Morality, Legality, and Enforcement:

secretgamergirl:

This is a very long post, and people don’t like reading those. All the really important bits are towards the bottom and in bold, so if you’re lazy, just skip to those.

For some reason, over the last month, more than one company running a crowdfunding site has poked me for input on their internal debates over supporting plainly evil crap. So… here’s a basic morality lesson to save us all time in the future.

Humans are naturally social creatures, which is pretty great for the whole society thing. Helping other people gives us this natural high, so it’s pretty win-win. Act in a fashion that’s helpful to people, they appreciate it, everyone’s happy. This works better on smaller scales, because we have a weird limitation on how many people we can properly think of as people at a given time, if everyone agrees to just generally be nice and helpful to each other, things naturally work out great.

For various reasons though (that limitation being a biggie) sometimes people just sort of give the finger to the whole society thing and do Bad Things. There’s some wiggle room on what constitutes Bad Things, and there’s certainly differing degrees, but basically, Bad Things are when you betray the whole society concept and cause harm to people. So, hitting someone, killing someone, stealing their stuff, raping them, this is pretty basic and everyone, for the most part, gets it. We don’t like when people do Bad Things, because they ruin society, and generally try to prevent them.

Some people think there’s this weird exception where it’s OK to do Bad Things when you’re angry at someone, There’s a bit of an instinctive component here, but it’s fundamentally bad for society, because instincts are generally subtle as bricks, not everything that angers you is actually something that harms you, and anger runs pretty counter to proportionate response.

Another basic failure of this morality concept is how some people think the problem with doing Bad Things is that people will see them being bad, and punish them. These people don’t understand that it is bad for Bad Things to happen to other people. The worst of these people will try to cause Bad Things to happen to other people, in ways that feel very indirect to them. For example, they might try to trick someone into doing something that will then cause Bad Things to happen, or trick someone into inflicting Bad Things on someone else.

Then there are people who recognize that indirectly causing Bad Things to happen to people is bad, but don’t recognize that allowing Bad Things to happen to someone when you could easily prevent it is also bad. Again, for the best functioning of society, we don’t want Bad Things to happen to anyone, and we want to help eachother out.

Isaac Asimov famously wrote a bunch of books about this set of laws for robots to follow to make society better. The most important one of these, which supercedes the rest says “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” That last part is on there for a damn good reason. You are a bad person if you ignore it.

Speaking of laws, we have them because there are a lot of different Bad Things out there, and some people don’t recognize them all. Writing them down makes it easier to explain. More importantly, laws let us work out what we’re going to do when people try to do these Bad Things, to keep them from destroying society, while doing as little harm as we can in the process. Otherwise we’d just have to rely on instinct or something, leading to a lot of “he tried to take my stuff, so I caved his skull in with a rock, now he won’t do that” and again, proportionate response is important.

Just having these laws though confuses people. Some think that because we have most Bad Things written down, anything we don’t have written down can’t be a Bad Thing. There’s plenty of Bad Things we don’t write down because either someone simply hasn’t thought to do so yet, or can’t think of a way to phrase it properly. Plus a lot of things which someone tried to write down, but didn’t phrase it just right, and someone doing a very specific reading can find a variation on that doesn’t match the law.

A subset of these people get the idea in there head that if there is a law against something, anyone who tries to do it will be caught and stopped right away, so if they’re still doing it, it must not be against any laws, and therefore not a Bad Thing.

The reality is, at least in America, because we are so careful not to do Bad Things to people in the process of preventing Bad Things from happening, we have this big elaborate legal system, to be really really sure nobody is punished for something we can’t prove beyond any reasonable doubt that they did, to a big room full of people, following some guidelines on how to consider evidence.

This means that even if someone in law enforcement is definitely, absolutely sure personally that someone is doing or planning a Bad Thing, they usually have to wait to do anything about it, until they are sure that they can prove they are doing it to people in a room later on. By design, that’s really hard to prove, and if you swoop in too soon, the bad person will get away with it because you don’t have enough proof. Doesn’t make what they’re doing any less bad though.

So now let’s get specific, OK?

Sexually abusing children is a Very Bad Thing. It is very harmful to those children.

Setting up a gallery of sexually abused children, and hosting discussions on how to gain access to children to inflict such abuse is a Very Bad Thing, because more people learn how to harm children through sexual abuse, and those doing so have their broken morals reinforced. They make people happy by showing them pictures of sexually abused children, and thus think they’re doing their part for society.

8chan.co is a website which was specifically founded to host such galleries and discussions of the sexual abuse of children. Many pictures and discussions of sexually abused children are hosted on 8chan.co, and many people go to this site to see them, announce their approval, and request more. The people who run this website know this and encourage it. They lie, and say they do not do this, because sometimes when a person tells a lie, other people take their word for it, and do not poke around and learn that it is a lie. People do not want other people to know, in particular, that explicit sexual photographs of 5 year old girls are posted on 8chan, along with tips on how to abduct and sexually abuse small children remain on the site for months at a time.

Giving money to someone who runs such a gallery is a Very Bad Thing. Again, it provides positive reinforcement, and makes someone who is doing a Very Bad Thing feel like they are doing something good. Plus, people who set up such galleries are more than likely people who themselves enjoy children being sexually abused, and giving them money gives them greater ability to inflict that abuse, by covering travel costs and preventing them from having to work elsewhere.

Fred Brennan, the owner and administrator of 8chan, publicly admits to running such a gallery and takes pride in this. He recently moved to a country infamous for allowing tourists easy sexual access to small children, and has posted pictures of himself surrounded by small children in what appears to be a sex club. It is not unreasonable to suspect he is someone who sexually abuses children.

Helping the owner of such a gallery collect money is a Very Bad Thing. Those who are afraid to directly contribute money to such a gallery, because doing so is a Very Bad Thing they will likely be arrested for are more likely to do so through a third party, which makes their funding more difficult to prove, or even just easier to do.

Most people who help others collect money, such as credit card companies, banks, and paypal, understand that it is a Very Bad Thing to help Very Bad Things be paid for, and do not ever help do so. This makes it that much more of a Very Bad Thing if you do, because it is only due to your aid that people are able to collect the money that allows these Very Bad Things to continue existing.

I am fairly certain that all of the very bad things I have mentioned here are very much against the law. None of the parties involved have been arrested yet, most likely because law enforcement wants to make sure they have evidence to be sure all of these very bad things are properly punished.

If you are a person who helps Fred Brennan collect money, you are doing a Very Bad Thing. You should probably stop doing it, and do your best to make up to society for doing so, both because of basic morality, and to decrease the chances that you will be arrested for the indirect role you are playing in causing children to be sexually abused.

If you are a person who does business with a company that helps Fred Brennan collect money, you are not necessarily doing a Bad Thing, but if you tell them you will stop doing so if they continue, it may help prevent Very Bad Things from happening to children.