- We human beings are wired to see malice in any negative situation. Our brains already over-estimate malicious intent (including by inanimate objects!) hugely. Defaulting to ignorance only makes us more likely to be accurate (although the blur of ignorance/malice doesn’t make this either/or).
- A false accusation of malice is 10-100 times more costly than failing to correctly flag malice. One false accusation basically makes an enemy forever. That’s poisonous for any movement trying to bring people to their side.
- Can you imagine a world without presumption of innocence? If there are very good reasons we embody this in law, why would the rules be different for social situations?
- Believing that most negative actions are caused by malice pretty much guarantees personal unhappiness. We are all subject to a barrage of minor transgressions. Our happiness depends on the ability to look beyond our instinct, and understand that people don’t read our mind and understand our situation. Assumption of malice has broken many marriages, families and friendships.
- It doesn’t require malice to take action. A rabid dog doesn’t have malice, but you still put it down. A harmful enough act demands action. But you don’t have to assume malice in order to act.
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Keep in mind this is only true if there aren’t people in the world who will kill you for the colour of your skin, your gender, your sexuality, etc. Noticing little signs of danger can save people from serious danger.
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Not always
Failing to correctly flag malice is a sign of incompetence, and the vicious circle goes round again.
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They’ll do that out of ignorance too. Which is kinda the whole point of this tangent.
You require very few fingers to count the number of ignorant killers who think themselves malicious.
If intent to kill (whatever the reason) doesn’t qualify as malice in your book then I’m going to bow out of any further discussion of what is malicious.
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No need to get aerated. I think the confusion is possibly between two different concepts of malice. I maintain that very few people think of themselves, even these killers you’re talking about right now, as acting maliciously. A lot of the time they believe they’re doing a deity’s work, or whatever. So of course they’re not acting maliciously.
But outsiders see this - quite justifiably - as malicious. We see them as 'orrible broken people. Their acts are, nevertheless, due to ignorance which may be explained by [their] duty or [our] malice.
To (perhaps over-) generalise:
Nobody believes themselves ignorant.
Nobody believes themselves malicious.
What have those two propositions in common?
My comment was about the maxim that you shouldn’t attribute malice to other people when incompetence will explain it. My point was that the maxim seems to apply well when you are fairly privileged, but a black queer person of visually ambiguous gender I know feels that it is pretty far off the mark. Not looking for malice in others risks your life.
But also:
People who want to kill queer people are full of malice and they know it. They hate queer people. They may think they are doing god’s work, but they think god hates queer people too. They think you are supposed to hate the wicked. Most people hate someone and most people think they are right to hate that person. People don’t think of themselves as being full of unreasonable or unwarranted hate, but they know what the word “hate” means and they know they feel it.
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I would hope fewer than you believe. I don’t know how you can be so certain as to what’s going on in their brains. And I certainly hope you don’t believe this level of conscious maliciousness to be present in the school-teachers of this particular post.
And lest you think I’m trying to justify their actions as ‘mistakes due to ignorance’ (it shouldn’t be necessary for me to point out that explanation ≠ excuse), I’d quote the (fictional) Will Graham of Manhunter:
“My heart bleeds for him, as a child. Someone took a kid and manufactured a monster. […] As an adult, someone should blow the sick fuck out of his socks. Does that sound like a contradiction to you, Jack?”
The problem in the case you have cited is that the authorities who would be the ones who would punish these murderers won’t do so because their authority is where said sick fucks get their beliefs from in the first place.
Oh - and I nearly missed this bit!
Again, the same is true for ignorance. Ignorance suffices.
I am still hoping for the Trump Murder/Suicide story where he takes out Mike Pence and himself in the same act. But the problem is I doubt Trump can hold a gun straight, let alone shoot one without wetting himself.
Okay, we’re back to the question of whether intent to harm is malice or not. I really can’t debate that.
ETA: I don’t mean to sound snitty, but I really don’t feel like we’re even having the same conversation or using compatible language.
If that’s all it is then sure, I cannot ‘intend to harm’ without malice if the word ‘harm’ itself carries that malice, but isn’t that debatable? Using the word only passively, surely you can ‘be harmed’ by a thing with no conscious agency whatever, so where’s the malice there? If you’re taking it as read that we’re talking only of deliberated conscious harm, then clearly you’re not equating the word/act with mere destruction (to take it to an extreme).
E.g. I think I can kill a wasp that’s just, or even about to, sting me without malice[1]. FTSOA I assume this implies harming it, but you are making me think carefully about whether I’m acting maliciously. Again, I don’t think I am, but from the wasp’s pov … (And personally I feel/hope in this case that I’d probably not actually kill it because - to me - that would seem unnecessarily vengeful - maybe that supports your side, I’m not sure 
).
And you don’t sound snitty btw.
[1] Just noticed possible ambiguity. I mean malice from me, but I guess that could also include from wasp.
In this school situation, it is more likely than not malice was not involved. But in life as a whole, malice is there more often than most think. And, in terms of school, a teacher was fired in Pico Rivera California was fired for pointing out that people were fools for believing US government lies and joining the US military to kill large numbers of civilians. When a school district eliminates the non-malign, the malign become more dominant. The same situation exists in most US police departments.
You miss the point that ignorance and malice can coexist in the same person, in the same situation.
This is actually a plot point in the series Cardinal; a psychologist is encouraging his patients to write suicide notes and, well, nudging them into the act.
Also, An Inspector Calls is wild. I’m a big fan of British detective dramas and this one is definitely not your typical example of the genre. It’s certainly an interesting choice for a class assignment and I’m not really sure in a good way.
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I really don’t know how you can say that since I’ve been rather careful to emphasise the possibility of the presence of both whilst emphasising the necessity of only one of them.
I may have intended to reply to a different comment. Some have had similar viewpoints to mine, just not the first few who responded to my original point. I apologize for the confusion.
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Indeed, if you are in a war-zone, it is dangerous to pretend that you aren’t. Obviously my observations of cost of incorrect assumptions only apply to social situations.
But even in a dangerous situations, the long-term costs to defaulting to malice are extraordinarily high. Police officers assuming ignorance can cost officers their lives. But assuming malice costs many, many more lives (albeit, not theirs).
So people say, and I certainly read about truly malicious people. But in 50 years of day-to-day personal interactions, I can count harmful acts against me motivated by a desire to do me harm on one hand.
Now I don’t live in a war-zone, and I’m part of the dominant culture, but for those of us who enjoy such privilege, I can’t help but observe the massive cost of defaulting to malice, both on a personal basis, and to society as a whole.
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Can you tell me which war was happening in London, England during April 1999 and February 2000? Because I seem to have missed it, living 300 miles North during that time.
Victoria Climbié’s murder happened because malice was not flagged by social services. War doesn’t come into the equation.
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