That makes a ton of sense. I was always confused by that. Reddit has a ton of rules in place, particularly against advocating for violence. I reported a few comments that called for death penalty for someone. Those comments were always greenlit. Maybe I just take stuff to literal. But some people sure have a hard-on for the death penalty...
In the US legal system, probably elsewhere as well, we have the concept of an "affirmative defense." That means "I committed the crime, but it's OK because of extra facts." That's different from denying one or more elements of the crime.
Example #1: I didn't poison Joe. I was out of town when it happened.
Example #2: I poisoned Joe. He had been sentenced to death, and my job is prison executioner. That's why I injected him with poison.
The second example is an affirmative defense. A murder occurred, but it was not illegal because it was authorized by the state.
I have a feeling that lawyers who took this quiz were more likely to answer yes for the ambulance and police car, but nonlawyers would answer no. That's because most people were answering the question "would they get in trouble?" But lawyers might have been thinking "is there a valid defense to a violation that actually did occur?"
In your example, calling for the death penalty isn't advocating for violence because executing someone in the justice system is legally permissible (let's not get into ethics or morality). The Reddit rule is generally understood to cover only illegal violence.
Exactly. By the strictest literal terms a rule prohibiting any call for violence would prohibit things which many people would find entirely unobjectionable like standing up for a country’s right to defend itself (with violence) against an aggressive invader.
All rules have countless unspoken caveats and are inherently only able to be interpreted in a cultural context; rules cannot be made so specific as to remove the need for that context. Problems come in when essential parts of that context are not shared by everyone who interacts with the rules.
> Exactly. By the strictest literal terms a rule prohibiting any call for violence would prohibit things which many people would find entirely unobjectionable like standing up for a country’s right to defend itself (with violence) against an aggressive invader.
Having rules against advocating for violence means that you want to prohibit such calls (otherwise you would have written down such exceptions and admit that calling for violence is sometimes OK).
Let me put it this way: what Reddit secretly wants is not standing up against advocating for violence, but avoiding the reputation risk that might happen if there exist to many post that advocate for violence in a way that causes an outcry.
In other words: the hidden problem is rather Reddit's "secret" agenda behind the rules.
For whatever reason, it seem like people usually exclude acts undertaken in connection with the state’s monopoly on violence from the scope of these things.
The spirit is that governement is an extension of "the people" and as such this violence is an extension of their own - i.e. in a healthy society the violence perpetrated bt the state is fully known and sanctionned by its citizens.
Like having prisons or letting police use lethal force on dangerous people, some things fit this description - but at some point lines have to be drawn and the leashes have to be reigned in if the violence is not agreed upon anymore - institutionalised racism and the likes.
> Reddit has a ton of rules in place, particularly against advocating for violence. I reported a few comments that called for death penalty for someone.
Note that taking it literally even calling for imprisonment is advocating for violence (unless convict accepts imprisonment voluntarily and not under threat of legal violence by law enforcement).
Strictly speaking, I think calling for the death penalty is advocating for a legal ruling. The violence following such a ruling is a second-order consequence.
It's calling for the state to kill someone. Doesn't seem any less an advocation of violence than advocating for a vigilante killing or advocating for some specific person to do the killing.
I was solely addressing the fact that both are violence, and asking for either is advocating for violence. Exercise for the reader to decide if they think either is moral or just, which is a completely different issue.
By that logic, no one is advocating violence unless they intend to participate in the violent act directly. It’s a logically consistent position, but it’s also a highly implausible one.
Of course one can advocate for violence without participating in it directly. For example, you could call for a riot. Or for the death of someone directly.
No reasonable person would confuse “the traitor should get the death penalty” with “kill the traitor!”.
I guess I’m not a reasonable person then? Advocating for state sanctioned killing is no different to me, in terms of advocating violence per se, than advocating anyone else do the killing. There are surely other distinctions to be made, but “the state should implement violence” isn’t categorically different from any other actor in the same configuration.
Now the interesting question is, what would happen if I was to ask for the death penalty on a crime that does not carry the death penalty? Or only carries the death penalty in countries with legal systems that we object to, like Iran?
