Edit: I intentionally put “bad people” in the title in order to provoke. 😊
If you don’t know what I’m talking about:
Black Mirror - Hated in the Nation
I’m not sure how to limit the scope of this discussion, since it touches upon so many areas of morale:
- the value of life
- the right to kill
- vengeance/revenge
- crime
- good and evil
So I encourage you to be articulate and to follow some structure: “what(thesis) - why(evidence) - what (thesis)”. Other easy to follow variations, such as “why(background + evidence) - what(thesis)” or “what - why - what - by the way(discussion)” or just a simple “what” are of course good too. I’m not trying exclude comments, and I won’t, just encouraging an easy to read discussion. As for me:
I would not kill using a Death Note, unless for some utterly personal vendetta. I would also not kill those that did, if we were talking about some sort of society wide phenomenon. I believe that taking action against human life on the macro scale, such as a nation state against another or such as one confined justice system against one of its subjects (state versus an individual, for instance) or in the fictive case of the above mentioned media, is wrong. This is because I don’t believe it right to through politics or legislation qualify or quantify the value of a human life, such as is done in jurisdictions that allow capital punishment. While I’m against such “marco actions” on human life, I for some reason have less of a problem empathizing with the individual victims involved, which is to say, I don’t think I’d rage against, say, a grieving mother avenging her murdered child by killing the murderer. But then again, not all individuals have the ability or the capacity to exact revenge and maybe they have to rely on their nation state for some kind of restitution? My opinion is probably logical mess, full of contradictions, but there it is. Feel free to poke holes, in a kind manner!
First I would rip out like 50 pages and give them to one of my closest friends to use as he sees fit. I trust him entirely.
Second I would write my own name in the deathnote, that I will die a peaceful death of natural causes at 100 years old. This will prevent anyone from writing my name in a deathnote since I don’t know how many others could be out there, and once someone’s name is written it cannot be written again.
But how would I use it? Tough question. You kill one dictator and an even worse one takes their place. There will always be wealthy people. Killing the top 1% just means there’s new people who are considered the top 1%. It would have to be some type of behavioral conditioning. Where everyone in the world is aware of some kind of super natural killer, but they only kill those who cause consistent and deliberate harm to others. I guess kind of like what Light wanted to do. Except I’d ignore the police entirely. Some dude named “Lind L. Taylor” is talking shit about me on TV? Cool.
Light’s biggest weakness was his ego. Too easily goaded into making mistakes. I’m fully aware I would be “giving up my humanity”. But instead of thinking about myself as a “God” I’d treat myself more as a “steward”. Someone doing out of some kind of obligation. I have the power to affect real change in the world, I’d be remissed if I didn’t at least TRY to do something.