you want to avoid moral dogma. i think this is difficult, when you make use of terms like “doing good” , “doing bad” ,“law” and “punishment”.
one basic problematic implication i always found when people want to better society with ethical considerations is, that human beings would want to cause problems for others. in addition to that, important knowledge is often excluded in those deliberations: problems of a society are due to structural violence in many cases. if you keep the majority of people in a state/condition of poverty, hopelessness, coercion and dependence then theft, robbery and murder will be considered as expedients to end this condition. if you ask those delinquents whether they wanted to cause problems and harm, in most cases they would deny that. they just felt desperate without any alternatives to act otherwise.
my approach to this problem is to distinguish between the impressions of the individual due to intentions and motives. i refer to this approach in this example: that means, that it feels different for me when somebody attacks me in rage and steps on my toe purposely or when somebody steps on my toe by mistake in a crowd. although the consequence, that my toe hurts, is the same, i would not want to report the one in the crowd to the police. and i am glad that our law respects motives and intentions as well as consequences. but you can go a step deeper and take all the feelings into account. in the aforementioned example it would be that the violent attack creates a feeling of fear in me and i felt hurt in my dignity as additional consequences of the physical pain. this way you can explain every moral value of an action with consequentialism, because it already includes the consequences of intention. but a consequentialism that defines itself by excluding motives and intentions is flawed.
and this is how i distinguish between"violence" and “necessary/inevitable harm”. the example of the surgeon is a good one. nobody will experience a helpful therapy and a painful healing process as a violent attack of the doctor. even pets are able to recognize that a vet means “help” for them, although the treatment might be painful; not all animals and not the first time, but they are capable to learn.
BUT: if it turns out, that a treatment was not helpful or did further damage, the question becomes crutial, whether this was part of an inevitable risk and not intentional or if the doctor could be considered unethical. so patients will have the impression of violence against them if :
- the doctor refused to give them the best treatment possible because of economical reasons, or other reasons. ( it is the feeling to be reduced and could be considered as a violation of the first formulation of the categorical imperative. the doctor would want the best treatment possible for himself and his relatives. and the maxim “give patients the best treatment possible” could be recognized as universal )
- the doctor applied an unnecessary method of therapy to maximize his profit (it is also the feeling to be reduced and to be instrumentalized. this could be considered as a violation of the second formulation of the categorical imperative because the patient is reduced to a means to an end )
- the doctor caused damage because he was careless. ( the feeling to be treated disrespectful. the pain of the damage and the pain that this damage was unnecessary. also a violation of sentence one and two.)
…and there are many more examples for treatments that would be considered as violence against the patient, because of the motives and not the pain of a therapy.
it is the same with my example with someone stepping on my toe. if it is your intention to block someones way to cause harm and it would be no harm to you to step aside, then yes, you do harm. but if you have your own motive to stand there and that motive has nothing to do with the person who feels blocked because of you, then it is up to the other person to decide what to feel (even dogs understand when somebody hurt them accidently and would not attack back). there might be cases where someone reports someone who steps on his toe to the police although it was an accident. from an ethical point of view this person causes harm if she can not distinguish between purposely or not.
information could cause harm. but i think that it is obvious that it was low-level-thinking and unethical to punish or kill the messenger for bringing bad news. and if free speech would have the same effect, it has to be considered unethical and harmful for the speaker.
“free speech” is a kind of an ideal. and it is a difficult discussion to determine what is meant by it.
if somebody has the intention to purposely hurt others with what he say and it doesn´t matter for him whether he tells the truth or he tells lies because it only counts for him to inflict pain and he could easily say nothing when there is no chance for him to do harm with words, than i would not consider this as “free speech”. people who have the longing for “free speech” are not motivated to cause harm, (but quite the opposite!), although it is often a consequence that they cause harm.
if your belongings make you happy it would be painful for you if others expropriate you. but the motives concerning belongings are very complex and many of them are unconscious.
one part of ethics is to me like a crime story: you would accomplish nothing when you don´t understand the motives of the agents.
the other part of ethics is much more complicated, because many human motives are unconscious and a secret to themselves. what could be the best ethical framework for a better society?
the ideas of immanuel kant are not so bad but they should be developed further.
a good start for new ethics might be, to recognize the tragedy : most of the people… nearly everybody wants to be a good person when asked.