In the study, he didn't ask his subjects to kill. And they didn't actually murder anyone.
> Rwanda ... Cambodia ... Nazis ... Interahamwe
People killing on behalf of the State is a whole other matter than what the article is talking about vis-à-vis pedestrian fatalities. The State has been the largest single driver of misery, destruction, and death in human history, and I don't disagree that mass murder has happened and is evil. But drivers ensuring the death of a struck passenger stands in stark contrast to the kill-or-be-killed nature of State violence. On this point, I would agree with your assertion about "compelling justification," which in the case of the State is the threat of violence against the killer for not doing the bidding of the State.
But even in the face of multiple genocides and huge wars, including nuclear bomb blasts, the fact remains that the vast majority of humans have never and will never kill another human.
> A great number of Americans ...
See a sibling response for murder rates and compare to my assertion that a vast majority of people don't do it.
And self-defense is not murder by the legal definition, which include premeditation.
> Only in the USA is it normal to think that people should have the right to kill in self defense.
I think you are wrong. At least in Norway where I've lived for the last few decades I'm pretty certain people are found not guilty because of self defense.
> Even more, many think they should be able to defend themselves from the state.. while that is the definition of a lawless society (a society where the state has no way to impose the rule of law).
Persecuting minorities where completely lawful in nazi Germany.
I guess you should be looking for another word because as much as I'm against lawlessness that doesn't cut it here IMO.
>That's a really poor example that only applies because you chose to use the term "murder" rather than "killing." Killing is not wrong because it's killing, it's wrong for more subtle and practical reasons -- something that is easier to show if you don't go around wantonly calling killing 'murder.'
No... I chose to say murder because it is not generally agreed that killing is wrong, even today.
Most people think that killing in self-defense, for example, is permissible, and sometimes admirable thing (though again, there is much disagreement on exactly what self-defense is) Hell, a lot of people think that killing in pursuit of a sufficiently emotionally charged goal is okay, see collateral damage in wars of choice. Many people think that killing in defense of property is okay, and many people disagree with that first set. I could go on and on.
In the country where I live, most killings are auto crashes. Clearly, most people don't think that this is wrong, considering how loosely we regulate who can drive (compared to, say, who can carry a gun) Hell, I am about to go to work; getting there half an hour earlier (vs. what it would take on my dramatically less dangerous to other people bicycle) is apparently worth risking other people's lives to me. Now, I don't feel particularly okay about this, and I mitigate it somewhat by carrying more than the usual liability insurance, but I'm about to step into my car and drive.
>Legally murder is an oxymoron. Murder is the unlawful killing of another.
That's the pedantic definition though -- not the one that goes beyond what "the books" say. By that metric, the killings of their own people by Nazi's, Communist, and right-wing regimes, where also lawful (the state dictated that those people were to be killed).
And not only people have been calling government/law approved executions "murder" for ages, academics have as well. E.g:
>2. Do you really believe there is never a justifiable reason for the state to kill a human being? I'm just curious, honestly.
"Justifiable" is a pretty low bar. A false-sense of increased security, or a request for revenge can also be used as justifications for capital punishment.
But why exactly do you find this difficult to believe?
Dozens of European countries have already decided that "there is never a justifiable reason for the state to kill a human being" -- and voted so.
Those countries still have had e.g. pedophile serial killers, and other such creeps, in the half a century or so without capital punishment, and are totally fine with just keeping them in jail.
Not only it is less hypocritical ("murder is bad, unless we do it judicially") and cheaper, it also prevents killing innocents, and allows for the possibility for exonerating evidence to clear them at a later date.
> Note, I doubt that this is actually true, but I wanted to highlight your moral apriori claims as ridiculous.
You failed to do that:
You didn’t address the agency problem where the 15 chose to engage in risky behavior while that 1 was coerced into dying — and ignoring the role of agency in the Trolley Problem is amateur hour. The helmets didn’t kill anyone, their following choices while wearing helmets did; which is in contrast to mandating no helmet, that is directly responsible for a death.
What you did was make a ridiculous argument that ignored the crux of the issue and pretend that the other person was wrong.
> > When the state of mind is the same, why should luck in the outcome change the punishment?
> If you don't see the difference between an accident and doing something on purpose as requiring different punishment, well then you just fundamentally disagree with about all of mankind. If your car tire blows and you hit another car and kill someone through no fault of your own, apparently you think that's an equal crime to murder. Really... c'mon... really?
You miss the question here.
If I am driving my car and I take y attetion off the road for a moment to adjust my car radio, and then plough into another car...
1) ... And kill the driver of that other car
2) ... And injure, but don't kill the other driver
Why should y punishment for (1) be more severe than for (2)? My intent was the same, my poor behaviour was the same. Perhaps the difference between causing death and not causing death is the quality of the crashed driver's car.
Murder requires intent to kill. Man-slaughter also requires intent to cause harm. That's why there are seperate laws for vehicular death - causing death by dangerous driving or vehicular manslaughter. It's hard to meet the burden of proof required by murder or manslaughter.
> You as a human are supposed to avoid getting killed even in cases where you aren't legally liable.
The bar is much higher than that. You are supposed to protect others, not just yourself, and including people who are at fault.
If a pedestrian is jaywalking and you provably have plenty of time and ability to avoid them, but you strike and kill them, you are definitely guilty of something like manslaughter. Although people somethings believe otherwise, the law (and morality) do not have the property that initial minor transgressions by one party absolve the other party of all fault in a resulting interaction.
Motive matters. There is a world of difference between intentionally trying to infect others and doing your best to not infect while still using the right to travel.
A distinction you have failed to acknowledge at all in your narrative. You simply assume guilt and appear to have no real conceptual understanding of justice, guilt, fault and appropriate punishments.
This individual has needs and rights that must be upheld as well.
The ends justify the means is a terrible philosophy that, if pursued, ends in sorrow. Another way to describe it is the many out weigh the few. It is the pavement of the road leading to pretty much every totalitarian government in history.
Finally, every day activities entail a certain amount of risk. Car accidents, disease, pests. You assume these risks to participate in public and they cannot be eliminated. Reasonable efforts to reduce them is fine, but there is a growing mentality that any risk you impose on others is unacceptable and this is an untenable position. You can't reasonably zero out risk.
> We have laws not to murder people because the state assumes a monopoly on violence.
This theory utterly fails to explain laws against murder from the millennia when there was no such thing as a state that claimed monopoly on violence. In the feudal system there was no such thing as a unified state entity, it was just a bunch of people invested with certain rights organised into nested hierarchy of fealty, no monopolies there, but still they had no problem ruling people guilty of committing murder.
> If you have the right to do a thing, you have the right to do it a million times.
You've never seen those signs that say you get only one free cup of coffee have you?
> you are just down some bizarre philosophical rabbit hole if you truly believe that
What I've said isn't anything radical, and like I've mentioned above, this is a common tenant of pretty much every ethical system that life is an end in itself. This perspective is outlined in Nozick, Kant, Scanlon, Nagel, Rawls and countless others. Some of these authors have influenced the legal systems of entire nations. Rawls and Kant, for example, are considered "main stream" ethical theorists.
> Under this logic policing is unacceptable
No, because as I've already stated, justified self-defense is a different situation entirely. The situation of extrajudicial killings by police is, however, unacceptable.
> vaccine research is unacceptable, driving a car is unacceptable
This is a false equivalency. The key difference here is the informed consent that's associated with the actions. Nobody is consenting to having their confidential data released. In the above situations you listed, one of the stipulations of engaging in, say, a vaccine trial, is a clearly stated risk. A vaccine trial on someone unwilling is wrong. Someone who willingly agrees to 'open-source' their data and gets killed as a result is also in a different situation that the one we are discussing.
To pretend that someone who's willingly engaged in a dangerous activity and died has experienced the same sort of wrong as someone who'd date was leaked against their will, and as a consequence was murdered, is just nonsensical. Notice how I said "if anyone dies as a result of this" not "anyone dying makes any situation automatically wrong".
If I walk on a sidewalk and get hit by a car, I am the one who decided the sidewalk's risks were worth it. There was no gun to my head. As my life is mine, I can dispose of it and use it as I see fit. That's not something anyone else can do or decide for me.
> when you don't even value your own life how can you value the life of others?
They don’t have to feel the value of others, just observe that the others seem to value theirs. This is bulshit reasoning.
> He looked for other avenues of suicide, and seeing no way out, chose that one.
Now that is something i don’t believe for a second. An adult human with access to the internet and a bank card has plenty other options. An adult human with access to a car has many options. Almost all of those options pose no harm to others at all. It is difficult to come up with options which would harm as many others as the option he took.
I take issue with killing them because it requires an infallible system that never kills anyone that doesn't deserve it and my conscious rests easier not killing someone that doesn't deserve to die than it does to kill someone that obviously does.
>> It is my opinion that if someone murders another person for most of the common reasons (robbery, relatively minor interpersonal disputes, nonsensical rage, etc...) something is wrong with the murderer.
This seems like wishful thinking - You are making some assumptions about the nature of human kind (that murderous behaviors are not part of it) and then you work backward to classify someone who has commited murder as not healthy.
The safer assumption would be to give some credit to social norms, and be grateful that murdering each other is mostly out of fashion (when did we last witnessed real duel to death?)
In the study, he didn't ask his subjects to kill. And they didn't actually murder anyone.
> Rwanda ... Cambodia ... Nazis ... Interahamwe
People killing on behalf of the State is a whole other matter than what the article is talking about vis-à-vis pedestrian fatalities. The State has been the largest single driver of misery, destruction, and death in human history, and I don't disagree that mass murder has happened and is evil. But drivers ensuring the death of a struck passenger stands in stark contrast to the kill-or-be-killed nature of State violence. On this point, I would agree with your assertion about "compelling justification," which in the case of the State is the threat of violence against the killer for not doing the bidding of the State.
But even in the face of multiple genocides and huge wars, including nuclear bomb blasts, the fact remains that the vast majority of humans have never and will never kill another human.
> A great number of Americans ...
See a sibling response for murder rates and compare to my assertion that a vast majority of people don't do it.
And self-defense is not murder by the legal definition, which include premeditation.
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