Interesting thoughts, Eric. This topic also connects to religions, which are in part sets of ideas. Christian faith leads me to oppose homosexual behavior and abortion, but if I were to harm an abortion doctor or a gay person, the religion would have made me do it only in the most remote sense.

But what about a faith (rhymes with Bislam) whose founding documents order violence against unbelievers? It seems to me the religion makes them do it in a more direct sense.

One of the most pernicious and seductive problems today is the ability for people to blame their problems on others. It used to be if you screwed up it was your problem, today it's society's fault or your parents or your friends or whatever.

Communism or marxism didn't make Lenin do what he did, he did it for power.
Communism was merely the vehicle he used to accomplish what he wanted.
You're a fool if you allow an ideology to pervert your thinking, but it's still your fault.

We are each responsible for ourselves, you can't blame anybody else for your actions.

Pish posh. As is well known, classicalvalues.com has brainwashed me, and that's what I'll say when I get in trouble.

As always. Honored to be of service.

"G-d damn, I say, G-d damn the pusher man." -- Steppenwolf.

"Go ahead, have some Kool-Aid." -- Jim Jones

Ideas arent' freestanding. They have proponents who are willing to promote them, e.g. George Bernard Shaw who thought killing unproductive people with poison gas was a good idea. Some other people thought so, too, evidently, and at least one of them was able to try this idea out on a large scale. Do ideas directly kill people? Obviously not. Do ideas have consequences, sometimes horrific consequences? Obviously yes.

Bad ideas and bad people kill people. Lenin,
Stalin, Mao, Hitler. How many people died
of malaria because of the banning of DDT use? So how about Rachel Carson? What about
abortion?

A defective product can be responsible for the deaths of individuals. That doesn't mean that there are not also others who share responsibility for the resulting deaths. We destroy the defective product and punish those who are culpable.

When ideas are responsible for bad results we need to identify them as part of the casual chain and hold them responsible. The proper action is to reject those ideas, and place shared responsibility on any who have accepted such ideas, and spread them.

Interesting post. Why write it if you didn't think ideas have consequences?

Come on people, there's more than enough blame to spread around for these kinds of things. Surely psychopaths, the people who incite them, and the ideologies that drive them can all be blamed at once. That's what sharing is all about.

I think people confuse causation with responsibility. Just because a later event would not have happened without a prior event doesn't mean the prior event caused the later event. It's a natural human tendency, but that doesn't make it right.

It's funny how the same person who believes that criminals kill people by accident will try to hold an entire industry responsible for a few zippers with paint that goes 1 ppm over the lead content limit.

"Wrong as he was, his ideas contemplated the German workers leading a revolution which would represent the next step in human evolution. The idea of ragged country people banding together and murdering urban people en masse (as happened with the Khmer Rouge) can hardly be squared with Marxism..."

You seem to have a curiously sterile idea of what "revolution" and "evolution" mean.

That guy is a bad specimen of the preacher type.

Who should take credits for the kids who work hard and succeed?

"When ideas are responsible for bad results ... The proper action is to reject those ideas, and place shared responsibility on any who have accepted such ideas, and spread them."

I blame the educational system in which students are not taught to think for themselves.

Btw, who is to decide whether an idea is bad or not? The loudest, the most powerful people? E.g. AGW. Some people still insist commuinism is a good idea, spread your hard earned wealth to those who don't feel like working is still a good idea, while those who want to keep the fruits of their labor are evil for not wanting to pay their "fair" share. A charitable organization is good, a profit making corporation is bad. Seems the bad people are the ones who give to the good people. A community organizer whose community is forever being organized is good, a mom who raises her Downs Sym kid is bad. I agree totally with the good lady, our current Secretary of State, who once said: sometimes you have to do things for the public good. I just don't agree with her on what the public good is.

Good idea, bad idea. Who decides?

So RINO I guess you are for making baby toys with lead paint, since you don't think consuming lead paint is responsible for mental retardation in children. The belief in such an idea can certainly be responsible for causing harm to children. See how this works?

Causation is intimately involved with responsibility. No causation then no responsibility. Pretty straight forward, and I see no way an entire industry can be held responsible for a causal chain started by an individual company.

Even if one were to confuse causation with responsibility the causal chain would not engulf an entire industry. So I don't see your point.

I have to take issue with you calling AGW an opinion. It's more in the realm of scientific theory, which means that with all of the current information, it is the best explanation that we have from the observed evidence. It doesn't mean it's 100% correct in every aspect, but it does mean it has to be taken very seriously. Gravity and evolution are scientific theories, and when enough evidence piled up they became excepted facts as a non-scientist would understand it. I know I'll get flamed for this, but almost every single AGW denier out there has no expertise in climatology and specifically statistical climatology. You have a hodgepodge of meteorologists, medical doctors, chemists, doctors of theology, etc., but really no published respected climate scientists. Now many of the people may be good in their fields, but if I had brain cancer I wouldn't seek treatment from an orthodontist. If you want an understanding of the validity of AGW, read what scientifically published experts in climate science have to say and not retired weathermen.

I never realized the full extent of my power.

AGW is not a theory. It is a hypothesis.

There are viable alternative explanations. Like natural variation.

And then you have the 15 year stall in temps while CO2 continues to rise. Of course that could be due to ocean cycles. But that leaves open the door to warming was caused by ocean cycles.

Ideological causation is distinctily different from ordinary causation, because of this one fact:

If a proton caused another proton to do X, that is causation based on the nature of the entities that act, and that's that.

Human beings, on the other hand, have free will (the entire concept of "responsibility", and morality, have no basis in reality otherwise).

So, unlike the protons, humans can choose otherwise. They can recognize the logical consequences of an idea, and disregard them -- they can reject the idea, or they can maintain a purported fealty thereto, but be a hypocrite.

Ideas are like roads, and people are the drivers that travel on these roads. We are free to choose which roads to travel, in what direction, and what speed; but as to that road's physical (logical) end, we do NOT have any choice. We are, however, morally responsible for knowing where our chosen road leads; your intention to drive to New York will not absolve you of the responsibility for ending up in Los Angeles.

So: the Marxist is morally responsible for constructing a road to tyranny, and every individual Marxist is responsible for every bit of driving they do on that road, up to and including its ultimate end -- murder on a mass scale.

No amount of screaming "But I didn't mean this!" will absolve either one.

"I have a serious problem seeing the ideas of one person as being responsible for the actions of other people."

Really? I see this happening all the time. I'm pretty certain the ideas a mother has while raising her children has some influence on all their future actions. I know the ideas of Jefferson and Franklin and Madison et. al. have a little bit to do with the boundaries on the actions of American politicians today. I deduce that the ideas of Hammurabi are responsible for the actions of a great many people throughout history. The ideas of Plato or Archimedes or Ptolemy or Copernicus or Einstein or Newton or Galileo or Fermi or - you get the picture. And there once was this carpenter in Nazareth...

Rino, apologies as that was Wacky Hermit's comment I was responding to.

M. Simon,

Assigning responsibility does not require the existence of free will. If there is a loose nut on my car engine that is causing a rattling noise then I can assign responsibility to it, and fix it. If I improperly assign the responsibility then I will fix the wrong problem and the rattling will continue.

The difference between an inanimate object and a human is not that one has a nature and the other doesn't. Both have natures. It's the differences in their natures that determines how we correct problems caused by either. It would be pretty silly to punish a loose nut for causing a rattling noise because nuts don't learn, and not because they are not responsible for causing problems.

It's quite possible to create a machine that doesn't have anything you would call free will, and yet responds to learning, and perhaps even punishment. In which case the proper response to correct a problem in it's behavior might be some kind of retraining or punishment.

Note that I am not suggesting that punishment is the only possible way to correct behavior, or necessarily the proper method in every case of responsibility.

You need to read some Daniel Dennett to correct some of the misconceptions you have about the nature of free will. The universe could be completely "deterministic" and the concepts of moral responsibility still hold.

In fact, the entire concept of determinism is itself non-falsifiable. I would challenge you to come up with a test that could be used to verify whether the world was deterministic or not. As far as I know it cannot be done.

A non-falsifiable hypothesis is a claim about the world that makes no predictions that could be used to show it false. In doing so it really says nothing about the world, since no matter what happens you can't use the theory to predict behavior. Obviously you can't use such a theory as the basis for deciding what to do in order to correct behavior (inanimate or animate).

"Ideas are more dangerous than guns. We don't allow our enemies to have guns, why would we allow them to have ideas?" -Joseph Stalin

I think you are stretching what might be a decent point, and being somewhat flippant about it.

Yes, ultimately, people are responsible for their own actions, except, what if their actions are based on the indoctrination by others, the elimination or surpression of facts and opposing ideas, and the deliberate distortion of reality by those with the ability to do so?

From what I understand of the Frankfurt school and its deconstructionism, it was a deliberate attempt to render all concepts as meaningless, to effectively destroy reason and replace it with ideology, because reason made acceptance of the 'revolution' impossible for those in the West.

Now, you can say that people made the choice to abandon the reason in order to adhere to the principles which became Political Correctness.

However, Reason, with a capital 'R', was developed over the course of thousands of years by mankind to overcome blind adherence to dogma, and the idea that Frankfurt school and its fellow travelers had was to destroy this millenia of progress; to eliminate it.

Basically, similar to Orwell's 1984, they were attempting to eliminate the very ability to choose X over Y, to eliminate all choice, through both the use of force and through the destruction of independent thought.

By your reasoning, those whose idea it was or is to destroy the ability for others to make ANY sort of informed choice, to even conceive of any alternative, are not primarily responsible for the destruction of that idea. Its left to those who, in the wake of those ideas, would be rendered literally helpless to argue against it, or even to know there was any alternative.

Let's go hypothetical for a second.

I take a newborn baby, tabula rasa, and raise

Sorry, ignore the last two lines of my post. It was part of something I meant to delete...

A better title for this post would have been "Ideas Don't Have Consequences".

On a more serious level, this post neatly demonstrates the fallacy at the heart of libertarianism, the fallacy of the atomic individual. It's actually the opposite of Locke's tablua rasa - libertarians believe that an "individual" is a complete and self-contained unit on which nothing need be or even can be written.

Steve,

This has nothing to do with political libertarianism. Libertarians do believe that ideas have consequences, and are responsible for how people act. Nor have you supported your claim that the mistakes of this article are connected to "the fallacy of the atomic individual". In fact, libertarianism is all about how should individuals coordinate in groups. You are just ignorant is all.