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ultraluminous | 5 years ago

Lynching slaves was immoral, unethical and "blameworthy" before it became illegal.

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smoe|5 years ago

And did it stop because people felt bad about themselves doing so or because some people were pointing fingers at them?

Look, I absolutely agree that something can be and often is immoral, unethical and "blameworthy" before it is illegal, and maybe my non-native English is a bit clunky.

But I do not care about having the moral high ground. I care about continued bad behavior having consequences, society protecting itself from bad actors. This can indeed be done trough various means (non exhaustive):

- Create incentives to act in a more desired way

- Call for boycotts and shunning them socially to try to force them to change

- Change the environment so bad behavior no longer provides benefits

- Create / update law

- Actually enforce the existing law

- Having increasingly big protest movements up to revolution / civil war scale

I'm fine with any combination of those depending on context and/or as different steps of escalation. I just think a bunch of people voicing anger at corporations on the internet doesn't do anything and, on the other hand, in a lot of places the situation is not bad enough to justify violence yet. So I lean towards a middle way using the instruments of these supposed democracies to change things.