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!
It can be justifiable in certain cases. Defending oneself, their family or even country can make it the lesser of two bads. It’s still not good in any manner and the threat needs to be acute.
Why? Why is an immediate, obvious threat worse than a slower, veiled one? Assuming both are equally dangerous and inevitable.
We have non lethal ways to deal with the other cases, imprisonment being the obvious, better alternative.
We do not. The billionaires pillage and kill with impunity. Cops and ice kill and pillage with impunity. You’re living in a fantasy if you think our system deals with the other cases. Look at the Epstein list.
Fixing problems by murdering the groups of people deemed responsible for them has been tried before, and the historical record is not kind to those who tried it. The results were mass atrocity, institutional collapse, and generations of damage rather than any durable solution.
Imprisonment, for all its flaws, at least keeps the process reversible and subject to evidence, appeals, and changing standards of proof. Treating death as the cleaner or more realistic option simply assumes that identifying, selecting, and eliminating “bad people” by the thousands can be done accurately and without creating new incentives for abuse. History suggests the opposite: once the standard becomes “we know who the bad ones are and can just remove them,” the definition of “bad” expands and the mechanisms for restraint disappear.
That is not a world anyone wants to live in.