"Violence is never the answer" only because it's historically the only thing that actually works.

It's propaganda meant to defang the population because it is an actual threat to those in power.

My opinion:

I think asking "is violence justified" in a binary manner means the question can't be answered.

Not all questions have binary answers.

Morality itslef is a quagmire of philosophy.

You can have moral killing, and immoral pacifism.

Rigid adherence to a moral code could lead to immoral acts. Too much flexibility in morals leads to amoral behaviour.

Every life is important, but not to the point where it overrides someone else's rights.

All of this is a spectrum.

It could be naive, but that feels like a binary position on a complex matter.

Since you used media as an example, let me use another common trope to answer. Do you know when in horror or thriller movies a character momentarily gets the upper hand on the killer by knocking them unconscious and then just tries to run away without even making sure that the killer is dead or at least arming themselves? Does that EVER end well?

The reason that trope is so common is that it's very effective at eliciting the sort of instinctive emotional response that makes us as viewers want to yell "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?? KILL HIM!!" at the screen.

We have that instinct for a reason.

To answer your question more directly, yes, morals ARE inherently flexible. If they weren't, we would never learn anything or progress as a society or even as individuals. I don't know where the idea that someone's morals are supposed to be immutable even comes from. One of the core steps to psychological well-being is realizing that you have no direct control over your "environment", but you absolutely have direct control over the actions you take to influence it and the way you adapt and react to it, which includes letting go of standards and expectations you've set for yourself if you feel that it's necessary.

Absolutes are not applicable in reality. You've mentioned utopias too, and well, the fun thing about utopias is that they don't exist. They can't exist. It's the literal definition of the word: "an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect." Dystopia, on the other hand, is what happens when you try to force a utopia into existence.

Morals can't be absolute. Tolerance can't be absolute. Everything is flexible and eternally changing. It's scary and it's complex but people have to come to terms with it.

Violence shouldn't be the first action taken, but once all other options are exhausted, violence is necessary

I think you've drawn the wrong borders around concepts, and are getting tangled as a result.

Regardless of how we'd like things to be, morality is just plausibly-generalised threat perception.

If people habitually went around doing that kind of thing, would you feel threatened by that?

If so, then you will feel the emotion of outrage, and you will consider the act to be Wrong.

Killing people and taking their stuff? But I'm a people, and I like stuff - I don't want that to happen! That's Bad and Wrong!

And that's the reason dehumanising the outgroup (or drawing a hard distinction of kind) is the first tactic used by oppressors: Oh goodness no, we aren't killing people and taking their stuff; that would be awful! Nonono, we're killing :demographic: and taking their stuff; that's completely different and can never come back to bite you or yours, so relax, it's fine.

And of course, sometimes all your choices suck, thus the whole concept of trolley problems. Which threat makes my world less safe: a cold-blooded one-guy killer, or a useless five-guy allower-to-die standing there with his hands in his pockets? Are me-and-mine more likely to be in the big group of victims or the little one?

The choice you consider 'best' depends on these kinds of questions.

Threat perception is the engine that drives your moral framework. You can go and try to build a system out of words that will predict its moves, but that system is always going to be a crude imitation of the real thing, and there will always be edge-cases that throw up conflicts.

Framing things in terms of how it affects categories-you're-in can be a bit unflattering, so most people try to bury it in their system of words.

When you do get that cognitive-dissonance feeling where your gut and your brain disagree on what's right, it's generally because your words are too specific, narrowing in on little details instead of the bigger picture.

It's definitely good to pause at this point, unpick the conflict and try to derive a wider principle that gives better answers - though you could fairly argue that this isn't really moral flexibility, just getting better at describing the morals you do have.

Real moral flexibility would be reassessing threats in their various contexts, and examining which categories of threat go where in the likelihood/severity matrix, and letting that inform your emotional responses. And yes, that's a very good thing.

Yes violence is sometimes the only answer.

Edit: in response to your original, much better title (that was 100% likely censored by the neolib respectability police running world.)

You say that you believe most people can differentiate between good and bad, but note that people often think they are doing good while doing evil deeds. The human mind is exceptional at reasoning even against logic or facts when it is to preserve a positive self-image. You mention being brainwashed; often, people "brainwashed" themselves.

Defaulting to tolerance, goodwill, and expecting good is a good start, but tolerance must end somewhere. Excessive tolerance will inevitably lead to it being used/exploited. At various costs.

Flexible morals make sense. Different contexts require different adaptions. Considering them flexible or not may also be a matter of not including enough data points/context that sources moral conclusions.

The solution to the tolerance paradox is that intolerance should not be tolerated. What this intolerance of intolerance looks like might vary, from shunning to telling them off to arresting them.

In the case of Nazis shunning and telling off has been tried in the years before WW2. It was made known that you can't make Nazis go away just by telling them to stop. We fought an entire war because they kept trying to impose their fascist ways on the world. And now they have returned, so why should we waste time with diplomacy again? Even Germany, having learnt the most from WW2 and having some of the most strict anti-fascism laws, is now home to one of the largest far-right party in Europe. We know how to get rid of Nazis and other fascists, the same way we did last time. And we know that if we let them be they will come for us, and try again to impose their fascist ways onto the world again.

In this case violence towards the intolerant is justified, because we know they will not listen to reason.

I'm still partial to the general philosophy of Dr Who. Killing is to be avoided even at extreme cost. But when survival is put on the line, it's time to put a bullet in someone, or blow up their entire species. When you reach that point, go as far as you have to, in order to make sure you don't have to again.

The question is put on wrong terms. All social order is derived from violence. What make the law, the law is the menace of violence. What supports democratic institutions are the violence of police and military against who don't abide the order. So, violence is inescapable. The righ question is not if it's justified, but WHO and WHEN have the right to commit violence. When put under these terms, it's much more simpler question.

The idea of peace has always been attacked and defended violently. Acknowledging the irony in that is clever, insisting it's an unsolvable paradox is obtuse.

In the same way, there is no paradox of tolerance. This kind of thinking haunts the mind of the theorist, but burns off in harsh light of reality like morning fog.

I find reflecting on violence done to one's self is more complex, because you have full control over whether the suffering should be your own or an attacker's. And you may start reflecting on 'what's a proportional response?', 'is killing them justified when you don't know if they'd have taken your life or not?', 'might they not be responsible for their actions?', 'it's it better to suffer a little and give people the benefit of the doubt?'. This can get layered with all sorts of guilt and doubt depending what you factor in. 'did I contribute to the economic injustice that has produced this mugger who's attacking me?'

Etc etc. It's a quagmire.

I find things become simpler when I consider an attacker about to assault a weaker person - a child say - in front of me. Should I use violence to stop that attacker?

Given that it now doesn't seem to be my place to reflect on the just suffering of a child, the obligation to stop the attacker with force becomes clearer.

At least it seems morally clear (at least to me) that to claim to be a pacifist when observing a violent assault on a child, one is no better than the attacker.

That breaks the idealistic (and naive) hope that there might be a way to be non-violent and just. After that, one has better tools to re-evaluate assaults upon one's self. If I am a person who through their actions reduces unjust suffering, then allowing myself to come to harm harms others and is unjust. Protecting one's self with violence becomes justified and necessary.

(When I was a student I was an idealist and a pacifist. When I became a father it became quite clear to me that I would break someone else in half if they were hurting my children..)

Yes. Like a straight line, truth and morality are attained through constant refinement. Like anything worthwhile.

A straight line is defined by what it is not. It's hard to be 100% sure that any given line is the shortest distance between two points, but it's easy to tell which between two compared lines is the more direct.

We should never hold our current path so sacred that we won't re-evaluate. But we should always choose the best path we know, and be brave enough to stick to it until we learn better.

I believe morality is relative to the current condition - it can't be absolute when nothing else is. In fact, can only be based on your understanding of the current reality, even if you are wrong.

I think de-escalation should always be tried first, and in real life it's the only thing that's worked effectively for violence directed at me.

But I do think there is sometimes a need to defend with force; and somebody has to do it in that case, it's not reasonable to be able to be nonviolent only because someone else is willing to do the violence on your behalf.

I do think it's safe to say that a majority of the human violence that occurs on our earth is unnecessary and not only that - it's counterproductive to whatever the violent person is trying to achieve. But I cannot believe it's NEVER warranted. Like if it was a bear or alligator attacking you and you had the means to violently end the attack, you probably would because you know they can't be reasoned with. Is it unimaginable that some humans might be similar in that they cannot be reasoned with, or not in time to stop them?

Violence, in most instances, is what many might call a form of escalation.

Suppose someone got on your nerves and you kicked them down a well? Or there was a country overrun by fanatics and the president ordered a genocide? Or there are people who have succumbed to some kind of immorality and someone set out to scare them with violence? These are all examples of the kind of instance where one might say that death is "a step above" the problem at hand. Think of the Allport Scale.

If you are in a bank and a bank robber starts threatening everyone and they take a particular interest in you or someone close to you, and you disarm and maybe cause them to die, that is harder to say is escalation, since the possibility of a violent outcome was already in the picture.

If one is to accept the idea of escalation, to escalate an issue, by definition, makes you worse than your enemies. Many people around here have unfortunately compared billionaires to Nazis when a Nazi would be closer analogously to the bank robber and the billionaires, even the ones who practice what many have called extreme acts of inaction, would be more analogous to the people mentioned who have "succumbed to some kind of immorality" (and yet there are some who aren't even immoral, so that's not even a good analogy either).

"Subdue your enemy without fighting." ~ Sun Tzu

Violence causes problems that will have to be dealt with later, but sometimes its necessary to deal with problem that is too awful to let be. If you want to prevent violence you need to prevent the situation where its necessary.

imo there is a line where flexible morals is okay and where its not and its not on same place for everything. Ultimately its about will it make things better or worse for everyone.

I also dont think anyone is inherently good or evil but everyone has tendency towards something. The tendency comes from genetics, environment and random chance. Its up to them if they want to go with it or not and if they end up doing bad things and dont want to stop then they should be considered evil until they stop and repent. Though they can still pretend to repent so if threat they represent is big enough, you need to also consider what the risks are if they lie and get away.

In avatar, (major spoiler) ::: spoiler spoiler aang lucked out and had the choice of having it both ways by just taking away ozais power. Without that option I think he would have had to just kill the guy or watch him destroy everything. In that situation, in my opinion, the destruction would have been partially aangs fault too since he could have stopped it. Otherwise you might as well blame anyone defending themselves from ozai for killing fire nation's soldiers. :::

What makes this so difficult question is also that everyone has their own set of morals they live by. One also kind of needs to define what good and evil is, because there definitely is evil at least.

While I wont push anyone towards any religiousness, there are some good points in some holy texts. If there werent, i dont think civilization living by those religions wouldnt have lasted very long. Unfortunately they are still words written by men and thus corrupted by shitty people, like that one part in bible about "you shouldnt rape kids" that got turned into something that was interpreted as anti homosexual. Religion has always been meant to "control" or guide people, but it isnt always malicious. Though getting the "core" message from some religion still relies on persons sense of morality since you need to know what to keep and what to discard.

So maybe ultimately being good is about honestly wanting and trying to be good and being willing to adapt and change towards it. It doesnt matter if you dont definitely know what "good" is, you can "construct" it from what others think is good. Also, its critical you dont lie to yourself about anything, that is surefire way to lose your way. Educating yourself, being capable of media criticality and watching and reading many kinds of stories also helps.

I don't believe in the death penalty. But there are people I will vehemently defend, and others where I'm not going to die on that particular hill. My morals are flexible.

Violence is a last resort, but not so much so that it must never be done. There are situations with leave you no other options by design.

However that doesn't mean I think committing violence is fine. I think Luigi did more good than harm with his action, but that doesn't mean I think he shouldn't bear the consequences of that decision. I salute him for trading the remainder of his own life to remove a shitty person from this earth.

But it was as much luck as anything that he did more good than harm, and like someone who drives home drunk from the bar without hurting anyone, you can applaud the result but still understand it was awfully reckless and they should suffer consequences to discourage them and others from making that same choice.