If asked to do evil, they should educate in a face saving way,… Broadly, they have a duty to correct the public, and elected officials, and anyone who is actually wrong… or at least they have a duty to not enthusiastically conform to the public’s stupid, and self-harming, and commercial-propaganda-based opinions
If asked to do evil, they should do evil. Because I don’t trust the judgment of bureaucrats to decide what is evil, and we’d be better off with them following what elected officials tell them to do and not deciding to become a shadow government that slow walks everything they don’t like. This is where you get the deep state from.
You yourself mentioned claiming that racism is a public health problem. But consider how “evil” goes with racism. Failure to do something about racism is evil—in fact to some people it’s one of the worst evils possible. Calling racism a public health problem is an example of bureaucrats seeing evil and deciding that they just have to fight the evil by any means necessary.
If a officer (serving as a trusted component in a coherent social machine serving an important telos) doesn’t resign when their deontics are violated, then why the fuck were they even trusted with such power in the first place? Someone has to be the grownup. You can’t have “nothing but idiots and children” if you want good things to happen, on purpose, at scale, with high efficiency. The worst possible outcome is for actively bad things to happen, on purpose, at scale, with high efficiency.
I could write a long response, about “conventional morality that runs on vibes and makes sense to consumers of governance” vs “post-conventional morality that runs on logic and is necessary for producers of governance” but the succinct response is: you left out the MOST IMPORTANT PART of the instructions, which was to resign if the early steps of Saying No To Evil don’t work.
Given the context here (you voted to 0 so far, and me prone to writing too much) I’ve DMed you with a few more words, that might be specifically helpful <3
If asked to do evil, they should do evil. Because I don’t trust the judgment of bureaucrats to decide what is evil, and we’d be better off with them following what elected officials tell them to do and not deciding to become a shadow government that slow walks everything they don’t like. This is where you get the deep state from.
You yourself mentioned claiming that racism is a public health problem. But consider how “evil” goes with racism. Failure to do something about racism is evil—in fact to some people it’s one of the worst evils possible. Calling racism a public health problem is an example of bureaucrats seeing evil and deciding that they just have to fight the evil by any means necessary.
If a officer (serving as a trusted component in a coherent social machine serving an important telos) doesn’t resign when their deontics are violated, then why the fuck were they even trusted with such power in the first place? Someone has to be the grownup. You can’t have “nothing but idiots and children” if you want good things to happen, on purpose, at scale, with high efficiency. The worst possible outcome is for actively bad things to happen, on purpose, at scale, with high efficiency.
I could write a long response, about “conventional morality that runs on vibes and makes sense to consumers of governance” vs “post-conventional morality that runs on logic and is necessary for producers of governance” but the succinct response is: you left out the MOST IMPORTANT PART of the instructions, which was to resign if the early steps of Saying No To Evil don’t work.
Given the context here (you voted to 0 so far, and me prone to writing too much) I’ve DMed you with a few more words, that might be specifically helpful <3