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Noah -> RE: To testify or not to testify!! (11/18/2006 9:20:04 PM)
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ORIGINAL: missturbation
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You, on the other hand, might rather live in a land which in all ways relents to the pressure to see a vow as nothing more or less than any handshake over the sale of a used car. I dunno.
I never said anything of the sort. I will say marriage vows have become pretty meaningless in my opinion and certainly are not more valuable than a life.
Thanks for clarifying.
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In any case the people whose morals you are swooning in response to, missturbation, don't strike me as toilet-worthy stuff. They strike me as people hewing closely to a set of values which happen to differ from yours.
Yep and as i have already stated i respect they are entitled to their opinions but i dont have to respect said opinion.
Yes. I have heard you each time you've said it. And why am I getting this lecture? Have I indicated any reluctance to consider any opinion yet offered here?
Does my taking the time to imaginatively inhabit their view and to ask you careful questions about your view indicate to you that I am a callous rejecter of people and their opinions?
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At the very least you must credit them for putting something far more valuable than money where their mouths are.
Maybe more valuable than money but not more valuable than someones life.
Here you are just mistaken. Maybe you didn't quite get the full import of what they had to say. They are making it clear--some of them, anyway--that they are willing to stake human life, their own or someone else's or several lives, for that matter, on their beliefs
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Kalira says what she says it is clear to me that in return for the chance to live under the legal circumstances at issue she is indeed willing to confront and accept whatever ill consequences might befall her as a result of someone else exercising the right in question.
Yes, but is she also willing to risk the chance of the person she has protected going out and reoffending? Could she live with that on her question? I know only kalira can answer.
missturbation, this whole reoffending thing is by no means built in to your example unless you smuggle it in. There are an infinite number of possible cases in which a person might refrain from testifying against a spouse where there is no reason whatever to believe that reoffense would result. Your spouse apprehends and struggles with the person who tortured, raped, and killed someone precious to both of you. The bad guy dies and your spouse is indicted for murder. Your spouse is in all actuality quite done with the killing phase of his life but you are called upon to give evidence which will in all likelihood be seen as damning to him.
The decision to testify might be different here than if he were a mafia hitman, don't you think? Or is it all black and white?
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Does that really disgust you?
Yes their loyalty could cost a heavy price.
Yes it could, and they might be the very ones to pay that price, and it seems to me that they have faced all of that.
Please note that one does not have to argue for "loyalty above all" in order to hold out that there might be cases in which they would refrain from testifying against a spouse.
{The sentence: "You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie!" keeps intruding at this point.}
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You seem to speak only of murder cases, by the way. Does your umbrage stop there or would you have the state compel spousal testimony for every sort of crime, misdemeanor and infraction?
My umbrage as you call it is not aimed at the law but the people who will not stand up for what is right. I spoke of murder because it is a serious crime, it was used as example. There are certain crimes i would not report my loved ones for yes.
If it shouldn't be called umbrage, once again, please clarify. I'd be curious as to why.
Thank you for answering that question about the scope of the issue for you.
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I'm encouraging you to back up for a bit from your condemnation of them as toilet stuff and try to explore their point of view at least long enough to gain some understanding of it.
I cannot and will not pretend to understand someone who holds human life so low in estimation.
(First let me note that you have explained in a subsequent post that your toilet talk wasn't meant in the way I understood it above. Thanks for clarifying that too.)
Well for heaven's sake. Did someone suggest pretending to understand?
My recommendation was to invest a little effort in understanding their points of view. I'm not at all sure what it means to "understand a person" beyond that. It does seem to me that we can have a better or worser understanding of one another's viewpoints.
We can read in the newspapers about the results of people defining one another as not being worth trying to understand. I don't always enjoy those stories.
The people posting to this thread didn't kill anyone, missturbation (as far as I know.) They hold an opinion about how to behave in a certain eventuality which as it seems to me is astronomically unlikely in the first place--if we stay with the murder theme.
Yeah, Kalira claims to have been in exactly the situation the thread deals with, and maybe she has. And maybe she refused to testify while jumping off a roof to evade killer bees. We can each formulate our opinions about those questions too. I can't wait to see her contributions to a thread about Martian abduction. That said I still credit her for owning up forthrightly to the entailments of the position she took in this thread.
You have been challenged about some of the troubling entailments of the position you have taken and you have not yet owned up to them. I hope you will address those questions from me and others.
Your decision to declare entire human beings as quite beneath being worthy of understanding on the basis of their expression of their opinion on something like this just strikes me as the thing which lies at the heart of radical fundamentalisms of various flavors.
So, no, please don't pretend. And feel free to apportion your energy any way you like. If that budget precludes spending it on understanding the ideas of the other people in this thread (including me,) I support your choice completely. But you needn't make such sweeping moral condemnations to do that.
What I was trying to show you was that a person could oppose you on the particulars at issue here and still hold human life in an estimation exactly as high as yours. They might, as it happens, just hold some other value even higher than you value life or anything else.
But unless you're willing to understand these people we shouldn't be surprised at the consistency with which you demonstrate your misunderstanding of them.
There are some compelling things which could be discussed here if certain people would climb down from ther polemical parapets and mix with those who seem to be trying to just explore the ideas..
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