A Talk with My Daddy II

Title: A Talk with My Daddy II

Date: 4 March 2011
Category: Outside of Class

http://www.liesyoungwomenbelieve.com

            My dad and I were having heart-to-heart conversation about conflicts in general. We had two opposing ideas. I believed that the two sides that are involved in the conflict must both have faults. However, my dad believed that although in many cases this is true, there are cases in which one person can is totally responsible for the conflict and this one person is the only cause for the problem. To support his argument, he gave me an example. He said, “Let’s say that there is a criminal and a normal citizen on the street and the criminal shoots the citizen to scare him/her in order to steal the money from him/her but does not kill him/her. If the citizen decides to go to court with this issue, then does this mean that the citizen has done wrong too?” I told him that although the criminal was more at fault in this conflict, the citizen also could be responsible for the way he/she appeared to be. Perhaps the citizen was flaunting his/her wealth which caused the criminal to target this person. Our discussion followed with him trying to argue that the citizen had just been “at the wrong place at the wrong time” while I tried to argue that the citizen should have been more responsible about how he/she appears in the public.

            Is there such a thing as “at the wrong place at the wrong time”? Who decides what is right and wrong? How do we determine who is at fault and who is innocent? Can some crimes be accepted if they are under the right circumstances (such as for one’s family, or perhaps being forced to do so by a superior person etc.)? Is it fair to rely and risk one’s life on the judge to decide who is innocent and who is guilty? If we rely on the judge, and we take his words as being knowledge and fact, then are we basing our system of justice on the fallacy of argumentum ad vericundium? (Knowledge Issues)