Does giving money to a burglar threatening you with force make you morally culpable for his/her actions?

I knew someone who when his home was broken into and the police arrested the burglar he agreed to file charges and testify. The burglar and his family up until then had gotten every other victim to drop the charges. So the burglar sued the homeowner for restraint of trade as a way to force the homeowner to drop the charges. The judge threw the case out, but not until months later when the case finally went to trial.

Yes and no.

Doesn't it depend on whether you support those actions? If you live in a democracy and disagree you can get involved and protest (like in Egypt) to change things; if you don't live in a democracy then do you have and choice/say in government actions?

Thanks for this question, Tolstoy. It is very important to me. And you put it real well. I cannot resist make an entry.

I say: Yes. Essentially yes. "Culpable" is a bit too decided... Let's say "accountable"... or better still... I'd say something like "involved".
And to anyone convinced that he is fighting a fundamental (total) war there are no innocent victims among the human beings that make up the structure supporting the enemy's war effort. Bombing of German cities in WWII I think indeed should be a good example as can make "ordinary" western people of our time to understand the idea.
If they are determined that Nazism was evil and the war against it was one that had to be won at all costs, unless evil prevails on earth, they may appreciate the idea that German civilians are part of "strategical targets" - the structures whereon the Nazi war machine is fueled.

And I would not focus primarily on the paying of taxes. Modern life is institutionalized down to the bone. If you want to be socially, economically successful, or even respected, you are more or less reduced to be this through the behaviour that is institutionalized, best expressed by being successfully tested in school curriculums.
Thus submitting oneself to being defined by the institutions, identifying oneself with the agenda of the institution one is a complicit.
The paying of taxes is not where the "culpability" starts.

And "culpable " is a hard word. First of all, let's grant that a person may be positive to the direction the institutions lead the shape of our world so he complicits with joy and pride. Anyway we'll need to acknowledge there is no simple black-or-white, therefore I'd be careful to automatically go from "involved", "complicit" to "culpable" until we have decided and agreed that we are thinking of a structure, institutions that we condemn.

And when one is deeply enough involved so as to be called upon to pay taxes, how then evade it?
The human beings are responsible for the institutions they produce, but no individual can take a stand outside the institutions to budge them the least.
If you are "powerful" within a society such as ours, you are it *within* an institution, never in the sense of having power and winning over one.
You refuse to pay taxes? Ok, good luck... you lose...

I want to repeat and sympathize with this testimony of ILN from another thread:

"I was saying that anyone willing to work should be able to. I'm also against mandatory schooling. Anything they teach in school is on the internet now anyways, so the argument that kids will grow up stupid is itself stupid, kids that want to learn will learn, with or without school, until recently school only provided kids with knowledge they couldn't get elsewhere. Only thing mandatory schooling does is make kids that want to learn have their class interrupted by some douchebag that thinks it's funny to make farting noises in class.
Having experienced public school unlike you I can tell you that I have learnt more from various Wikipedia articles than all my history and geography courses put together. Public education is a joke."

Ivan Illich was a thinker publishing books in the 1970s criticizing the institutionalization of life in industrial society.
He prophesied Internet in a way, as he called for using modern means of communication for free networks of people taking initiative and responsibility for their own learning, for their own interests, not for being tested, stamped and sorted by an institution providing "education".

The horror of "child labour" I think has taken minds far astray. The concept conjures up images from the early industrialism of 12h or more of daily work in mines and then leads on to think of kids doing any work but school is unhealthy.
When kids feel not like a burden, creatures in need of a painful costly "education", but rather like participant, developing, learning, positive little companions in healthy unstrained work, both kids and parents shine with satisfaction.

But this never now happens in "rich" countries...

We are all implicitly consenting to the social contract under which we live, whether it is expressed in writing or not.

But our societies do have a plethora of means of legal protest, petitions, focus groups, pressure groups etc. You really have a civil obligation to take part in these activities.

I think that most people tend to overthink the whole tax thing. You're more or less stuck paying taxes.
If you're an economist, you're entitled to gripe over the size of your tax bill, but for the rest of us you're pretty much just better off writing the check and forgetting about it. It's not something to spend too much of your energy worrying about.
Tax problems are, at the end of the day, white people's problems.

You brought up the subject of terrorism, something regrettable that many government leaders indulge in. Where I think some cats go wrong is in understanding the proper way to combat this sort of violence and misbehavior.

The best way to confront these sorts of issues is to fully engage the system. Tax protesting is unfortunately yet another form of escapism. Rather than engaging and ultimately effecting positive change in an egregious system, tax protesting mostly serves to make you look like an eccentric.

To truly fight terrorism you want to truly engage a system - to get a PhD in something relevant to public policy, to get experience working inside of the government, to develop political connections, to engage nonprofit and NGO, to write and speak effectively, to become someone who's opinion the rich and powerful will respect. This is how you effect change.

You realise that if you abolished public education and expected kids to sit at home and learn from Wikipedia, thousands upon thousands of parents, who currently work while their kids are at school, would have to give up their jobs in order to look after their children?

I'm not making an argument for or against, at this stage, but have you thought about the impacts on people, and your economy, of this proposal?

In response to the OP, I'd say, "sort of". I like the term Sylence used, actually - not "morally culpable" but "involved".

If you are a citizen of a state, and that state does something you consider morally wrong (such as, say, goes to war with another country without good justification) the question should be asked of you: "Well, you are a part of that state - what are you going to do to voice your opposition to the war?" So yes, as a citizen and a taxpayer, you're "involved" in the state's actions.

I say no, for two reasons. First, I am compelled under threat of punishment to pay taxes. Second, my government doesn't listen to me or anyone else, so if I do raise an objection to a morally dubious action, it will fall on deaf ears.

This is why the 16th Amendment should have never been ratified.

Yes I'm morally culpable.

I'm one of around 30m tax payers and about 5% of my taxes go on defence, so whilst I'm culpable the degree of culpability is quite small. As my taxes also go to the NHS (around 15%) my conscience is salved a little.

@Gunfigther, if this is true: "if I do raise an objection to a morally dubious action, it will fall on deaf ears." - then you're not living in a democracy.

If the will of the people, from which your government claims to derive it's power, is ignored in favour of powerful moneyed interests, then you've got bigger problems than taxation.

I don't think so, at least not in a meaningful way.

Morality is highly subjective, to begin with, as is intent...

And I'd argue that personal and public/state morality are separate, at least to an extent.

I'd argue that personal morality is based on intent (ie, if I mean to be kind in offering you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich not knowing that you're highly allergic, I'm at fault in a practical sense--and possibly you as well for not telling me or checking what you're eating before you chow down--but I'm not at fault in a moral sense, I didn't INTEND to cause you harm and in fact intended to help you, and there's no way I could have known that my action would cause you harm as I didn't know you were allergic.)

By contrast, the morality of a state is the sum total of the actions of its people...

Intent matters here, but since nearly every one of our 300 million US citizens have different intentions when they pay taxes or even when they vote for political candidates (20 Obama voters could have 20 different reasons for voting for him, ranging from a hatred of Romney and the opposition to true endorsement of Obama to a blanket endorsement of the Democrats to self-interest insofar as Obama might be friendlier towards certain social positions--ie, gay rights/marriage--than Romney, so if you're gay, and your choices are someone who's at the very least ambivalent and at best someone who's grown to endorse gay marriage on the one hand and a candidate whose Mormon beliefs--and in this case I feel it's fair to reference them, belief is private, but given how high-profile the Mormon stance on gay marriage is, I think that's a fair point --well...if gay marriage is a central issue for you, then you COULD vote for Obama just the same as a guy who might hate gays but endorse Obama's other policies) I think individual intent is muddled to the point where in most cases it becomes a non-factor in terms of counting individually--

Hence why it coalesces and counts in "group intents/morality."

This can be unifying (Latinos, female rights activists, Jews, blacks, and gays can conceivably all come from very different backgrounds, but broadly-shared collective intent has helped the Democratic party to build a powerhouse political base come election time) and it can be destructive (the intent of the Religious Right, Big Business and Libertarian sects of the Republican Party right now are all very much at odds, and that arguably caused them to lose the election as much as the New Democratic Coalition described above helped Obama win)...

That neither validates nor refutes the position, you can unify a bad platform or destroy a good one...

But it does mean that individual intent is given over to the whole.

As such, we all have different intents when we pay taxes.

Further, we have very little control over where that money goes.

You can be shoveling coal into the boiler to make a steam engine go, but you have no control over whether or not the captain suddenly decides to break out some hidden guns and raid another ship or kill his passengers for their money.

You could argue the ship would never be in position to fire on the other ship if the coal workers didn't power it, but as they didn't know what their raw efforts were going towards, individually they're not at fault, while collectively they are.

As such, you can't blame a small, nice, happy, tolerant German family for WWII...

That being said, they're collectively implicated when we blame "Germany" for certain actions in WWII.

I'd add this is yet another reason I think the people here who judge politicians on a moral standard which is skewered towards personal morality are naive and in error.

State morality requires a different outlook and mindset than personal morality.

For individuals, morality tends to be more intent-centric...

For states, I'd argue it's Greatest Good for the Greatest Possible Number.

Exploiting others and having "dirty hands" in your personal dealings can be immoral...

But it may be (and often is) necessary for politicians to have dirty hands and even harm others to help a greater number.

I'd argue that's PROBABLY the justification the Democrats have for Obamacare...

*HOWEVER*--

1. I do not know nearly enough about Obamacare to have a debate on this,
2. I don't really care to have a debate on this,
3. I don't deny you the right to say (and for all I know be correct) that this isn't the case,
4. This is not meant to start a healthcare debate that will span 300 posts, I'm just
5. Giving the POSSIBLE reason Obama, Hillary, Harry Reid and Co. might be endorsing this program.

"For individuals, morality tends to be more intent-centric...

For states, I'd argue it's Greatest Good for the Greatest Possible Number."

obi, this kind of Machiavellian utilitarianism has been the argument for any number of crimes, massacres, and misdeeds over the course of human history. I mean, the government could introduce chattel slavery and doubtlessly save us from having to pay taxes (and arguably already is) -- would that be for the greater good?

@Ckrobert, that seems to be a rather poor interpretation of Machiavelli. He was rather discussing practical leadership; the kind of thing that leads the US to spy on the rest of the world - because you do what you can to ensure you remain in power...

I don't remember him saying anything about the greater good of your people... (however you go about it)

@ orathaic

"then you're not living in a democracy. If the will of the people, from which your government claims to derive it's power, is ignored in favour of powerful moneyed interests, then you've got bigger problems than taxation."

America is NOT a democracy, we're a constitutional republic. My state government is (somewhat coincidentally) doing a good job, so I'll accept moral responsibility for my state's actions. But that is neither here nor there. America *does* have bigger problems than just taxation. For starters, our federal government isn't even in the general vicinity of its constitutional mandate.

If I had a choice in paying taxes, yes, I would share in what the government does.

But since I pay taxes with a gun to my head, I am not responsible for what the government does.

Orathaic, if it's easier you can just call it utilitarianism. But my understanding of Machiavelli's significance is that he calls for a good and effective ruler to do immoral or wicked things, based on the needs of the state. Preserving one's power, even immorally, is ultimately better than instability. This is why he praised the Borgias, who ruthlessly but effectively maintained the stability of the state. It's why he praises the miserly ruler who won't have to tax his people and ultimately lead to revolution.

@'America is NOT a democracy, we're a constitutional republic.'

I'm so glad you're pedantic enough to bring this up.

Also NOT RELEVANT. Well done.

@CK, yes, i'm being almost as pedantic as Gunfigther, i just happen to like Machiavelli, i think he gets a terribly unfair treatment in common usage.

@ orathaic

No disrespect intended. I agree with most of you said in response to my previous post. I completely agree with the assertion that the American government has not reflected the will of the American people for quite a while.

I just never miss an opportunity to point out that America is NOT a democracy. It's a pet peeve of mine when people refer to America as a democracy. Democracy is tantamount to mob rule. Constitutional republicanism is how America was originally intended to operate and is the best plan for the future. The sooner people realize that, the better off America will be.

I'd argue that it's not paying taxes that would give you (a very small) degree of culpability, but voting for the government that implements the policies

Well, my vote doesn't mean anything.