Sublette County Sheriff K.C. Lehr has received more than 7,000 emails about a Wyoming man who reportedly captured and tormented a wolf before killing it, he told Cowboy State Daily on Wednesday.
Some of those are threats.
Lehr said people in his office, as well as Sublette County and Wyoming Game and Fish Department personnel, have been receiving threats — including death threats — stemming from Daniel, Wyoming, man Cody Roberts’ reported capture, torment and killing of a wild wolf in late February.
Then why care if people are being hypocritical? Why should it bother you that people adopt whatever beliefs are beneficial at the moment and then change them when it suits them? Isn’t that the smartest attitude to have? How could you even call someone else “morally repugnant”?
I mean having beliefs that are beneficial at the moment and then changing it whenever it suits you is a great short term option if you want to have moral beliefs, sure, but it’s not great in the long term, societally or personally. So I wouldn’t really call it the smartest attitude to have. I also don’t think that not having morals would necessarily prevent me from caring if people are hypocritical, or thinking that other people are morally repugnant. I’m just thinking that they’re morally repugnant by some external set of morals which aren’t my own, obviously, some morals which I haven’t internalized, and which aren’t mine, probably.
Anyways, I gotta get back to shitposting online, and eating babies, or whatever it is that people with no morals do.
Think you have it in you to write at least one paragraph where you don’t contradict yourself? You say you care, but have no internalized morals? Which is it?
Yes, having no morals would prevent you from caring if people are hypocritical – this is what is known as a moral stance. Without morals, there is nothing wrong with hypocrisy.
Sorry to keep you from your preferred activities, I just think you should really think this through before you mention it to anyone again.
No, probably not. That would be too easily agreed with, and uncritically accepted.
Why is caring if people are hypocritical a moral stance? I can just find it annoying, it doesn’t have to be a moral issue. There doesn’t have to be something morally “wrong” with it for me to find it grating.
If I were to point out, though, how hypocrisy might be wrong under most moral stances which don’t explicitly allow it, probably sort of along a “this is a principle to which all other principles must bow and are devoid” sort of thing. I’d probably go something along the lines of, if it’s actual hypocrisy, then it’s contradictory to the internally consistent moral principles at work, so from within the moral framework of whoever’s being hypocritical, the hypocrisy is wrong, they’re failing to live up to their own moral principles. That’s sort of a defining trait of hypocrisy.
For clarity, if I had to define my own actual moral position, it’s that I think morals are kind of more arbitrary than people would seem to believe. Or maybe less self-evident, is a better way of putting it. People tend to assume that everyone else is beholden to their own moral standards, or that someone else’s hypocrisy is just a case of cognitive dissonance or something, rather than being internally consistent within the worldview. People can still be wrong, but most of the time, people don’t actually know why someone else is wrong, they just kind of, assume that they are, mostly in bad faith. It’s sort of like the classic example of, ahh, those evil conservatives, they are going to ban abortion for it being murder, but then also want capital punishment, what hypocrites! I mean, they’re right in that the discrete positions which they’ve taken are probably correct, but their reasoning for getting there was wrong, so they’re basically just correct by dumb luck of their circumstances drawing them to a “correct” conclusion. Every individual claim or position you evaluate has to be kind of evaulated as it’s own thing, and everything as it exists within a particular worldview, it’s dumb to assume those aren’t well-justified. It’s like when people assume that everyone in the middle ages was just like, extremely stupid, and not human, and didn’t have real perspectives or live real lives. It flattens other people to cardboard cutouts. I’m struggling to come up with actual examples right now of people like accusing their political oppositions of hypocrisy when in reality their opposition just belongs to a totally different worldview and set of principles, but that’s probably cause I’ve switched to decaf, so if you call me out on it then I’ll come up with more solid examples later when my subconscious has had time to cook on it.
Anyways, this guy torturing this wolf, he was probably not just crazy and insane, he probably is just some stupid guy. I personally think it’s probably a better idea to examine that guy and his set of principles than just kind of offhandedly condemning him because of what I view as basically a deterministic action. It’s unproductive to just condemn him, it’s more productive to examine that behavior in order to put a stop to it at some future point, or even just to pursue understanding for it’s own sake. Maybe I’m just assuming the socrates moral position, or whatever the guy is that believes knowledge is the greatest good, except I also believe “behold, a man” is also a pretty good burn, so maybe not. I also think it’s kind of dumb to use this particular guy as an example. Potentially he’s interesting because, as people have discussed in the thread, he’s kind of a weird off example of something you usually don’t see headlined in the news or called out, which is the regularity of animal cruelty and the nutso behavior that a lot of hunters engage in, which could be examined well, but I dunno if this is the best example of that, because this is pretty extreme.
Mostlyl, though, the post I made is a vent against the fact that I see people on social media all the time engaging in these kinds of vent-y behaviors, which is something I acknowledge to be dumb, because I am engaging in the same problem about which I am complaining.
I also don’t understand, what about my post is rubbing you the wrong way, here? You seem like you’ve probably gotten the gist of it, what part of it are you drawing ire with, other than my incoherent rambling shitpost style of typing where I contradict myself and attempt to hold no clear positions of my own? I thought it was pretty self-evidently in jest when I said “but still, I must chastize you for it, because when I do it, it’s morally justified and cool.”. That’s definitely an unironic statement, that when I call for death threats, it’s a cool thing to do. Everyone else is wrong, only I am correct, that’s unironic for sure, for sure.