Targeted assassinations as a driver of progress is a very underrated idea, I wish it would become more mainstream.
1. right now, we have norms against murdering people
2. if my team starts murdering people, we could probably get what we want
3. however, this breaks the norm against murdering people, and will encourage the other team to start murdering people to get what they want.
All of a sudden, people are murdering each other left and right. This is sometimes called "war". It is very bad.
Normalisation of a bad thing is always worse than bad people getting away with it in specific conditions, for any specific condition short of “when they feel like it”.
Environmental destruction is a problem that needs massive, urgent action. We have seen over and over that nicely asking corporations to behave doesn't work. I don't know what the solution is, but I wouldn't be surprised if fed up people take up violence. It will probably just worsen the situation.
But it is an age-old question of philosophy.
> Global Witness has said 164 environmentalists were killed worldwide in 2018. About half were killed in Latin American countries including Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Guatemala.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/31/peru-logging-i...
There is a government philosophy called utilitarianism. It’s based on the premise that a policy is good if and only if it increases overall happiness in a society thus, ends justify the means.
It’s totally valid to be an utilitarian. Nonetheless, you have to accept two premises.
1. There is no individual rights. 2. Measuring happiness is a trivialization of human experience (ex. How many people would need to be given an iPhone in order to justify the torturing an assassination of a child?).
Try reading Justice by Michael Sandel if you want to learn more.
Happiness is also heavily subjective. People in the first world often feel like they're missing out if they don't feel like they have the latest and greatest iPhone, while someone in an extremely poor area would be happy to have running water.
Is the utility of a new phone really the same as giving someone running water, or do we take into account that the need for a new phone is a somewhat self-inflicted societal standard?
I like the concept of utilitarianism, but find that it's basis in statistics means that you can typically justify any position by tinkering with the parameters of how you measure utility.
You select for more ruthless, selfish, and paranoid targets that way. Hell it is terrible for your ideology's image as you marry the image of crazed gunman/bomber to cause. The anarchists trid that and the term is still synonymous with depraved lunatics with bombs two centuries later.