Terrific, and challenging, question, and a very relevant one given all the 'occupy' movements of the past few months -- where many people (young, American, etc.) who are better off than most other people on Earth are demanding to be even better off, rather than demanding to help those who are genuinely worse off! .... Rather than give you my answer, let me refer you to a recent and very provocative and influential (and very readable) book on the subject: Princeton ethicist Peter Singer published, a couple years ago, a book called "THe Life You Can Save," which explores that very question at great length, arguing (in short) that most of us ought to do an awful lot more towards helping even distant others than we actually do .... And once you've read that, you can google 'responses to Singer' and begin exploring the various reasons philosophers offer to suggest that Singer goes too far ...

hope that's a start --

ap

I would consider Norway and the UK to be examples of this. Here the fundamental equality of citizens is not seriously undermined because the role of the state religion is largely ceremonial. In other countries, of course, citizens who do not share the state religion suffer severe discrimination which can be grave enough to defeat, by itself, the claim that the state in question is democratic.

It makes sense here to think of "being a democracy" as a matter of degree. Most of the states we call democracies fail fully to live up to democratic principles in one way or another. Having a state religion is a shortfall, but can be a relatively minor one if any resulting discrimination is not too severe.

I find it hard to see why anyone would suggest they are not responsible at all for their actions. But surely it is a good question whether they alone are responsible for their actions. And here, of course, the controversy becomes political. Did "higher-ups" issue orders that were tantamount to suggesting that such abuse would be tolerated or even welcome? Did the "higher-ups" turn a blind eye to what was happening and fail to supervise the prison properly, perhaps intentionally, so as to distance themselves from what they knew was likely to happen? This latter responsibility, for oversight, is particularly important, since we know, from the Stanford prison experiment and the classic work by Stanley Milgram, that otherwise decent human beings, when subjected to the right sorts of stresses, will do almost arbitrarily horrendous things to one another.

Finally, then, one might ask whether what we know from these experiments does to some extent excuse the behavior of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib, that is, reduce their responsibility. This is a very hard question, and I am not qualified even to try to answer it. I will say, however, that I recently heard an excellent paper by Gideon Rosen on this very topic---not on Abu Ghraib specifically, but on the moral implications of the Milgram experiments. The paper doesn't seem to be available anywhere yet, but one day....

I think your argument is logically valid--that is, IF the premises were true, then the conclusion would be true. And I don't think it commits any formal or informal fallacies (except perhaps equivocation in the sense I'll explain shortly).

The problem is that it is unsound, because it has at least one false premise; hence the conclusion is not "made true" by the premises. Premise 3 is false. The government does not tell us not to kill no matter what. As you point out, it tells us not to break specific laws against specific types of killing. Typically, citizens are not breaking the law (and are morally justified) in killing in self-defense or to protect others from an immediate and deadly threat. And (legal) killing in war and use of the death penalty (where it is legal) are also not forms of killing the government tells us not to commit.

Now, we may have reasons to think that some or even all killing in war is morally problematic and even more reasons to think the death penalty is morally wrong. And we have greatly narrowed the scope of such legalized killings over time (in the U.S. and even more so, in other industrialized nations, most of which, for instance, have made the death penalty illegal). And we may believe that it is hypocritical to say some killing is OK but not others (though almost no one, perhaps Jesus excluded, suggests that you cannot kill, if necessary, in self-defense). But I don't think that the government is "saying one thing but doing another" in these cases, because the government, just like most of us, does not treat all killings as the same thing (hence the equivocation in the use of "killing").

Thanks for a few moments of idle amusement!

Perhaps the best response is "Oy!" But to earn the huge salary in Merely Possible Dollars that the site pays me, a bit more is called for.

So yes: it's a case of false analogy, and the analogy goes bad in indefinitely many ways. But one of them has at least some intrinsic logical interest.

Suppose that as a matter of social policy, we set up a system that left everyone with a paycheck of the same size at the end of every month. What does that amount to? It amounts to saying that each person can acquire the same quantity of goods as each other person. Maybe that would be a bad idea; maybe the result would be that people would get lazy and less wealth would end up getting produced overall. But that's not built into to very logic of the idea. It's an empirical claim, even if a highly plausible one. There's nothing logical incoherent, as it were, about a system intended to produce completely uniform distribution of wealth, whatever the practical upshot might be.

Suppose, on the other hand, that we set up a system that smooths GPAs out completely, so that every student gets the same GPA - say, 3.2. Then what we've done amounts to getting rid of GPAs. It gets rid of them because what a GPA does, at least roughly, is tell us how well people did on certain sorts of tasks. For that to be possible, the system for awarding GPAs must allow (though needn't require) that different people can end up with different GPAs.

We've looked at the extreme cases of completely uniform distribution. In practice, the reply might be, no one has anything that extreme in mind. But the point of looking at the extremes was to draw attention to a difference between the very logic of the two cases. Redistributing income doesn't as a matter of logic affect the purchasing power of a dollar, even though redistribution schemes raise lots of perfectly good policy and empirical questions. But unless the "redistribution" of grades is a mere matter of relabeling, redistributing GPAs destroys the information that GPAs are intended to convey. It's logically a bit like what we'd have (to borrow Kant's example) if it was understood by everyone that when we say "I promise" there's no real expectation that we'll do what we "promised." That would be a case where promising in any meaningful sense would be impossible.

Real life redistribution schemes would no doubt be less total. But the underlying logical point doesn't go away. GPA redistribution schemes would amount to fuzzing out the information at the core of what a GPA is. Near as I can tell, there's no similar logical problem for wealth redistribution. And so the analogy really is an apples and oranges affair.