Ripheus23

I noticed that the logic of my argument about action vs. inaction, in ethics/responsibility theory, seemed to lead into an argument about moral dilemmas, too, and now I think I can explain just how these issues fit together. The connecting concept has to do with the semantic satisfaction conditions for imperative sentences/prescriptions. Negative imperatives have negative compliance conditions, compliance being the status an imperative has for semantic satisfaction in the way that assertions/declarative sentences have truth as their satisfaction status.

So, it is false that we are responsible only for wrong things that we allow to happen. If we were responsible for those, we would also be responsible for all the good things we allow to happen, because if we were not equally responsible as such, then negative culpability would be more important than positive attribution, which would entail the concept of wrong/evil (moral opposition) being more important than the concept of right/good. But evil is not more important than good, hence... Also, though, it is false that we are responsible for the good we allow. This is because positive imperatives have position actions for compliance conditions, whereas prohibitive imperatives have inaction for a compliance condition in general. The asymmetry, here, disallows(!) the equivalence.

Now, in the case of a moral dilemma, if one of these were inescapable/unsolvable, it would follow that no matter what you did (thereof), you'd do something wrong. But since you are not imagined to be capable of doing nothing whatsoever in such a case (which is questionable, after all), there is no general compliance condition available for the imperatives that are ranging over you in a conflicted manner. That is, for a moral dilemma to irrevocably go through, it would be necessary for prohibitions to have positive actions for compliance conditions. It is true that indirectly, by inference from a set of imperatives some of which are positive and others negative, one can relate a negative imperative substantially to a positive action, but not as its internal semantic satisfaction. Accordingly, within the zone of a solid dilemma, one would have to have negative imperatives with positive compliance conditions, which cannot be true.

The train of thought that transcendental delusion rides, travels from a mistake about the oppositional priority of good over evil (in that the concept of evil depends on the concept of good to have distinct meaning, as the opposite of what is good (it just is any such opposition; there is no self-defining essence of darkness besides this)), to a distorted perspective on doing-vs.-allowing-harm, to the ethical cataclysm of indefeasible dilemmas. From there, of course, it goes to retribution-vs.-retribution and chugs along back to the galaxy of the final offenses...