Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Patrick Christys: Are the Southport u0026 Grooming Gang Cover-Ups Evil or Incompetent?" video.
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Part 1: So before watching i want to make a couple of points. (I'm I'll and in pain and on strong pain killers now and again so I will not be up to my usual deep dive i don't think. That might be a good thing though for any reader of what follows)
Your framing of the question sets up a binary opposition or disjunction between "Evil" and "Incompetence". Lets deconstruct this a bit. So to what concept or category would you oppose "Evil" with? Would it be active and maybe consequential "Good" or just a passivity or negation "Do no evil". So to what do you oppose "incompetence"? "Competence"?
Now when we think of "good" we can think in terms rooted in will and intention and purpose or aim primarily with respect to a person and agent. People and the things people do are classed as good in terms of intent. In modern times though good has been linked more directly to measurable and predictable consequences as in 19th 20th century utilitarianism. Then we can say institutions policy laws are good or not without any reference to an intention by an agent, we say the institution is good due to its effects. But in this consequentialist (Peter Geach) view the opposite of good then must be only in terms of either neglectful, eg "not-"goods that could have been done"," eg difference utilitarianism so popular now in political discourse i or instituional policies that cause more harm and pain rather than good. We may be tempted then to call institutions "evil" on these purely consequentialist criteria even though the metrics will always be of a policy difference never a pure quantity. Then you can get statements like some people benefited from the policy others lost or were harmed compared with another possible policy that could have been implemented. Can we then say "the institution was good towards some people and bad harmful neglectful or towards others"? So then good and its opposite bad/harmful/neglectful/evil as category labels for institutions just depends on who is chosen to report and/or the schema of people measured? Good or evil depends on who you are with resect to the institution. So for some it can be good and others evil at the same time. We may say the evil is the result of neglect or un-metrices negative outcomes. A Double effect or unintended consequence might not be appropriate since it may impose a mythical intent from the institution that is categorically inappropriate even though they say things like "the institution has apologised". In the politics we are familiar with the instituional consequential issue here is schematised by appeal to law, justice and equality, and or political basis. Eg with an appeal to justice and equality any possible winners and losers are schematicised with respect to a wide scope equality metric. So a policy may have massive different differential effects on different people in its scope, but now these are assessed not with regard to individual or aggregated individuals but to those individuals as firstly members of a grouping according to say race and or gender. Now named person “s” may suffer loss or enjoy gain from a policy but we must look to “s” firstly as a member of a Set or group “S”. Now we say there are differential winners and losers in terms of groups but this can be justified not by utility defiance with respect to other possible policy but with respect to whole groups in the context of a idea of all groups that make up the population universe (Universe is “Set of all sets” in which only sets exist and no non set member individual can exit. “I wouldn’t be a member of a set that would have me as a member”)
This Social justice schema could be thought of as both a higher order notion of Good in Justice that deals with all people, or as an excuse for dealing some people from the bottom of the pack. Oddly ideas of justice as opposed to pure utility were meant as a limit to utilitarian exculpations of harm and neglect due to democracy and institutions. That is the double effect phenomena of difference in who gets what, can mean “the sacrifice of a few people for the Greater good”, is intrinsic in pure utilitarianism and takes on a powerful will of its own when we think of democratic politics as a conflict not just between winners but also between who losses? We say yes they were sacrificed but their party policy and institution lost the election. It is the democratic “will of the people”. Human individual and group rights were meant to limit this risk, but now rather than limiting it with respect to a country, they seek to expand the metric scope of utility measure to the whole world by set and groups membership. So world like group membership differential utility metrics eg a white man may be subject to a differential national utility loss or injury with respect to the countries group schema population, but when a world or planetary point of view is made the group schema now the 3rd would wars and famines “deflate” the loss to a subliminal insignificant figure.
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Part 2: This utilitarian approach with its metrics and schemas, both masks and excuses any harms as mere technicalities, and it “eliminates” any notion of intention of the institutional agents and so responsibility. They indeed appeal to the external metric “we didn’t have enough money because of the last government’s policies”. With instituional utilitarianism then we have both technical exculpations externally, and internal exculpations as both using the former as a personal excuse, and as a structural veil of ignorance and insulation of its agents from responsibility. Instituional agents and their policy are only ever view as subjects of those policies not as substantive agents of them. If there is a category of evil it cannot be grounded in any utilitarian excuses, or accidents, it has to be grounded in a will and intent of the institutional agents. This may seem impossible from the start since to be an institutional actor is to be acting out of duty public duty in virtue of their station competence and authority and legitimacy, whereas here then a use of a private policy in a public office would normally be malfeasant and open to categorical evil as a private ill though the institutional private policy or private use of a public policy, the political turn toward social justice schema had made the privileging of certain gropes now essential in all policy by whole world utility metrics and Social justice informed regulations. No one join a particular institution to do public duty, they join the particular institution with its particular schema to prosecute private aims with publically authorised “public duties”. Now whereas the privileging of public duty in law in institutions had been seen as “limiting” the possible vice laden actions of institutional actors, rather private vice has become the very aim and purpose of institutional agents. They disguise this with a sublime media presentation of the horrors suffered by their own or representing group. Whereas the left talked of structural bias in institutions with respect to external outcomes only, the term structure here is an attempt to “deflate” any primary reference to “conscious” intent, and rather to re frame the meaning into agentless terms, such that the structural schema is substantively equivalent (Frege on set function substation) to any intentional description. And so intent can be technically eliminated form reasons without apparent loss.
Now all this above comes into clear view when we ask about institutional activity an incompetence. Where there is competence we have the effective measurable management of public duty through shell institutional instruments and we can talk of competence, but since any private intent is left at the door of the institution then this would seem to simultaneously mean that agent is just doing instituional deontology functionary. Incompetence then would mean just poor management of duties by outcomes. That is more usually classed as an accident than as malfeasance. Any ascription of evil intent is lost then behind a veil of anonymity and excesses of accidents lack of money and not intents. This can set up bad and problematic incentives, in that poor application of duties can be an excuse for more money rather than being fired or charged with criminal activity. There is though a place left for both agent competence and a category of public duty that sees public duty as a instrument for private aims. Now the democratic and the justice schema along with its a priori partisanship (eg group reprehensive and or advocacy)approach to public office combines the private use of public office. This has no limits really and can and often does become the criteria of competence in public office or privileging particular groups in utility as the job and duty description but then this will spread to include such tactics in the use of the law and regulation and activity with regard to enquiries. The perceived institutional duty to be, in the first instance, representing and advocating for a particular group in policy implementation can spread to the whole structure of the institutional laws and rules, now avoiding criticism is at once: a representative and advocate maxim, a public private political duty that sees the rules and laws as affordances in this, not limits, and plausible individual deniability it is the old notion of vice turned into a political virtue. The success of these tactics though have opened up a possible space for talking about evil here. A space closed down by the rolling out of the enlightenment and its elimination of intention and will for institutional structure.
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On the link at 11:00 mins; You need to be careful not to conflate the Grooming gangs with the immigrants. I mean if you follow an anti-"the Social Justice Schema" of pro-Minorities, since the "pro" binds over both the Grooming Gang Identities and Immigrant Identities members, you can make a logical conceptual error that "anti" is "the not" to both "Grooming Gangs and "Immigrants". While a "unhelpful story, a bit of narratively difficult evidence, for one identity of the left might well receive criticism and or silence by "all" left identities, this cannot mean that an unhelpful story binding for one identity necessarily binds for another (This was or is a fallacy that violates an axiom or theorem in logic long ago.)
Such equivocation can reveal a poor grasp on reason and logic, and/or drawing false conclusions from forming opposites and negations of opponents positions and schemas, or it can reveal the kind of space of reasoning of racists.
There are other possibilities though: one that a political party wants to stop immigration and by speaking of grooming gangs and immigration in the same breath they might force or construct a false conflation or association of the two in the minds of the listener. In this case the Grooming gangs issue can be used to gain support for anti immigration policy.
Usually even when all trickery and logical error is absent, there is still often conflations and equivocations and so on, but because the same instituional instrument can do both separate groups at the same time. For example in heath care.
The related essence and accident issue is also often in play for example going after a group by using anti drugs laws, the drug issue is accidental to the group and draws in many other groups into it scope. Also the issue of very fine grained cases of sexual assault all being conflated conceptual with extreme examples of sexual assault. For the left and liberals too the conceptual conflation is via placing all the acts under a continuum of quantity/quality of Ordinality harm and potentiality of risk. I guess an extreme Cardinality would be able to say a 100 unsolicited kiss utile is equal to one sexual assault utility.
Years ago i was set to do a lecture on this and they put me in a room with no white board. But i was very familiar with this and so took my own white board. I recall saying to the students imagine pain is measured along a meter ruler, place along the ruler where you would put various types of pain.
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