Joshua Greene

So basically, it tells us really, what is violence in our conception, right?

A violent action is really an action that has three things.

It causes harm, that's in the background.

It is something I didn't mention before, active as opposed to passive.

Hmm.

So this would be the difference between someone, you make them go over the footbridge versus they're about to fall and you don't stop it, right?

So active, intentional, not a side effect, and fairly direct.

Like those three things, that's kind of what makes up the core of our sense of this is a violent action.

And bringing this back to Peter Singer...

Part of why, you know, we're letting people die all the time, people whose lives we could save.

It doesn't feel like an act of violence because we're not going in there and killing them.

We're allowing circumstances to kill them.

So it's passive rather than active.

It's not our intention.

We're not achieving some goal by doing this or some specific goal.

And there's no physical directness there.

So it kind of explains why things...

that can be incredibly damaging, don't set off our alarm bells.

They don't have that paradigmatic feeling of like punching somebody in the face or pushing somebody off of a footbridge.

You know, often when I tell people, like, if you push with your hands, then it seems wrong.