ggreg said,
What would you do, ggreg, in the cases you cite? Would you inform on those people?
I am trying to work that out. Hence the discussion about what the decision depends on.
A reasonable and fair, system of prospection, justice and rehabilitation for one thing, judged by some standard or other. I doubt I would inform on someone in North Korea, unless they were a serial killer and perhaps not even then, since the North Koreans tend to put their children, mother and father and extended family into the gulag too. I suppose one would have to balance how many people they were likely to serially kill.
Weighing up the gravity of the crime, plus the chance of a repeat offence versus the harm to third parties of someone going to jail such as children deprived of a good mother and father. On the other hand, if the mother is a drug addict and the prison is going to help her kick the habit then the children might be better off.
It is actually a pretty complex soup to navigate through.
I don't buy the idea that the system is so corrupt in the UK or the USA that we should not engage with it or owe it no loyalty. Sure there are bad parts, but there are lot of good parts too. I am not sure that on aggregate it was ever significantly better than it is today. That might simply be the grass is always greener flaw that humans fall into.
Perhaps it is not even meaningfully comparable.
At various times Europe had political corruption, assignations of royal heirs, kings with strings of lovers and concubines, serfdom, superstition, filth, disease, child slavery, trial by combat, ducking stools, high religious offices bought and sold and the mentally handicapped were basically tossed into asylums and left to rot.
We have abortion and ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity today but some of these other ills are much lessened.
We erect memorials to men who valiantly died in World War I which was a morally pretty ambivalent war. The opposing countries, one could argue, must have been pretty sick and the system pretty screw up to send so many young men to their deaths? And for what?
The system we live in today give us a lot of freedoms relative to the past. We are free to marry who we wish, free to believe in what we wish, we are free to contracept or have a large family. We don't live in a North Korea. For our society to function there has to be a trust between government and governed. Far from perfect, I agree, but it will never be perfect.
My question is whether by staying silent about certain crimes you make society a little better or a little worse?