We can have signs and rules, and the rest of it. But we're talking about you wanting to go to the police to enforce one of them.

If a sign is seen as a 'strong suggestion', as 'advisable' or a 'please do this' then there's no issue -- that's what signs are.

But you didnt see the sign that way; and that's what i'm responding to. Your impulse was to bring the disciplinary arm of the state to bare to enforce someone's opinion of how a park should be run.

This is quite the opposite of being critically engaged with the nature of signs

If the laws are not enforced, then people don’t obey the laws. That’s how you get both dog bites and white collar crime.

Your assumption is that my “wanting to bring the disciplinary arm of the state“ is based on the rules, and not on my compassion. That’s where you’re wrong. I was using the rules of the state to enforce my compassion, not to enforce the rules. in this case, the rules aligned with my compassion.

And in fact, I would not call police if I saw someone shoplifting. And that’s what people don’t understand about those of us with Asperger‘s. It is a sense of right and wrong not based on rules, but based on right and wrong.

My claim is that your compassion is being hijacked, not that you're blinding following an instruction. Compassion is one of the main emotional mechanisms of social discipline: it is the overbearing mother. Compassion is often the most vicious way of policing people, as its users takes themselves to be moral.

The sign couldve been a poster of a dog off a leach running around with another dog, having a good time. That, I imagine, would likewise trigger a positive emotion in you.

What i'm advocating for is more of a gap between the sign and the emotion. I dont think the sign would be as effective if it were a command read out by 'some average looking person'

the sign here has a special quality in triggering an emotional response, because the usual moderating triggers are absent: those of the falibility of a person

Rules and regulations are not needed to constrain compassion, they needed to constrain sociopathy.

A Sign does not trigger an emotional response in me. My emotions were triggered by the action of the person walking their dog without a leash design told me that other people were compassionate, just like I am.

Compassion is more dangerous than sociopathy. Sociopaths are transactional, and often follow the rules on a transactional basis.

To conduct a genocide, one needs compassion. In the way people are here having fantasies of dangerous dogs biting children, likewise similar fantasies of danger abound -- compassion for imagined victims driving overwhelming oppression.

I dont consider this morality, quite the opposite. Morality is deliberative, it takes into account the particular, it is a response to the concrete reality not the imagined.

No no, compassion for the other.

You see the germans imagined the jews a threat (and of course some were, as some of all people are -- just as some dogs are dangerous). Now all you need to do is make headlines of all the times a jewish person murdered someone and the like. Indeed, imagine it on youtube: all these videos of jewish criminals. Now you have waves of compassion for the victims of these criminals. It's trivial.

I take it in this case people here are making an identical argument that were made by those racists who imagined so much danger.

Of course when looking at the actual stats the german jews were no less or more violent than anyone, indeed, often a little less -- and often a little more patroitic in fact.

How here do we imagine dogs? Well 56 deaths from dog attacks in a decade -- far less than from people in that same time, of course.

Dogs, it seems, are incredibly well-behaved compared to people. Perhaps we should leash young men, or ban them from parks. That would have a much more dramatic impact

You see, you don’t even know what compassion is. if people were able to believe that the Jews were a threat then they were not compassionate. They were afraid. And we can be sure if they started killing people they were not compassionate. So you still did not explain how compassionate people can kill other people.

Fear has no place in compassion.

No, they were compassionate for the victims of jewish criminals. Ex hyp., they did not feel any fear towards jewish people.

When you have compassion for victims, that makes you intolerant of their attackers. And if you imagine victimhood, then the anger and intolerance is just the same.

Compassion is an incredibly dangerous emotion for this reason; and is at the heart of a great amount of war and conflict. If people were afraid of an enemy, the won't attack them. But if they have compassion for their (possibly imagined) victims, then my god: they'll punish them to the ends of the earth.

Emotions are not moral things. Actions are. Any given emotion leads to both moral and immoral outcomes: anger is moral when it enables self-defence; fear is moral when it enables protection; compassion is moral when it enables protection to the needly.

But as with all the others, compassion becomes a profoundly immoral force when it motivates a desire to protect non-victims from their non-attackers. This "protection" is a form of self-righteous oppression -- and vastly more common than sociopaths pulling strings.

It is trivial to form a mob to lynch whomever you like if they feel it would protect some innocent -- it is compassion which drives the excess of all mobs

That's not at all what the poster said.

Water is good for you yet too much water will kill you. This is what the poster meant.