Ukraine War Update EXTRA: Looting - Answering the Moral Challenge. Or Not.
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"I am lusting for justice, global justice, geopolitical political justice."
Hello Team!
Jonathan introduces the video as a one-off looking at the answers to his moral challenge from the previous day about how pro-Russian voices justify the looting seen on CCTV footage. He is interested in understanding the justifications used and sees it as an example of cognitive dissonance reduction.
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Justifications for looting
The main justifications seen in response to the video were:
- A few bad apples approach, e.g. "bound to be a few bad apples...no matter who". Jonathan argues this doesn't cut the mustard as an approach. The amount of looting is too widespread to just be a few bad apples and even if it were, it is still morally wrong and needs to be rooted out.
- Minimizing or denying it happened, e.g. "sometimes it can happen and it shouldn't and it isn't correct." While accepting it is wrong, this still minimizes the scale of the looting.
- Whataboutery/two quoque fallacy - Deflecting by pointing to wrongs on the other side, e.g. "Such morals weren't an issue when the UK nazis were terrorizing the people of Donbas". Jonathan explains these alleged actions have no moral effect on evaluating these specific acts of looting.
- Looting is excusable in war, e.g. "It's war. Looting happens." Jonathan strongly disagrees, saying this is "giving up even attempting to be a moral agent."
How (not) to do moral reasoning
Jonathan goes through some of the comments attempting to justify the looting and highlights the poor moral reasoning, including:
- Arguing if property will be destroyed anyway it is not immoral to "liberate valuable things". Jonathan points out even if this premise was true, it would still be morally wrong.
- Saying because soldiers "endure awful things" and are "not on vacation" their morals will naturally be different. Jonathan questions if war should be an excuse to let your darker side through - it is "allowing yourself to be immoral."
Wrap up
Jonathan implores viewers to learn how to identify and deal with these kinds of poor arguments and fallacies as they come up, as they are used universally beyond just this topic. He hopes the courts will be able to deal with the systemic war crimes of the Russian army. He thanks viewers for indulging him in this moral discussion.
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