RE: Moral justification for the execution of criminals of war?
August 15, 2022 at 7:39 am
(This post was last modified: August 15, 2022 at 7:47 am by The Grand Nudger.)
(August 14, 2022 at 11:55 pm)bennyboy Wrote: The same act is not always at the same moral tier. The government may take my property, hopefully within certain limitations, but certainly without my consent. Taxes and so on are not (generally) considered a crime.Doesn't matter if they're intrinsically wrong. The social contract is relative. They either fit in a societies ideas of itself or they do not.
The government can also limit my liberty by incarcerating me-- again, whether I submit voluntarily or not. This is not a crime.
Okay, extrajudicial killings are a crime, but that doesn't make them intrinsically wrong. It may be a crime (or at least a sue-able offense) to injure someone while trying to rescue them from a burning car-- but I wouldn't consider that an immoral act.
(August 14, 2022 at 11:57 pm)bennyboy Wrote: I can't imprison you, either. I have to petition the government to do it on my behalf.If you don't think killing someone is immoral then you probably won't think killing a killer is immoral either, but since it doesn't matter what you think is immoral.....
Nor can I take your property at a whim. If I think I'm owed, I have to petition the government to do it.
If I desperately want to kill a person-- well, I might just do it, knowing the legal consequences, and I wouldn't consider it immoral. But generally speaking, I'd have to petition the government to do something like that, since I cannot legally do it myself.
I'll just give you the short version. Your infatuation with your own subjective moral pronouncements and emotivist justifications has no bearing on descriptive moral relativity. None. It may be the case that a society doesn't kill killers because they think killing is wrong. Each and every emotional reason you give for killing would then be your emotional reason for doing wrong. Each personal opinion on the subject of killing would be your personal opinion that lead you to do wrong. There's nothing incoherent in this, there's no "incompatibility" in this. Dead...fucking...simple.
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