BvBPL
Pour Decision Maker
I'll stipulate that my earlier use of the word violence was limited to the intentional kind. The kind done with malice, well intended or otherwise.
What you're forgetting is that the homeowner has a responsibility to clear the snow from her walk. So it goes from being simply lazy, to being lazy in a manner that ignores her duty, to (perhaps) being willfully lazy in light of the fact that her other neighbors in the community have shoveled their walks and she's the outlier.
What's more, the responsibility to clear one's walk isn't a surprise to anyone. It's not a case of, say, a party asking his neighbor to stop burning leaves in her lawn on a given Saturday because he's throwing a lawn party that day that she didn't know about.
Plus an unshoveled walk can be really, really dangerous.
So, yeah, it's violence if we are using the relatively low standard for violence that encompasses calling a code enforcement officer within its definition. The homeowner isn't drumming her fingers together sinisterly while watching out the window, hoping that people will fall on her walk, but a pure malice standard is too narrow a definition.
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Consider the subtext that violent acts are morally unacceptable. That's the argument that's being made here about calling the cops after all.
Let's say you are at the switch for a railyard and there's a railcar screaming down the tracks. If you don't throw the switch it will run into a school bus full of children, but if you throw the switch it will change the track and the railcar will safely come to a stop.
If you say that a choice not to change is the tracks is not technically violent because it is inaction rather than action, not changing the track is still not morally acceptable.
Even if you don't accept that choosing not the shovel is violent then it is still morally unacceptable in the same manner that not changing the track is morally unacceptable.