got tonkaed wrote:The justification is weak because it does not stand up to even the remotest of criticism. I am not saying that "blaming the victim" is an universally weak justification, there are some situations in which it works quite well. However, the majority of these situations require that an individual is rather aware of all or a majority of the factors at work.
In short, this situation is not one of those situations. As has already been stated, and you have yet to disagree with (so I am assuming we can hold it as true in context), people in Japan who suffered as a result of the tsunami did so, in your estimation, with enough relevant information that they should have been able to make decisions which would have allowed them to avoid their fate. Given that they did not do so, you do not find yourself compelled to feel an inordinate amount of emotions or take extraordinary action on their behalf.
The immediate and fair question that was asked was "why was it their fault that they lived in Japan, an area which is prone to earthquakes and also possibly prone to damage from Tsunami's?"
You argued that they had enough information to then move and not moving was a choice and so on ergo....
There is the immediate difficulty when evaluating this line of reasoning in that I am inevitably going to have to reduce it down to individuals. In some ways there is a disconnect between your line of thinking in this area. Your justification is inevitably personal, while the moral outpouring which you are against is primarily social (which is another reason against your line of thinking, you are essentially comparing apples on a very large scale to oranges).
Would you have felt sorry for one individual who in a hypothetical situation, had decided to move away from Japan that day or in any relevantly short time frame, but perished in the act of moving? To what practical limit can individual responsibility maintain dominance over natural circumstances?
But for the sake of brevity (lol) lets go back to why your argument of choice and responsibility is weak. You essentially from what I have read so far, place an elevated importance on a decision that would ultimately not come from one specific choice and quite possibly from a choice that has never really been considered. Most major decisions in life (insert your preferred major decision here) come from a long series of choices and circumstances that are incredibly difficult to trace. My own decision to move to Korea for employment was certainly not a singular decision (stupid anecdotal evidence) and not a decision taken with perfect information. When making these decisions, there is a huge list of things which must be prioritized and I would be willing to bet most people do not prioritize natural disasters very high on that list of decision making. If they do, they are probably the type of person who fears flying because there is a chance that the "plane might crash" or they play the lotto because there is a chance "they might win". Either way, its not exactly a very logical or soundly reasoned hierarchical preference.
This is much of the problem with your argument. You seem to be arguing that every person who gets in a plane crash shouldn't really be worthy of much thought or action, because there was a chance they would get into a plane crash. Everyone knows plane crashes happen and everyone knows tsunamis can happen as well. That doesn't seem to stop people from flying nor does it stop people from appropriately reaching out when bad things do happen, because we realize they are bad.
To the second rather strange claim you are making, the idea of arbitrariness in moral outreach. We have both already stated that this is happening. However, I find the fact that this bothers you to be a bit strange to say the least.
We have a limited capacity to interpret and comprehend the world around us. Space matters in a large extent for who and what we care about. In the past that was because people had less opportunity to really get informed about these issues. Today it is more due to the abundance of information that people do not have time to process it all.
There are people out there who do actually care quite a bit about all of those things that you mentioned as worse than the situation in Japan. And not very surprisingly, they tend to know quite a bit more about those things than the average person off the street would. If you doubt this, by all means prepare a 5 question pop quiz about any of the issues and do a "jaywalking" segment. Presuming you get off campus far enough for it to matter, you could spin yourself into a nice little youtube side job educating the world about how much life on earth can suck at times. And you'd be molding minds, which is nice in terms of intrinsic benefits.
It is fine to say it should be different, but would you really blame the person who didn't know about all of those issues for feeling grief and wanting to donate to the people in Japan. Of course you would not, that person is reacting to a situation which is fresh in their memory and appeals to their sense of morality.
If in your position you find that there are far more compelling things in this world to attract your time and energy and you do not wish to spend your efforts lamenting for the people of Japan that is fine. It may be quite possible to argue that this is so. But to essentially criticize people for reacting to something that is put in front of them to react to, and people choose to react in a manner that is appropriate given the situation, is again suspect.
Thanks for your post.
It poses some pretty good points, and I could nitpick and say that I'm mostly talking about the tsunami, but yeah, overall it's not a good argument on my part.
Anyway, I'd like to ask everyone a question:
Why should I feel sympathy for them?
