[FRIAM] MoNA

[glen∈ℂ]

Well, that's a reasonable heuristic. But there are complications. A good example might be the "preemptive strike", when you perceive a slow-growing threat, some of which may have a noisy signal prone to misinterpretation. (Thinking Iraq invasion.) E.g. our home grown domestic terrorists like Richard Spencer, the source of the "punching nazis" meme. When you see an insidious threat like Richard Spencer and even though he's not physically attacking you at the moment, you *think* he's inciting violence in some of his less refined flock, so you sucker punch Spencer during an interview.

Is that sucker punch an ethical use of violence?

The MoNA work was supposed to indicate that there is a stable classification for deciding such things (by software assisted decision making). They posit 5 axes that seem to be stable:

- Care or Harm
- Fairness or Cheating
- Loyalty or Betrayal
- Authority or Subversion
- Purity or Desecration

I believe I can couch the Spencer sucker punch on either side of each of those axes, at will. That makes them look, to me, like rhetorical methods ... not moral intuitions. E.g. fairness vs. cheating. It's obviously cheating to sucker punch someone. Yet, it's obviously cheating for Spencer to cite "free speech" and maintain plausible deniability while inciting race- and class-based violence in his flock. Hence sucker punching him is a *more* honest, more fair, counter to his insidious rhetoric. So, whose being more fair or more cheating? The sucker puncher or the crypto-nazi? I honestly don't know.

On 10/27/19 11:35 AM, Gillian Densmore wrote:
> It's not that deep. Someone is (physically) attacking you for some bonkers reason? It's fine (and even encouraged some say) to some how deffend your self. So there you go- a not all that deep example