And yet, incentives and institutions matter. To use an extreme example, even very good people trying to run a society on pure communism will quickly find themselves becoming monsters.

Our military does brutal stuff because that’s the kind of job we’ve given them–occupying a hostile local population with a guerrilla war going on is the kind of job that requires awful brutality. Similarly, the job of enforcing drug laws by SWAT raids and paid/coerced informants, and the job of funding your local police department by property seizures and traffic tickets, are inherently corrupting. They’re the kind of jobs that turn good people toward doing ugly, unethical things.

So, yeah, hold the police and soldiers responsible for the brutal acts they do. But also remember that we, in terms of our elected officials and our laws and policies, put them in the position to do those things. If we want the brutality to stop, we need to change the incentives and the institutions. Until we do, while you and I can feel morally superior to those guys who machine-gunned the guys trying to help the wounded in the Collateral Murder video, or the cops terrorizing unarmed people in a midnight SWAT raid, that awful stuff will just continue.

Oh, well, thank you for enlightening me. See, I was under the impression that people are morally responsible for their actions. I was under the impression that robbery, kidnapping, assault, battery, torture, maiming, and murder were all morally bad things that people shouldn’t do, even if they thought they could get away with it and profit from it. Now I see that I was wrong. People aren’t responsible for their actions – incentives are to blame! Why, if you think you can benefit from invading people’s homes, trashing their stuff, and ruining their lives, then it surely is not your fault if you do so.

Thanks to you, I shall never again blame anyone for any action undertaken due to incentives that they faced. Which is to say I shall never blame anyone for any action taken, ever again. After all, the people who craft policies and laws are just following their incentives, too. And the people that appoint or vote for them, why, they’re just following their incentives.

“You may disagree, even vigorously, with the objectives set for the military sometimes (I think we ALL do at some point – the joys of the military being controlled by our psychotic politicians),”

Full stop. They are not fucking controlled by psychotic politicians. They are not controlled by anyone but themselves. Nobody made them sign up, and nobody made them stay on, and nobody makes them go anywhere. And any argument that they are controlled by others just is an argument that they’re not moral agents, and should be treated no differently from any other tools. In that case, they are tools that serve the most inane and venal purposes of some of the most vile psychopaths in the world, and ought to be seen and treated as just that.

“but the very large number of the troops perform far better, morally speaking, than most of us could ever hope to, and certainly far, FAR better than any army in the history of mankind.”

Granting your empirical claims purely for the sake of argument: so what? Likely, your typical self-selected thief or con man performs better, morally, than any of us could ever hope to if we were to suddenly decide to become thieves. Fair enough. So what? And they’re less evil than the forces of, say, Chingis Khan. Great. So are most serial killers. So what?

“if PG&E and their employees were okay with it.”

Probably.

Don’t confuse employees with the senior corporate management. The meter readers and others who meet customers might not like this at all. Could, probably only slightly, increase the risks they face in their everyday job.

Try contacting the union as well. They might have more interest for the above reason.

What about the other mothers of drug-involved kids that don’t get the warning? Do they just get to have their heart attack?

Goddamn this pisses me off. The worst of it is that this proves that THEY KNOW the dangers and unintended consequences of these raids and just don’t give a damn so long as it isn’t happening to them or their family.

Watch the “Collateral Murder” video and tell me again how our military is so moral again.

I agree that many good people leave police work because they can’t stomach the corruption and abuses. It is too bad the incentives work the way they do. I try to be fair minded about police officers but the point has been made here that even the ones who do not actively engage in abuse or corruption still cover, or at least look the other way, for the ones who do.

the military from the bottom to the top deserves nothing but utter contempt.

Here I must thoroughly depart from at least a vocal minority around here. Having known both police officers and military members personally, I can say that the members of both groups are simply people, both good and bad… but the incentives for the police are all screwed up, so many of the better people who join the police force leave it sooner rather than later.

The military has its share of “bad eggs”, just like every other group of human beings on the planet, but they have at least their share of good ones, too. You may disagree, even vigorously, with the objectives set for the military sometimes (I think we ALL do at some point – the joys of the military being controlled by our psychotic politicians), but the very large number of the troops perform far better, morally speaking, than most of us could ever hope to, and certainly far, FAR better than any army in the history of mankind. Example: When invading Iraq, Saddam’s forces in one city (don’t remember the name off hand) kept us out (for a little while) by threatening to kill their OWN civilians. Think about that for a minute in historical context.

To say that they deserve utter contempt, when they are far and away the best example in human history, is to set up a ridiculous and utterly impossible standard that will never be met. That’s stupid.

if PG&E and their employees were okay with it.

Probably.

“…He said his wife told him she could hear the shouts of officers as they climbed the stairs to Jacob Miller’s apartment, some disguised as PG&E employees.”

So many things about both articles pissed me off so I sent an FYI to PG&E that the Monterey County Sheriffs Dept had impersonated their employees while serving a search warrant for drugs and asked if PG&E and their employees were okay with it.

Unfortunately, that’s all I can do.

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2011/06/portland_police_mistakenly_fir.html

“Rise” to the level? Give me a break. The foreign-deployment branches of Imperial Policy Enforcement are certainly far more competent than the domestic branches*, and I realize that Just World Bias can very easily tempt people to infer virtue from competence, but the military from the bottom to the top deserves nothing but utter contempt.

*It’s difficult to believe this really has much to do with inherent differences between the individuals composing them, since there’s significant overlap in personnel. More likely that cops are just lazy, because they know it’s mostly safe to be lazy, because enough Americans are either spineless or sympathetic to them that actual effective violent resistance is exceedingly unlikely.

#11 | Steve Verdon | July 5th, 2011 at 7:52 pm

BTW to both xysmith and mannie,

I wasn’t trying to be snotty above, but if you are new here you’ll learn two things:

No snottiness detected. But I do believe it is important to point out that they are civilians, too, and to do so whenever it is safe to do so. FTMP they don’t have the discipline of an ash and trash detail led by Beetle Bailey at Fort Swampy. (with apologies to Mort Walker.)

Paramilitary, I agree with – just like Saddam’s cops.