Moral justification for the execution of criminals of war?

[bennyboy]

As far as parent nodes to fall back on, why would there need to be any?  The people considering punishing some person for x haven’t breached the social contract.  If they punish x in a way that does…then yeah, sure, it’s all a societal sewer for every involved party at that point.  Killing killers ( war criminals or otherwise) is very often put forward as an example of just that situation.  

Because rights are tiered.  They're founded on basic principles, and then refined tier-by-tier.

Root node rights are things like the right to life, to the pursuit of happiness, to liberty, and so on.  If we form a financial contract and you violate its terms, the problem is that the violation of that derivative right (the right to be paid for my work re a contract, say) may give way to peer nodes, i.e. different expressions of those more fundamental mores.  If I can't get my money from you, then the system will restore some kind of moral balance by limiting your liberty, for example.

But when the violation is agains those fundamental rights, then there ARE no peers.  You can't really restore balance for the life of a child by imprisoning someone, because liberty is not more fundamental than life, and no appropriate peer derivative can be found.

There is one more type of node that I haven't mentioned-- a duplicate.  Since there's no peer node for a death, then the only really just punishment is death-- if, at least, intent to kill can be demonstrated.

[The Grand Nudger]

Laws are an explicitly deontological overlay to what the social contract is talking about (or is alleged to be talking about, if we prefer, lol). The thing it's trying to explain societal organization without.

So, for example, when I asked if you knew that you couldn't chop off arms for breach of contract - it isn't on the basis of any law that a person in society would be expected to know that - rather..that knowing that, informs what laws we may make explicit if it's up to us to do so. Even in a country where the laws did allow for as much, we might reject complicity in that process as it doesn't match our ideal concept of society. The social contract is what a society feels responsible for, what they don't, what they will and will not do, but not necessarily the laws written.

You and I may not agree with a society that doesn't believe in killing killers - but even if there were a legal pathway to do so, or no legal barriers to doing so (exactly where we find ourselves), we may still reject doing so (where a good many of us on the boards find ourselves). Or, conversely, even if there were legal barriers and it was fundamentally illegal to do so, we may still kill a killer and count on our society to shield us from the consequences of what we would likely perceive to be an unjust legal system. Occupied and exploited people often find themselves in this situation.

This is why there doesn't have to be any fallback in the case of a society that doesn't kill..even to kill killers. Any given killer may have stepped out on the this hypothetical social contract, but the society hasn't. It isn't rights based, or legal in any way - rather, the ideas that rights and laws flow from. Some people think that the closer explicit laws are to some underlying relative moral agreement, the more content and more peaceful a society would be. IDK about that. I can think of some pretty wild shit we've agreed to over the years. As it stands, though - like I mentioned in previous posts..I don;t see executing war criminals as a great bad - and insomuch as we have the legal pathway to do it, but a society turning away from capital punishment in any form - I think we have the best of both worlds. Where, if by necessity in the moral or societal sewer we just have to hit a guy over the head with a brick, we can do so....and the decision will be heavily scrutinized.

[Silver]

The point of being sociopathic means not being part of the social contract.

[The Architect Of Fate]

Because rights are tiered.  They're founded on basic principles, and then refined tier-by-tier.

Root node rights are things like the right to life, to the pursuit of happiness, to liberty, and so on.  If we form a financial contract and you violate its terms, the problem is that the violation of that derivative right (the right to be paid for my work re a contract, say) may give way to peer nodes, i.e. different expressions of those more fundamental mores.  If I can't get my money from you, then the system will restore some kind of moral balance by limiting your liberty, for example.

But when the violation is agains those fundamental rights, then there ARE no peers.  You can't really restore balance for the life of a child by imprisoning someone, because liberty is not more fundamental than life, and no appropriate peer derivative can be found.

There is one more type of node that I haven't mentioned-- a duplicate.  Since there's no peer node for a death, then the only really just punishment is death-- if, at least, intent to kill can be demonstrated.

Death pays for nothing and you can never pay for life. And killing killers is not part of any reasonable social contract and no breach in said contract equals death.

[bennyboy]

Any given killer may have stepped out on the this hypothetical social contract, but the society hasn't.

I think we can say this is the essence of the argument right now. When the individual steps out of the contract, and (in my view) has surrendered his rights as provisioned BY that contract, then what does it mean to say that the society hasn't?

There must be something lost by members of the society in executing criminals-- they must have an ongoing vested interest in the biological well-being of a serial killer.

I get that. If life is not intrinsically valuable, then someone has to (gets to?) determine an arbitrary value-- life X is worth maintaining, life Y is not. And that's a dangerous slope to build on purpose. I wouldn't want a Republican-loaded supreme court to start adding trans people, gays, or atheists to the list of lives not worth protecting.

[Silver]

Conceptual constructs are how we make gods of ourselves, and via those creations we make ourselves feel superior by finding fault with others.

[The Architect Of Fate]

I think we can say this is the essence of the argument right now. When the individual steps out of the contract, and (in my view) has surrendered his rights as provisioned BY that contract, then what does it mean to say that the society hasn't?

There must be something lost by members of the society in executing criminals-- they must have an ongoing vested interest in the biological well-being of a serial killer.

I get that. If life is not intrinsically valuable, then someone has to (gets to?) determine an arbitrary value-- life X is worth maintaining, life Y is not. And that's a dangerous slope to build on purpose. I wouldn't want a Republican-loaded supreme court to start adding trans people, gays, or atheists to the list of lives not worth protecting.

Nope nowhere in the social contract does it say we have the right to kill someone if they break it nor does breaking the contract give us the right to do so. Nor does the life of a serial killer need to depend on what others lose by keeping them alive.

[bennyboy]

I think we can say this is the essence of the argument right now. When the individual steps out of the contract, and (in my view) has surrendered his rights as provisioned BY that contract, then what does it mean to say that the society hasn't?

There must be something lost by members of the society in executing criminals-- they must have an ongoing vested interest in the biological well-being of a serial killer.

I get that. If life is not intrinsically valuable, then someone has to (gets to?) determine an arbitrary value-- life X is worth maintaining, life Y is not. And that's a dangerous slope to build on purpose. I wouldn't want a Republican-loaded supreme court to start adding trans people, gays, or atheists to the list of lives not worth protecting.

Nope nowhere in the social contract does it say we have the right to kill someone if they break it nor does breaking the contract give us the right to do so. Nor does the life of a serial killer need to depend on what others lose by keeping them alive.

You seem not to have read what you are responding to.

[The Grand Nudger]

Any given killer may have stepped out on the this hypothetical social contract, but the society hasn't.

I think we can say this is the essence of the argument right now.  When the individual steps out of the contract, and (in my view) has surrendered his rights as provisioned BY that contract, then what does it mean to say that the society hasn't?

There must be something lost by members of the society in executing criminals-- they must have an ongoing vested interest in the biological well-being of a serial killer.

Negatron, they have an ongoing vested interest in a particular kind of society - the definition of the social contract.  Again, the social contract is not a legal construct, it is not about rights, or laws.  Rights and laws are (ostensibly) about the social contract.  Easy way to remember. Deontology is top down, social contract is bottom up. There is no "lower rung" or tier. A society that doesn't kill presented with a killer has a choice.  Kill the killer, and thus become like him in that they have all now breached that contract -or hold to it themselves despite that killers breach.  

I get that.  If life is not intrinsically valuable, then someone has to (gets to?) determine an arbitrary value-- life X is worth maintaining, life Y is not.  And that's a dangerous slope to build on purpose.  I wouldn't want a Republican-loaded supreme court to start adding trans people, gays, or atheists to the list of lives not worth protecting.

Life being valuable is one possible explanation - but so is valuing honor or virtue, or avoiding taboo, or the harm that executions cause to executioners..and any number of other things.

[The Grand Nudger]

As an addendum, I don't want to get too close to those arguers who invariably argue when referring to the social construct that there is only one possible sane or rational formulation of it. That all people would agree to that formulation outside of any complicating incompetence (moral or intellectual). Leaving aside that we could all be doing this for silly or no or mistaken reasons - a higher level of scrutiny around in-group killings is fairly ubiquitous to human communities. When we think about the kinds of societies we want to live in, ones that can kill us are low in that estimation, and there's no need for an explanation beyond a shared self interest. We don't have to care about an executed person to have concerns over an executing state, thus our (hypothetically) not giving a shit about an executed person and having no personal stake in their continued existence can be irrelevant to whether or not we decide to assume the responsibility of killing upon ourselves. I think, in this, your intolerance for anything other than purely subjective reasons for any given thing is causing you to insist that people take some course or rationalization a - when we have courses b-z a million times over which don't fit in your preferred set. You may thinks it's foolish or wrong or lacking in a justification if we don't have some personal vested interest in the continued existence of a serial killer (and, apparently, some deontological foundation for action)....but that's.....just..like..your opinion, man.