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> I’ve slowly come around to thinking that only those who substantially share a moral framework with me deserve to be treated in that framework

Indeed. You can only get burned so many times by people who treat values and virtues like command words, expecting you to fall into place and obey, but never budging themselves when you reverse the challenge.

> Perversely, some governments reward terrorists’ (and other criminals’) families with monthly stipends[1].

Well you're stretching the argument here.

Arguably Palestinian government doesn't view those that attack Israelis as "terrorists or criminals".

It's baffling that the writer either overlooked or ignored this. Collective punishment transfers the cost of enforcement from the ruler to the ruled.

We don't need florid nonsense[0] or baby Hitler hypotheticals to explain it. The Nazis didn't engage in reprisals[1,2] on the basis of moral philosophy. One practical motivation was to alienate resistance from the remainder of the population.

[0] What’s clear is that when rulers enforce family punishments, the ruled shiver with terror. Don’t tell me these tactics don’t work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacre

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Kondomari

These tactics don't work because both sides will just go colonel Kurtz and spiral into endless depravity. The CIA tried their mind ops from Vietnam to Nicaragua and their enemies never cowered.

Yep. Look at the failure of terror bombing campaigns. Rather than demoralizing civilian populations, it hardens their resolve to fight from London to Kyiv.

but I’ve slowly come around to thinking that only those who substantially share a moral framework with me deserve to be treated in that framework, and those who choose to act in a radically different moral framework probably deserve to be treated under that framework. In other words, I refuse to let my moral framework be used as a tool to harm me.

It's incoherent to exclude this from your own moral framework.

Isn't collective punishment in boot camp primarily used as a tool to increase the group cohesion of the trainees? In that case, it doesn't really fit into the other use cases, and must be argued against individually.

I'm not sure about the actual utility, but in abstract, it fits quite well to my impression of how humans, especially in small, "hunter-gatherer band sized", groups, work. And the military has a special need to create cohesion in its military that goes beyond what would be even vaguely acceptable in any liberal democracy for the general population. Especially in the special case of a criminal: which government would be stupid enough to increase the group cohesion of a dangerous criminal's family (including this criminal)?

Although less explicitly, collective punishment is used in the office as well. For instance by letting an entire team work overtime if one of the team members screwed up his work and made the team miss a deadline.

But the fact that collective punishment is used in some places doesn't automatically make it right, IMO.

I don't see how that is "punishment". A team is a group of people helping each other to achieve a common goal. Sometimes other team members will screw up and you will step in and do what you can to help the team overcome this. Other times that member is going to be you, and then your teammates will (hopefully) step in to cover your ass.

> Although less explicitly, collective punishment is used in the office as well. For instance by letting an entire team work overtime if one of the team members screwed up his work and made the team miss a deadline.

A "good" idea (*sarc*) to either

- decrease the team cohesion (i.e. make the team members hate each other)

or

- increase the team cohesion in the face of a "common enemy" (the boss) who all of the team members will from now on hate

Both of these are likely not what a boss desires.

Is that collective punishment, or putting the end goal before other concerns? I would hope most managers do not want to punish workers, but will insist things need to get done, and done well, in time and on budget. It's the subtle balance that is the challenge if you want to be a good boss.

> So I am not horrified by the discussion of family retribution and don’t automatically reject the idea without consideration.

You should trot your idea around a a thought experiment where members of a family ascribe to different morale frameworks.

social conformity is the easiest type of human control, once you get enough people on board. unfortunately it all comes apart when the social rules have to change and you are faced with a majority of the population that has grown up and solidified their views and will not budge

Perversely, some governments reward terrorists’ (and other criminals’) families with monthly stipends.

That is a very one-sided point of view. Do you think the people you call terrorists - and people sympathizing with them - think of themselves as terrorists? And even if they do, do you think they think terrorism is bad in their situation? Were the people blowing up a bomb next to Hitler terrorists and was what they did bad? I bet Hitler and Stauffenberg will have quite different opinions on that.