You can't say that any aspect of a moral situation is less than perfectly clear, without that sounding like an argument for less punishment of whoever the listener thinks was in the wrong, which sounds like taking the side of Bad.
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This is a mechanism for Moral Clarity Bias / "automatic norms" a la
@robinhanson, that doesn't go through norms being more shared in the ancestral environment. Anyone who advocates a norm may claim that norm's manifestation to be obvious and its enforcement an unmixed blessing.Show this thread -
I mean, I probably do tend to come down on the side of mercy relatively more often, because I share the Jewish conviction that every human is an idiot, and that therefore it's not fair to punish someone unless there was a written law making the details excruciatingly clear.
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On Jewish theology this is because you can't possibly figure stuff out without divine guidance transmitted through generations of rabbis, and on my worldview it's because the brain is crap software.
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But let's be frank: part of being Jewish is a deep, genuine sympathy for other people's mistakes, a sense that it's not fair or reasonable to expect them to be as wise, as smart, as perfect as God or you. That's why Jewish law is so (a) merciful and (b) excruciatingly detailed.
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I think lack of clarity in the need for punishment is conceptually distinct from lack of clarity in the underlying rule.
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Our intuition that murkiness -> mercy comes from 1. certainty that punishment creates a negative effect so 2. need to outweigh that certainty with a positive impact to justify punishment. Tie goes to mercy/inaction
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