this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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chapotraphouse
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I think you are confusing yourself by thinking of a typical burglary - I.e. a burglary where the burglar has done what they can to make sure people aren’t home (e.g. struck during work hours, saw the mail piling up and came when the person was on vacation, etc.)
But that’s not the situation being contemplated here. The OP specified a nighttime break in. This is the opposite of your standard burglar - they’ve struck when people are the MOST likely to be home.
Of this subset, what percentage have doing something bad to you in mind? Or more to the point, at what % are you morally obligated to not take actions against them? Let’s say 49% of the time does the nighttime breakin burglar actually intend you physical harm. Do you have to eat it at those numbers? (I’m asking genuinely, since you seem to have a strong moral intuition here. From your other post, you said you couldn’t put a value on human life, so the only other value I have here is the resident’s life. In the 49/51 example, since it’s more likely than not that there’s no harm intended, this maximizes the amount of lives).
You just want an excuse to legally murder someone.
There will be no excuse for the terror
Me personally? No, I would lock my door and call the police. I would not go out and try to confront the burglar, but I wouldn’t also call out to them and say “oh btw I’m here and armed.”
But we're not arguing about homicide by magic spell here, this is a pretty specific and extremely spotlighted type of crime, the only reason to conjure coinflip percentages out of thin air is to entice specific sentiment, fascist sentiment in this case.
What? The reason I ask is to try to get a better understanding of the principal backing up the stance you took. I was trying to understand if it was life-maximizing with no qualifiers (i.e. irrespective of whose life was risked), which is how it read to me in your other responses in the thread. But I wasn’t sure, since you also said like 99.99% of the time, the burglar wouldn’t attack you if you announced, which could mean there was a heavily qualified principal.
So, I asked the hypothetical to try to figure out what your underlying motivating principal is here, as it filters out the noise of the 99.99% example. It was in no way meant to “entice fascist sentiment.”