A great episode, and, as usual, I agree with most of the things you’ve said. There was, hovewer, one point you made in passing closer to the end of the episode I think I disagree with.
Mentioning the Russian soldiers in Ukraine, you said they were almost kids and brainwashed by propaganda, so they can hardly be held responsible. While I agree most of them are basically kids and brainwashed, and while I totally think people who are sending those kids there are to be blamed first and foremost, I still think holding these soldiers fully resposible is the right thing to do.
I’ve been giving this question a lot of thought lately: where should the blame and the responsibility lie, between people who call shots and people who do the shooting. These situations are a wide variety, but I think each one of them can be placed somewhere on a single spectrum, and that spectrum has two extremes.
On one end of the spectrum is a situation where a pilot is landing a plane at a big international airport with a lot of traffic, at night time, in bad weather and poor visibility. The pilot, naturally, has insufficient information, and trusts the control tower with his plane and his passengers. If the control tower gives the pilot some directions, and following those directions leads to a disaster like a mid-air collision, all the blame and all the responsibility goes to the control tower. The pilot is innocent, that much is obvious.
The other end of the spectrum is a gang that robs a person in an alleyway. The gang does have a leader who calls this shot, but every member of the gang understands that what they are doing is a crime. When the gang is caught, the leader, arguably, should be punished more than the regular members, but none of the regular members should get punished less (and, of course, getting excused is completely out of the question) because they were told (by the leader) to do what they did. Every single one of them knew what they were doing was wrong and illegal, or at least was supposed to know it.
Call me unempathetic, but a religious fanatic committing a crime because she was told to do so by her spiritual leader, and a soldier participating in an act of armed aggression because he was ordered to by his superiors are closer to the gang member than to the pilot in my opinion.
Even more. In Russia (and in some other countries, too, AFAIK), a person who killed someone in a road accident is punished more severely if the person was drunk or on drugs. It seems unjust medically (when you’re drunk, you have less control over your actions, so you should bear less responsibility, right?), but it makes total sense socially: we do it to discourage drunk driving. The point is not to do the offender justice, the point is to keep others from even thinking of becoming offenders.
I think the same logic should apply here: a person who commits a crime acting as someone else’s tool should get more punishment, not less. It may be unjust to the person, but it would be a good insentive for an average person to start thinking for themselves, do their own research and make their own judgement.
People are lazy, and they tend not to care about things that, despite being important, don’t affect their lives immediately. However, all through my life I’ve been finding that an average person starts demonstrating a surprising amount of common sense and critical thinking as soon as the decision they’re about to make has some obvious potential to severely influence their life. And Discordia be my witness, the world does need common sense and critical thinking in people. Badly. So we’d better encourage it any way we can. Right?