Ask Lemmy

The question is put on wrong terms. All social order is derived from violence. What make the law, the law is the menace of violence. What supports democratic institutions are the violence of police and military against who don't abide the order. So, violence is inescapable. The righ question is not if it's justified, but WHO and WHEN have the right to commit violence. When put under these terms, it's much more simpler question.

Violence shouldn't be the first action taken, but once all other options are exhausted, violence is necessary

Since you used media as an example, let me use another common trope to answer. Do you know when in horror or thriller movies a character momentarily gets the upper hand on the killer by knocking them unconscious and then just tries to run away without even making sure that the killer is dead or at least arming themselves? Does that EVER end well?

The reason that trope is so common is that it's very effective at eliciting the sort of instinctive emotional response that makes us as viewers want to yell "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?? KILL HIM!!" at the screen.

We have that instinct for a reason.

To answer your question more directly, yes, morals ARE inherently flexible. If they weren't, we would never learn anything or progress as a society or even as individuals. I don't know where the idea that someone's morals are supposed to be immutable even comes from. One of the core steps to psychological well-being is realizing that you have no direct control over your "environment", but you absolutely have direct control over the actions you take to influence it and the way you adapt and react to it, which includes letting go of standards and expectations you've set for yourself if you feel that it's necessary.

Absolutes are not applicable in reality. You've mentioned utopias too, and well, the fun thing about utopias is that they don't exist. They can't exist. It's the literal definition of the word: "an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect." Dystopia, on the other hand, is what happens when you try to force a utopia into existence.

Morals can't be absolute. Tolerance can't be absolute. Everything is flexible and eternally changing. It's scary and it's complex but people have to come to terms with it.

I find reflecting on violence done to one's self is more complex, because you have full control over whether the suffering should be your own or an attacker's. And you may start reflecting on 'what's a proportional response?', 'is killing them justified when you don't know if they'd have taken your life or not?', 'might they not be responsible for their actions?', 'it's it better to suffer a little and give people the benefit of the doubt?'. This can get layered with all sorts of guilt and doubt depending what you factor in. 'did I contribute to the economic injustice that has produced this mugger who's attacking me?'

Etc etc. It's a quagmire.

I find things become simpler when I consider an attacker about to assault a weaker person - a child say - in front of me. Should I use violence to stop that attacker?

Given that it now doesn't seem to be my place to reflect on the just suffering of a child, the obligation to stop the attacker with force becomes clearer.

At least it seems morally clear (at least to me) that to claim to be a pacifist when observing a violent assault on a child, one is no better than the attacker.

That breaks the idealistic (and naive) hope that there might be a way to be non-violent and just. After that, one has better tools to re-evaluate assaults upon one's self. If I am a person who through their actions reduces unjust suffering, then allowing myself to come to harm harms others and is unjust. Protecting one's self with violence becomes justified and necessary.

(When I was a student I was an idealist and a pacifist. When I became a father it became quite clear to me that I would break someone else in half if they were hurting my children..)

Violence, in most instances, is what many might call a form of escalation.

Suppose someone got on your nerves and you kicked them down a well? Or there was a country overrun by fanatics and the president ordered a genocide? Or there are people who have succumbed to some kind of immorality and someone set out to scare them with violence? These are all examples of the kind of instance where one might say that death is "a step above" the problem at hand. Think of the Allport Scale.

If you are in a bank and a bank robber starts threatening everyone and they take a particular interest in you or someone close to you, and you disarm and maybe cause them to die, that is harder to say is escalation, since the possibility of a violent outcome was already in the picture.

If one is to accept the idea of escalation, to escalate an issue, by definition, makes you worse than your enemies. Many people around here have unfortunately compared billionaires to Nazis when a Nazi would be closer analogously to the bank robber and the billionaires, even the ones who practice what many have called extreme acts of inaction, would be more analogous to the people mentioned who have "succumbed to some kind of immorality" (and yet there are some who aren't even immoral, so that's not even a good analogy either).

"Subdue your enemy without fighting." ~ Sun Tzu

My opinion:

I think asking "is violence justified" in a binary manner means the question can't be answered.

Not all questions have binary answers.

Morality itslef is a quagmire of philosophy.

You can have moral killing, and immoral pacifism.

Rigid adherence to a moral code could lead to immoral acts. Too much flexibility in morals leads to amoral behaviour.

Every life is important, but not to the point where it overrides someone else's rights.

All of this is a spectrum.

It could be naive, but that feels like a binary position on a complex matter.