Journal Sylver Dragon's Journal: Musings on the word murder 5
I have a bad habit of getting involved in discussions over on Fark, and one thing that I have seen there and in our culture is a habit of calling things murder when, really, they aren't. Let me pull from Merriam-Webster:
Murder - the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought
Yet for all the lack of laws backing the claims up we get: Meat is murder, abortion is murder, the Death Penalty is murder. All wonderful sayings meant to, and usually getting, some type of emotional response. And all completely wrong.
Now, certainly one can believe that any of these is morally equivalent to murder. That's OK, I'm not arguing the morality of any of them, just the actual statement itself. But this is rarely, if ever, made clear. And, I would argue, that the point of the sayings is that they are trying to elevate the action which they disagree with to the level of murder.
So what? Well really, not much to be honest, my mind is just wandering about. But it occurred to me that, we overuse the "is murder" meme quite a bit in the US, and I wonder if in doing so we have cheapened the impact of the title "murder". Murder is perhaps the worst of crimes, as it absolutley destroys all of an individual's rights in one fell swoop. A dead person has no life. Without thought, there is no real liberty. And a dead person has no use for and no real way to exercise ownership over property.
I can't really come up with any other crime which so thoroughly destroys a person's rights. A captive is alive and can be freed; thus, he retains the possibility of having his rights restored. A stolen item can be returned or compensated for. Certainly, emotional damage can last a long time and affect a person well after the crime, but possibility exists. With murder, all possibility is gone. Unless we figure out some sort of resurrection device, the dead will always stay dead.
Now for the fun ramification of this claim: The Nazi death camps were not murder. Pol Pot's actions were not murder. And the list goes on.
No, I've not taken leave of my senses. No, I'm not smoking anything, though I would share if I was. Just stop and look at it logically.
1. Murder is the unlawful killing of a person
2. Laws are created by governments
3. The Nazis were in control of the German government
4. The laws of the Nazi German government created and condoned the death camps
ergo, it wasn't murder.
Substitute most oppressive, horrible regimes for the Nazis and the logic still follows. The only real weakness seems to be in number 2. One could claim that laws which violate basic human rights are not legitimate and therefore void. Or that most of those governments were dictatorial coups and therefore not legitimate. In either case any action they engaged in was, by default, illegal and you could come to murder. But either way, it's going to come down to defending a definition of basic human rights or legitimate government.
Now, anyone who's paid any attention to my ramblings will know that I tend to believe in Natural Rights (Life, Liberty, Property). To be honest, any time I have tracked out that belief I have found that it's based on an appeal to consensus, which is a fallacy and not logically defensible. Still, if people can base their morals on 2000 year old writings about an invisible sky wizard, I'm keeping mine until I find something better.
So, this isn't about trying to justify anything. It's just about the use of a word, and what it would mean to try and stick with a strict definition of it. As if often the case when we try to "stick to our guns", it often sets us up with strange bedfellows. If someone wants to have a go at it, and try to defend the idea that certain rights are basic and any law in contravention to them is invalid and therefore void, I'm all ears. Word of warning on it though, unless your rights are based on a logical foundation I'm going to drag it down to relativism, and no one wants that.
Murder - the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought
Yet for all the lack of laws backing the claims up we get: Meat is murder, abortion is murder, the Death Penalty is murder. All wonderful sayings meant to, and usually getting, some type of emotional response. And all completely wrong.
Now, certainly one can believe that any of these is morally equivalent to murder. That's OK, I'm not arguing the morality of any of them, just the actual statement itself. But this is rarely, if ever, made clear. And, I would argue, that the point of the sayings is that they are trying to elevate the action which they disagree with to the level of murder.
So what? Well really, not much to be honest, my mind is just wandering about. But it occurred to me that, we overuse the "is murder" meme quite a bit in the US, and I wonder if in doing so we have cheapened the impact of the title "murder". Murder is perhaps the worst of crimes, as it absolutley destroys all of an individual's rights in one fell swoop. A dead person has no life. Without thought, there is no real liberty. And a dead person has no use for and no real way to exercise ownership over property.
I can't really come up with any other crime which so thoroughly destroys a person's rights. A captive is alive and can be freed; thus, he retains the possibility of having his rights restored. A stolen item can be returned or compensated for. Certainly, emotional damage can last a long time and affect a person well after the crime, but possibility exists. With murder, all possibility is gone. Unless we figure out some sort of resurrection device, the dead will always stay dead.
Now for the fun ramification of this claim: The Nazi death camps were not murder. Pol Pot's actions were not murder. And the list goes on.
No, I've not taken leave of my senses. No, I'm not smoking anything, though I would share if I was. Just stop and look at it logically.
1. Murder is the unlawful killing of a person
2. Laws are created by governments
3. The Nazis were in control of the German government
4. The laws of the Nazi German government created and condoned the death camps
ergo, it wasn't murder.
Substitute most oppressive, horrible regimes for the Nazis and the logic still follows. The only real weakness seems to be in number 2. One could claim that laws which violate basic human rights are not legitimate and therefore void. Or that most of those governments were dictatorial coups and therefore not legitimate. In either case any action they engaged in was, by default, illegal and you could come to murder. But either way, it's going to come down to defending a definition of basic human rights or legitimate government.
Now, anyone who's paid any attention to my ramblings will know that I tend to believe in Natural Rights (Life, Liberty, Property). To be honest, any time I have tracked out that belief I have found that it's based on an appeal to consensus, which is a fallacy and not logically defensible. Still, if people can base their morals on 2000 year old writings about an invisible sky wizard, I'm keeping mine until I find something better.
So, this isn't about trying to justify anything. It's just about the use of a word, and what it would mean to try and stick with a strict definition of it. As if often the case when we try to "stick to our guns", it often sets us up with strange bedfellows. If someone wants to have a go at it, and try to defend the idea that certain rights are basic and any law in contravention to them is invalid and therefore void, I'm all ears. Word of warning on it though, unless your rights are based on a logical foundation I'm going to drag it down to relativism, and no one wants that.
Food for thought (Score:1)
"2. Laws are created by governments"
If someone, say the UN, declares a law in a specific country wrong/in breach of UN principles - does that mean it is now illegal to follow it assuming said country has signed up to UN Charter?
Some Nazis appear (from wikipedia) to have been convicted at the Nuremberg trials for war crimes related to the death camps. This means they were tried and executed under rules that did not exist at the time of their actions. I suggest you lower your carbon footprint if you plan to
Re: (Score:2)
Considering that the UN Charter explicitly recognizes that the individual nations are sovereign, I would lean towards no. The UN is not a world government, yet. No matter how much it wants to be one. I'll admit that I've only made it about half way through the UN charter (Chapter X). But I don't yet see anything
Technically accurate, but.. (Score:2)
It's probably a good idea to keep in mind the linguistic context of the word. Like most English words, "murder" has a variety of definitions [virginia.edu] that change over time. The word is after all much older than Merriam-Webster's dictionary, which in any case simply parrots the formalized legal definition.
While the legal definition has considerable inertia, the colloquial usage is bound to vary. "Meat is murder" is a usage that might stand up over time, or might not. I am pretty sure history will continue to regard t
Re: (Score:2)
I think Sylver Dragon, when describing Fark website discussions, is observing people using colloquial terms, like murder, in order to convey a message that they consider something immoral. His examples were meat, abortion, death penalty, and Jews. But Sylver Dragon also appears to be saying that he thinks the world, or life itself, is without moral right or wrong, but only lawful and unlawful as can be supported by a governme
Re: (Score:2)
I'm just looking at a word and definition from a narrow sense and trying to extrapolate from there what the ramifications of such a stance would be. It's just a fun mental exercise and not meant to be something which espouses a certain belief. In other words, mental masturbation.
I like to do this with both my beliefs and with ideas around me from time to time. I find that it helps me to keep my own beliefs in perspective, a