If you didn't, then the state had to accept your information, arrest your father, then kill you for snitching on kin That's how this works
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
why isn't the answer to not turn him in i.e., if you choose not to snitch, why isn't the fact that you couldn't snitch because he's your father a defense that shields you from personal liability for not having turned him in, if/when he's caught?
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Replying to @Random832 @BootlegGirl
Because the state has an absolute right to punish treason by any means necessary It's two competing values colliding - the Confucian ideal that the parent/child relationship is fundamentally sacred and the Legalist ideal that the state must act to preserve its own authority
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
seems like the kind of thing that could get the state into a whole lot of trouble in practice what's the penalty for being late etc plus the state could, simply, not punish the son, while still punishing the father
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Replying to @Random832 @BootlegGirl
No, then that could and would be a universal excuse A patriarch sets up a rebel movement within his whole family and everyone has to get aboard (which is, in fact, how the successful rebellions usually went)
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But the way the "paradox" is phrased it's putting the two duties on different people It's like sorry dude, yes, as a son the right thing for you to do is to obey your father without question But as an agent of the state, that means I have to kill you
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Because the state is MY father
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
ok but then why does the agent of the state have any obligation to kill him for turning his father in? not doing that would encourage people to turn in traitors, right, so why isn't that something you "must" do as well?
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in fact, if it must act to preserve its authority, shouldn't the state protect people who turn in their relatives for treason from being murdered by angry surviving relatives? that is, again, an action which would tend to help protect the state.
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Replying to @Random832 @BootlegGirl
Because it's two competing value systems that were synthesized into one, it's a paradox caused by having two First Laws of Robotics that can never ever be violated, because one is being cited as the spiritual justification for the other
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Which means even acknowledging they CAN come into conflict is this painful taboo thing (to have this philosophical argument at all was highly controversial, it's like being someone who keeps saying "What if you had to torture a baby to stop the world from exploding")
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