You can't just see something happen and become that thing.
Everybody goes to fiction for this argument. The same logic would be applied to non-fiction. Documentaries depict their subject matter all the time. The types of things jurors see in evidence review. Apply it to all stages of Law and Law Enforcement. People doing studies on say, oh I don't know, rape gangs etc.
People will easily dismiss the absurdity when applied to ficiton. Non-fiction is where the real absurdity rears its head in a far less ignorable way.
That's entirely separate to the argument that gets made though and is almost if not entirely resolved by age and natural maturity alone.
I boil the argument down to "monkey see, monkey do" and if the premise is taken as true, then it becomes immoral for law enforcement to view video evidence of murder because of the effect it would have in driving them towards replicating it. It becomes illegal to distribute it, it hugely affects what can be conveyed through the news by either depiction or description. And on and on it goes across every facet of life and information, real or imagined.
Now the argument does have some merit with firsthand viewing of any such events but it requires a magnifying effect from multiple other factors (age, mental condition/fortitude, moral compass, underlying psychiatric conditions/conditioining, cultural normalisation/commonality... list goes on but you get the idea *Forgot to add, there's also mitigating factors within similar subsets to contributing ones) to have any reliable impact on behaviours and outlooks. It's a numbers game of incredibly low probabilities and the effects can only be seen afterwards because of required diagnoses making ti not only an unreliable predictor, but an absolutely useless one even in the context of where the effect is very real.
Absurd, beginning to end. I just wanted to expand on it because the overall gets missed on the internet.
Everybody goes to fiction for this argument. The same logic would be applied to non-fiction. Documentaries depict their subject matter all the time. The types of things jurors see in evidence review. Apply it to all stages of Law and Law Enforcement. People doing studies on say, oh I don't know, rape gangs etc.
People will easily dismiss the absurdity when applied to ficiton. Non-fiction is where the real absurdity rears its head in a far less ignorable way.
I suppose that would be the real issue.
People unable to tell reality or non fiction from fiction, and just copying what they see.
We usually have to tell kids that cartoons aren't real for this reason, as an example.
That's entirely separate to the argument that gets made though and is almost if not entirely resolved by age and natural maturity alone.
I boil the argument down to "monkey see, monkey do" and if the premise is taken as true, then it becomes immoral for law enforcement to view video evidence of murder because of the effect it would have in driving them towards replicating it. It becomes illegal to distribute it, it hugely affects what can be conveyed through the news by either depiction or description. And on and on it goes across every facet of life and information, real or imagined.
Now the argument does have some merit with firsthand viewing of any such events but it requires a magnifying effect from multiple other factors (age, mental condition/fortitude, moral compass, underlying psychiatric conditions/conditioining, cultural normalisation/commonality... list goes on but you get the idea *Forgot to add, there's also mitigating factors within similar subsets to contributing ones) to have any reliable impact on behaviours and outlooks. It's a numbers game of incredibly low probabilities and the effects can only be seen afterwards because of required diagnoses making ti not only an unreliable predictor, but an absolutely useless one even in the context of where the effect is very real.
Absurd, beginning to end. I just wanted to expand on it because the overall gets missed on the internet.