that we do live under a government in this time. Therefore the most effective way to protect innocent people is to make it your job.

Nothing is wrong with enforcing the laws that are morally compatable.

Nothing is wrong with causing harm to others IF they are indeed a danger to other people's lives and causing harm to them is the most efficient way to stop them from this behavior.

Question: Why is the definition unsificient?
Is it mores specific? Like, I'd trust this person not to steal from me, but I wouldn't trust him not to try to fuck my wife if they were alone for awhile?
If it's what you said, that they rarely (not concistantly) take actions to protect. I disagree with that. Infact I would say that some DO consistantly take actions to protect.


If I missed something, I apologize, but at least tell me where to read it because I've been reading and reading.

So no matter what the facts are, no matter what happens police (and presumably priests still) are simply exempt from any evaluation or examination. Hm.. yeah that pretty well prevents any possibility of falsification of your position, but such stipulations create a severe disconnect from reality (and reason of course) which necessitate that your position will be unsupportable.

Nothing is wrong with accepting stolen property for the job of enforcing the act of stealing property? Nothing is wrong with acting as judge and jury prior to any evidence existing? Nothing is wrong with assuming that you are worth more, are more morally valuable than every other individual who is not like you? All are equal, just some are more equal than others eh?

You cannot find even a single instance of a law enforcement officer (who has been on the job more than 30 seconds) who has acted more often to protect any honest innocent individual than he/she has acted so as to harm others. In fact I would point out that you cannot find that there exist any who have acted so as to protect honest innocent individuals without harming innocent others even once out of more than a million actions. But by all means if you have evidence that in fact police do not enforce the law, do not use their power, (do not take a paycheck) and thus serve as examples of the type of cop you claim is the norm, I am sure we would all love to see it.

As for the consistency issue, are you truly claiming that you know of police who do not enforce any law other than to stop murder, stop theft, or stop immediate physical harm to others?

It seems that you may be reasoning that if a cop ever does something which could be construed as positive, then necessarily all cops are always inherently trustworthy, or perhaps something similar to a slightly lesser degree. I would contend that you would never give a rapist a similar carte blanche if he were to rescue a child from drowning say. Why then do police get this preferential treatment merely because they are police? (again presumably all of this applies to priests as well)

The definition is insufficient for the reason cited already (as well as others). It fails to capture vital aspects of trustworthiness, such as consistency in behavior. Consider a clock (hopefully you have no emotion bias in favor of clocks! ) that is broken in the sense that it has stopped. Is that clock trustworthy? Will it always tell you the right time? Nope.. Depending on how you tell time and what sort of clock it is, at most it will tell you the correct time twice a day, so just like the cops you cite, there are perhaps times for a split second that the clock is accurate, (for the cops this means doing something decent), but this fact does not mean that the clock is trustworthy. Now consider that a truer analogy would be a clock which is broken in the sense that it keeps moving but not at the proper speed. It will almost never give you the correct time and you cannot know when it will give you the correct time. It deceives you and is unreliable. This is more like the police you are heralding as the epitome of trustworthiness..

I find that cops vs clocks resemblance completely and utterly correct.

I can only compete that some people reguardless of thier positions in life at the time, can only (with a clear concience) do what is morally correct. This is not exclusive to you. Or anybody for that matter. For one, the society that we are in, has everybody at work for 8 hours a day exept for criminals who have no work span, and therefore a lot of us subscribe to police enforcement of the laws that protect us so we CAN work all day and not have to worry about how to find the jackass who broke into our house and stole something while we were gone.

This leaves us with the only option of those who are paid to protect, detect, and enforce.

The fact that they are paid to do so means 2 things of course.
1. we pay taxes which in turn, pays them. (BTW, they make less than anybody with a degree, even if they themselves have one)
2. Other people, TEACHERS for example, get paid the same way, and nobody judges a teacher unless of course they think that they are unworthy of teaching, or of course, they are having sex with the students. (Teachers, being an example of course only to clear any exceptions from you TX, in other words, not an ad hominem, but a closer point to you as so you'll understand more clearly that regular people get paid by taxes.)

Taking the job as a priest merely means to teach religion, in any sense. You could say it's all fallacy, however many of the lessons learned within religion are the same learned within morallity, and if one is inclined to do so even with multiple stories from this book or that, why judge them as untrustworthy for it?
Police are the same in retrospect. However, as you have said before, they can detain you and will not let you walk away.

This is something I kind of agree with. I don't want a drunk driver to walk away when a cop is telling them not to get into the car. If the cop has to forcefully restrain them from this... who cares? Ask any parent, that's fine with them. At least they are not causing an accident leading to the death of innocent people, or thier own kids.

Further,

The clock anology is correct... yeah... but after thinking about it, you are saying the police rarely save lives or protect, it's only once in awhile... can you elaborate on that?

You are mistaken about the pay rate, grossly so.

Teachers need not be government employees, whereas all police necessarily are. Teachers do not have total power over the lives of any other person, police do.

Taxes are taken from us yes, that does not mean that taxation is just, or that those who thrive off of the ill gotten gains are exempt from the taint.

Very few similarities exist between the rules of religion and morality. Religion tells you to sacrifice yourself for entities which are your superiors (just like cops tell you.. )

You still seem to be arguing that the potential for doing something that might be potentially good completely nullifies the vast negatives inherent to the person. I have brought it countless times now and not once have you allowed for a single standard. Will you likewise grant that necessarily OTHER liars are always trustworthy? Will you likewise simply stipulate that all rapists are safe around women? Do you also dictate that we cannot judge the actions of a pedophile as evil because he is a pedophile?