Does Entrapment Really Make Good People Do Bad Things?
Posted by freedomforall 7 years, 6 months ago to Philosophy
Excerpt:
"Let's look at the federal side of it. Due to the rules they've put into place, undercover work and entrapment are bread and butter for their investigations. You can complain about it, rail against it, point out the shady nature of it but hey, that's the game. The choices are simple: 1) play the game, 2) change the game, or 3) refuse to be part of the game. That's it. You don't get to dictate the terms, the players' actions, or the ways that the rules change after you start playing. You definitely don't get to stop the game if your opponent starts cheating---and they do cheat in every way possible. So your only options are to play with the current rules, change the game on them, or not even get involved.
If you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. "
"Let's look at the federal side of it. Due to the rules they've put into place, undercover work and entrapment are bread and butter for their investigations. You can complain about it, rail against it, point out the shady nature of it but hey, that's the game. The choices are simple: 1) play the game, 2) change the game, or 3) refuse to be part of the game. That's it. You don't get to dictate the terms, the players' actions, or the ways that the rules change after you start playing. You definitely don't get to stop the game if your opponent starts cheating---and they do cheat in every way possible. So your only options are to play with the current rules, change the game on them, or not even get involved.
If you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. "
I told a few friends that I thought everyone could be corrupted, given the proper motivation. One of them, a barrister, said he couldn't be. I asked how he would respond if someone with power and connections asked him for a less than legal favor and simultaneously "offered" to help his daughter's career, and could also blackball that daughter if he refused to provide the favor. He didn't answer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VrFV...
"There's a sucker born every minute." -- P. T. Barnum
"You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." -- Abraham Lincoln
People can be made to do things against their own better judgment or will through emotional manipulation, guilt, blackmail, the promise of something for nothing, or even misplaced good intentions. At the extreme it will cost them their lives, as with martyrs for a cause. Why can't people remember to "just say no"?
I think you're saying too few people know where value comes from, and I'm saying too few people know, but more people know than in the past. I think it's a glass half empty / half full thing.
This has been a sad fact of life throughout human history until the industrial revolution. I think this is why the world's religion say interest is evil and good people share. They were written in a time when people couldn't conceive of someone borrowing money, creating a good return for the lender, good wealth for himself, and good/services for customers that wouldn't have existed otherwise. If history shows it takes a few hundred years for the economic, political, and moral values to catch up, that's not all that bad.
Very scary prognosis for the country. How would we ever get control over the excesses of government with a majority of the citizens thinking like this.
If, in order to get what you want, you have to disregard all the negatives that come with it rationality disappears.
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