Theft has always been considered a lower tier of violence than kidnapping. Theft through deceit and avoiding direct confrontation has always been considered a lower tier of violence than mugging.
Invalid argument. You've changed the term being debated from 'hostilities' to 'violence'.
The kidnappers were directly threatening Kaori's life. Pay up, or the girl gets it. Most moral systems consider that a greater evil than an act that indirectly makes things more dangerous and threatens lives of others that way.
If I were going to argue this point, I'd ask that you actually define the moral systems that you allude to by saying "most", and give a proper explanation for why you believe that they support your position.
If I were to use Utilitarianism, for example (since it's one of the most popular forms of consequentialism, which is itself the foundation of the vast majority of non-religious moral systems), it's trivial to show that the potential death of 40 people in exchange for modest benefits for a handful of people is far more evil than the potential death of 1 person for the potential saving of 1 person.
In other words, don't just handwave away your justification by alluding to this cloud of "most moral systems"; please provide actual examples to support your argument.
ANY DEMAND WAS UNREASONABLE. I don't care if they asked for a penny.
I'm hungry, is it then reasonable for me to go kidnap someone's sister and demand a burger? Oh, I only asked for a burger and not a million dollars, so that makes it okay? My demand was reasonable?
Their need is irrelevant to the moral question.
You seem to be heavily conflating the idea of 'reasonable' and 'moral'. What they did was immoral; what they demanded was
not unreasonable. In your above example, demanding a burger is reasonable (silly, even). 'Reasonable' depends on the effective cost to you relative to what you gain, and its 'appropriateness' to the situation. Whether you
like the idea of giving up the cost is irrelevant. Whether you deem the act to be
moral is irrelevant. EG: A 10% interest rate on a credit card reasonable, even if you believe charging interest (ie: usury) is immoral, and you'd really rather not pay any interest at all.
"Any demand was unreasonable" is a fundamentally false statement. You can say that "Any demand was unacceptable", and that would be valid (for you, at least, based on your moral boundaries), but 'reasonable' is an entirely separate question.
Your further arguments seem to continue to have this same fundamental conflation of ideas. You're arguing against things that I'm not saying, and you're arguing points and terms that do not mean what you think they mean.
I am in no way saying that the kidnapping was moral; it was certainly immoral. However immorality has no relevance to the argument of reasonableness, and is only tangential to the means of responding to the action.
Meanwhile, the response chosen has its own evaluation on the reasonable and moral scale, which you seem to be ignoring, presuming that any response you choose is by definition moral and reasonable and acceptable.
That makes them the villains. No further moral analysis required.
This is what I believe is the fundamental flaw in most people's approach to moral questions. "If the other person is in the wrong then ___" — and they simply stop thinking at that point, treating any action or choice they make as beyond needing its own evaluation, as intrinsically moral simply because the other's action was immoral. It absolves them of all wrongdoing, no matter what (potentially horrific) actions they take. It is the nightmare of the White Knight who believes they can do no wrong, solely because they can point at the wrong thing someone else did.
Furthermore, our first resort is not violence. Our attackers are the ones that have resorted to violence first. When we had a grief cube shortage did we go out and rob other girls? Did we kidnap others?
We'll just conveniently ignore the times we forcibly took other people's territory.
Also, what action would have been proposed had we had, say, a reserve of 5 cubes, and could only harvest about 30 cubes for 40 girls? You mention the grief cube shortage, and then equate it to those of the other group as if the stress and dynamics of the situation were identical, when they were not.
The root of the problem is that our enemy believes they can extort resources from us through violence at low cost. We must ensure that they reassess and decide that the cost is actually very high, so that they will not do it again. Otherwise they will keep on doing this.
A valid statement.
That means we must hurt them. If we don't we might as well surrender and let them enslave us.
An exaggerated and incomplete conclusion.
We cannot just negotiate. If we do so it will only invite further kidnappings and more demands. If the enemy is too strong to defeat completely then we must find their weakness and hurt them as much as possible. That will be a warning to them that we will be no easy meat and they need to look elsewhere. If they are truly rational, then they will not even kill Mariko and Sora as that would waste their leverage.
This makes quite a few assumptions.
1) That the kidnapping demands are transitive. That is, what they gain from the kidnapping is what anyone who might potentially consider such an action would also want, and that granting them that will lead to similar actions by others.
2) That we actually grant them what they ask for. The simplistic either/or view ignores the possibility of any alternative route, where the kidnappers do not get what they ask for, but we are still able to resolve the situation.
3) That it's 'OK' for the kidnappers to continue their actions, as long as it's not against us.
4) That violence is the only language of information exchange that allows one to pressure the opponent into ending their action.
5) That any followup attempt by any other group (ie: anyone else who might see this as an excuse for them to try their hand at kidnapping as well) will be able to do so just as easily as this group. In other words, it assumes that we will not have learned anything from the incident, nor changed our behavior so as to prevent it from happening again.
The following section is going to take a bit to get through.
No. I am not advocating amoralism. I am advocating justice, which is harsh and brutal. You reap what you sow. Tit for tat.
That is the core of all morality.
Which advanced game theory clearly supports. Nothing beats tit for tat. Nothing. Oh, a year ago or so someone discovered that in a very specific circumstance, tit for tat could be beaten by a slightly refined tit for tat with forgiveness. The fact remains though that tit for tat is what works. It's what works according to game theory. It's what works according to real life history.
In fact it is our enemy that is favoring amoralism. Nothing they are doing suggests any morality. Nor did Naru demonstrate morality. They both demonstrate an amoral belief that might makes right.
First, you're conflating morality with justice, and the enforcement of a legal and/or moral system.
Justice is not at the core of all morality; morality is (presumably) at the core of justice. Essentially, you're assuming the conclusion.
The Prisoner's Dilemma (the puzzle that uses the tit-for-tat solution, abbreviated PD) is not the entirety of game theory. It is merely the single simplest example of game theory, that is used to illustrate what game theory is about to those who are not familiar with it.
Tit-for-tat does help explain a general behavioral tendency. However one must recall that it is a solution pattern for a problem for which there are only two actions possible. Once there are more than two actions possible, the complexity of the problem space grows exponentially, and the solution patterns become far more nuanced. Once you place it in an evolutionary space (where there are more than just two players in the entire 'world'), the number of stable solutions (ie: ones that won't die off due to all other active solutions beating them) grows. And all of that complexity develops when you're still only working with a single puzzle problem; other puzzles have different problem scopes, so a single 'behavior' (such as tit-for-tat) won't necessarily give you an optimal solution in all problem spaces. That's the point where 'morality' starts to evolve.
And
even then, tit-for-tat only gives you scope for acting exactly the same way as the opponent. Disproportionate response is an entirely separate pattern.
When I noted that basic game theory is amoral, that's because the end goal of most basic puzzles is, "That which gives me the greatest reward." Assuming you defined cooperation as the 'moral' action in PD, tit-for-tat encourages immoral behavior (defecting) for as long as that will give you the greatest reward. It's designed to encourage the other player to cooperate so that you can also cooperate and get the
best reward, but it makes no distinction between the two choices available to you, as far as morality is concerned.
For example, you can use a PD model for two thieves to determine whether to cooperate and rob a house, or defect and tell the police. The greatest reward for the two of them will always be to cooperate, whereas if one defects, it's in the interest of the other one to defect as well, as it will be more beneficial to turn in evidence on the other thief than to try to rob the house on their own and get caught. So game theory (on this extremely simplistic scale) supports immoral actions just as easily as it supports moral actions, and tit-for-tat does not change that.
Our current enemy does not appear to be acting amorally. From helix's comment, they favor a particular rational morality (the outlines of which are pretty easy to guess). We will not be able to assert moral or amoral motivations until we get more info on what's going on in game.
It is not bad faith. The law explicitly says that if someone is making a credible threat to coerce you into an action, then you are not bound by agreements or contracts made, and you are entitled to use deceit. The bad faith is explicitly attributed to the person making the extortion.
What the law allows is entirely separate from whether an action is in good faith or bad faith. That the law allows it does not mean that you are not acting in bad faith. 'Legal' and 'moral' do not mean the same thing. You're conflating separate concepts again.
As a summary of my own viewpoint, I am encouraging that our actions be as moral as possible, with no regard to the morality of the opponent's actions. Their actions do not define the morality of our actions. At the same time, I am not asserting that we never do anything immoral. Killing someone in self defense is still killing, and thus immoral, but that doesn't mean it's not justified, nor is it based on the legality of the action. The real questions, though, are whether it's a
necessary and
reasonable action in pursuit of your goal (eg: surviving the encounter), as well as an overall evaluation of the worth and morality of the goal itself.
For example, suppose a gang tried to kidnap Homura, who can literally walk away from it before they even realize she's gone. Legally, she's perfectly within her rights to kill them (ie: she will not be accused of murder for killing her kidnappers). However, is that a reasonable, appropriate, or moral action for her to take?
Should she do that? (It may not be possible to answer that without knowing more about the kidnappers themselves.)
