Killing worst enemy or a serial killer

[Dinosaur]

Imagine deciding to kill a person whom you are convinced deserves to die. Consider the following scenarios, assuming that there would be no legal problems for you if you killed the victim.

You can do it by pushing a button and do not see the person.

You can do it using a sniper rifle from 1000 yards away.

You can do it with a Bowie knife while he is conscious, facing you, & shackled to a wall.​

There are other scenarios between the first & last of the above.

I could not kill the victim in the last scenario & there are probably other situations which would at least make me hesitate.

How do others feel about the above or other scenarios?

 

[Captain Kremmen]

First of all I cover him in honey and tie him to an ants nest for a few hours.
Then I'd choose the sniper rifle.

 

[cosmictraveler]

Imagine deciding to kill a person whom you are convinced deserves to die

Well I would not do any of those things. What if I was wrong about the person? As an example if I found someone who had my horse and that horse was stolen from me a few months ago could I assume this person stole the horse to begin with? What if he stated he bought the horse from someone else and had a bill of sale? Would I then be killing him and not the right person that stole the horse? So I'd let the legal system do its job to find the right person to punish and never take the law into my own hands.

 

[Sorcerer]

I don't support the death penalty anyway, and I certainly wouldn't be prepared to kill someone except in self-defense or the defence of family/innocent people - such as shooting a gunman who was on a killing spree. (Not that I can shoot anyway, but you get the point).

 

[Stryder]

As pointed out "Death is absolute". Removing someone from the planets surface isn't necessarily a punishment, after all they won't feel pain, they won't feel remorse, they will never care, they will never observe a reason for any of those things.

A person getting revenge assumes that the act of killing someone for that revenge will set all the balances right, perhaps make them feel "better", however whatever was done to tick them off that much in the first place is never going to settled, there will always be a feeling that wont go away (possibly made a lot worse by being pushed to kill someone).

Punishment is about someone spending their entire life trying to make amends for whatever crime it is they committed, either by choice or by force (incarceration). The main downside with incarceration though is overall maintenance cost, requiring guards, maintaining bare essentials in humans rights, which will be for the most part seen as more than those particular people deserve.

A well used Neitzsche quote sums it up:

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

(In other words to kill someone for what they have done, will make you a monster too)

 

[kx000]

Is it possible where I can be passive so no harm may be brought upon me.

 

[spidergoat]

I'd like to think I could do option 3. But I never have done anything like that, so who can say. It's the most ethical. If you want someone dead, at least have the decency to do it yourself by your own hand, up close.

But if I had a whole lot of people to kill, then pushing a button would be more convenient. I'd imagine that killing lots of people by yourself would take a psychological toll on you.

 

[Stryder]

A re-look at Dinosaur's original post and I spotted a discrepancy.

The term "victim" is used for a person that is assumed not to deserve whatever has transpired. In the case of those people that become murderous "monsters", they would not see their mark as a victim but as a foe or assailant in the case of retribution. That's where the state of mind of a person has got to the point of no longer caring what occurs to that other person (i.e. Psychopathy; Which is different from Sociopathy archetype that has apathy for people in general.) The initial revenger would also likely no longer possibly caring about what happens to themselves, at which point this is a deeply emotional and psychological response which could be considered primitive in nature such as survival/self preservation, they aren't necessarily in their right mind if they carry out an unplanned attack.

 

[cosmictraveler]

We need justice not revenge in our legal system. So those who are found guilty of a heinous crime should be brought to death by those in charge of such matters not by you or I.

 

[Dinosaur]

Post #1 started with:

Imagine deciding to kill a person . . . . .

Various responses make me wonder about the following possibilities.

Some folks here do not understand English.

Some here are incapable of thinking about how they would act in a situation which is unlike any scenario they have actually seen/encountered or previously thought about.​

Aside from the above types:

Some Posters are focused on the precise semantics of a term instead of considering the intent of the speaker/writer. Id Est: They quibble about the use of victim when foe or assailant would be the appropriate word. OCD personality perhaps.

Some seize on any opportunity to discuss their view relating to taking a life in any scenario which relates to killing a person. Id est: When asked if taking days torturing a person to death is more heinous than using a sniper rifle from 1000 yards, they yammer about the ethics of killing a person. I guess they do not distinguish between subtle differences in action & only focus on the end result.​

My favorite is the Captains’s remark in Post #2:

First of all I cover him in honey and tie him to an ants nest for a few hours.

Then I'd choose the sniper rifle.

 

[Sarkus]

I'd have to opt for the first option.
I'd get no satisfaction from the witnessing of the death, nor from any up-close personal involvement.
If I thought someone deserved to die it would not be because I want satisfaction from the act of ending of their life, but because I'd think the world a better place without them.
So for me it would have to be the option with least personal involvement and least suffering for the individual.

More of a dilemma would be between option 1 but knowing it would be an excruciating death for the person, and option 3 if I knew it would be quick and relatively painless. If option 1 was going to be an excruciating death then I'd choose option 2 over 3.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Even assholes have spouses, children, parents and friends who love them despite their faults. So when you kill an asshole, you're not punishing him--as Stryder said, he's dead so he no longer has any feelings.

The people you're punishing are those spouses, children, parents and friends, all of whom wish they could have done a better job of convincing him to be a better person, and will spend the rest of their lives in anguish over not having done so. This also includes his teachers, his coaches, his priests, even his neighbors. Do you really want all of those people to feel even worse than they already feel? Why? What did they ever do to you??? Hell, even his poor dog is going to be consumed with grief, and if there's anyone in this scenario who doesn't deserve even one second of grief, it's the dog!

I have two female friends who are still weeping over their husbands dying from cancer more than ten years ago. Imagine how they'd feel if you killed them? You'll spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder. You'll probably be a bundle of nerves and end up killing ten more people due to mistaken identity.

You have to be especially careful with his children. If they visit him in prison, they learn that if one behaves poorly one might end up in prison. But if he's dead, all they know now is that you're the dick who killed their Daddy! They don't care about right and wrong, all they want is revenge. Sound familiar? Revenge is exactly what you want, after all! The most evil and primitive of all human emotions!

This is how feuds start. There are still a couple of places in the USA where family feuds have been going on for several generations. In other countries, for example Albania, feuds are a fact of life. It can even be argued that the enmity between the Sunni and Shiah Muslims is largely due to a feud that goes back to the time of Muhammad; so far back that nobody really has the story right anymore. All they know is that they hate each other and won't rest until the other guys are all dead.

Is this the kind of world you want to live in? Where every place is like the Middle East???

If you've ever known anyone who spent time in prison, he will assure you that it's worse than dying.

Someone raised the issue of cost, saying that executing a prisoner is much cheaper than keeping him alive in prison. This is not true in the USA. There have been so many cases of the wrong man being executed that our justice system is extremely careful to make sure they've got the right man. (Usually, but not always, especially if you're talking about an Afro-American suspect in the South.) This involves several appeals, which are immensely expensive processes. And it takes a long time. If the guy gets a good lawyer he might remain in prison for ten years before he's executed--this also mitigates the economic rationale for capital punishment.

 

[Sarkus]

Fraggle, I think Dinosaur wants us to consider the situation once we have convinced ourselves the person deserves to die.
This means, as far as I can tell, and given what Dinosaur has also subsequently commented, that all your concerns above will have already been taken into account before you reach the conclusion that the person deserves to die.

So while your comments are admirable, and hopefully what the vast majority also think with regard killing people in general, it is simply not the question being asked here.

Personally I don't think I'd ever be capable of deliberately doing so, for the reasons you give above.
But the question starts with the notion that the decision to kill or not has already been made, and it is a matter of which way you'd choose to carry it out.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

But the question starts with the notion that the decision to kill or not has already been made, and it is a matter of which way you'd choose to carry it out.

In that case it's an invalid notion because I would never have made the decision to kill. So I can't answer the question.

As I've noted before, there are exceptions to everything, including my opposition to capital punishment.

Imagine capturing a terrorist after a particularly deadly attack on a large group of civilians. You run him through your legal system and find him guilty of several unspeakable crimes. Because your country does not have a death penalty you toss him in a particularly dismal prison for life. Perhaps you have a treaty with North Korea and they'll put him in one of theirs.

Then three days later his buddies kidnap thirty of your people and promise to kill them all if you don't release him within ten days--knowing the bureaucratic limits on your ability to do this quickly.

What do you do?

You wish you had executed him.

So there are, indeed, cases in which the only rational decision is to execute. But they are rare, and clearly don't apply to the average civilian murderer--or (probably) to the miscreant in your example.

 

[spidergoat]

Even assholes have spouses, children, parents and friends who love them despite their faults. ...

Not all of them. Most likely those people would be relieved to be free of them. Besides, they wouldn't deserve death if they didn't bring more misery to the world than joy.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Not all of them. Most likely those people would be relieved to be free of them.

I take it that you're not a family man. Family love trumps everything: look at all the abused spouses who stay mum for fear that the cops will take him away. Sure, there's a bit of Stockholm Syndrome, but that doesn't explain it all.

Besides, they wouldn't deserve death if they didn't bring more misery to the world than joy.

I can scroll through a week's newspapers and come up with a very long list of politicians, corporate moguls, fundamentalist preachers, polluters of the environment, and other slimeballs who bring more misery to the world than joy. Does that mean that it's okay to kill them too?

As I've noted before, the First Rule of Civilization is: You must never kill another human being except in self-defense against a ruinous attack on your person or property -- in other words, only if the other guy voluntarily seceded from civilization first. Otherwise we would have to devote so much time and energy to protecting ourselves against each other that the surplus energy and other resources that make civilization possible would be dissipated and we'd be right back in the Stone Age.

If you come home and find an intruder strangling your wife, well sure, you have to stop him any way you can. But if you manage to tie him up and call the police, so the government makes you safe by taking him away, but then the shit-for-brains government kills him anyway, that's not justice and that's not civilized. That's just revenge on an institutional scale, and it's a symptom of a dysfunctional civilization.

You don't get to kill people just because you hate them. I guarantee that there's somebody out there who hates you, and he has a reason that he finds just as satisfactory as your reason for hating the hypothetical miscreant in your O.P.

I don't want that person to kill you, and I don't want you to kill the hypothetical miscreant. I'd rather not live in a dysfunctional civilization, because it means there's probably somebody out there who hates me and believes he has a satisfactory reason to kill me.

Have you got it now? Civilization means that we are supposed to be civilized.

 

[Sorcerer]

I take it that you're not a family man. Family love trumps everything: look at all the abused spouses who stay mum for fear that the cops will take him away. Sure, there's a bit of Stockholm Syndrome, but that doesn't explain it all.

I can scroll through a week's newspapers and come up with a very long list of politicians, corporate moguls, fundamentalist preachers, polluters of the environment, and other slimeballs who bring more misery to the world than joy. Does that mean that it's okay to kill them too?

As I've noted before, the First Rule of Civilization is: You must never kill another human being except in self-defense against a ruinous attack on your person or property -- in other words, only if the other guy voluntarily seceded from civilization first. Otherwise we would have to devote so much time and energy to protecting ourselves against each other that the surplus energy and other resources that make civilization possible would be dissipated and we'd be right back in the Stone Age.

If you come home and find an intruder strangling your wife, well sure, you have to stop him any way you can. But if you manage to tie him up and call the police, so the government makes you safe by taking him away, but then the shit-for-brains government kills him anyway, that's not justice and that's not civilized. That's just revenge on an institutional scale, and it's a symptom of a dysfunctional civilization.

You don't get to kill people just because you hate them. I guarantee that there's somebody out there who hates you, and he has a reason that he finds just as satisfactory as your reason for hating the hypothetical miscreant in your O.P.

I don't want that person to kill you, and I don't want you to kill the hypothetical miscreant. I'd rather not live in a dysfunctional civilization, because it means there's probably somebody out there who hates me and believes he has a satisfactory reason to kill me.

Have you got it now? Civilization means that we are supposed to be civilized.

Good post.

 

[Sarkus]

In that case it's an invalid notion because I would never have made the decision to kill. So I can't answer the question.

Its not an invalid notion at all. It merely requires you to put yourself in what would be an unfamiliar position, and imagine how you would want to act in that situation.
That the answer you give is never going to occur, and might even be an impossibility for you to reach in reality the position of choice offered, does not invalidate the thought experiment for you.

Again, this Gedanken is not (and maybe Dinosaur can correct me if I'm wrong) about the morality of killing someone per se, but in the method that we might choose once the decision has been made.
So all matters of whether the decision to kill a person is the right or wrong thing are irrelevant.

And I'm fully with you on the morality or otherwise, and the dilemmas involved in making that decision int he first instance, but they are simply not relevant here.

 

[spidergoat]

I agree, this isn't about the death penalty, or whether there might not be something good about these people after all in their personal relationships. We are asked to imagine someone we are already convinced deserves death. I'm not a proponent of the death penalty. But I do believe in personal justice. Murder is murder, and no one should get away with it. But say if someone brutally raped or murdered one of my family members, I would not hesitate to murder them and accept the consequences. I think civilization will survive.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Its not an invalid notion at all. It merely requires you to put yourself in what would be an unfamiliar position, and imagine how you would want to act in that situation.

You assume wrongly that we are all capable of imagining ourselves in any unfamiliar position that helps you pursue your point. This is not true.

As most of the women here will quickly tell you, most of us men are incapable of putting ourselves in the position of a woman. Not only do we lack several specific sensory nerves, hormones, etc., that greatly influence human thought and decision-making, but we also don't have half a lifetime of being raised female with all the experiences which inform our morality and behavior. This is why Mrs. Fraggle routinely says, "I'll give a flying fuck what men think about abortion the first time one of you assholes gets pregnant."

That the answer you give is never going to occur, and might even be an impossibility for you to reach in reality the position of choice offered, does not invalidate the thought experiment for you.

True. What invalidates it is that I cannot imagine myself in that position, so I cannot perform the experiment.

This is not to say that I could not, in real life, find myself in that position. If someone killed my dog, I might become irrational and beat his brains out with a hammer, strangle him with a bungie cord, eviscerate him with a spade, or murder him with whatever other common tool happens to be nearby, before the police arrive. But it's difficult to hang onto that imaginary scenario long enough to apply a logical argument to it. As the last wisps of imaginary anger dissipate, I'm left with the sober realization that it is I who will end up in prison, leaving my other dogs to be carted off to the pound where they too will undoubtedly be killed.

The only way anyone in modern civilization can be driven to commit murder (with a few rare asterisks such as my terrorist-cell scenario) is to be so angry as to become illogical. And who gives a shit about what illogical people think?

I agree, this isn't about the death penalty, or whether there might not be something good about these people after all in their personal relationships. We are asked to imagine someone we are already convinced deserves death. I'm not a proponent of the death penalty. But I do believe in personal justice. Murder is murder, and no one should get away with it. But say if someone brutally raped or murdered one of my family members, I would not hesitate to murder them and accept the consequences. I think civilization will survive.

Yes, civilization is robust enough to survive occasional irrational behavior by its members. But will your family survive? Your wife is already dead, and now you're in prison for at least ten years.

What will happen to your children? The shit-for-brains government will decide where to put them, and you can bet that it won't be with the relative you would have chosen. Perhaps with your ex-wife who abandoned them and ran off with a guitarist. Perhaps with your mother, who beat you back in the days when parents could get away with that. Perhaps with a court-appointed guardian, someone you haven't seen in years.

Everything we do has consequences. So it's always better to not be ruled by pure emotion, especially a negative one like hatred, anger, revenge or religious faith.