Moral justification for the execution of criminals of war?

[The Grand Nudger]

However, if a person thinks that people shouldn't kill people, and if a society develops around this idealized form of organization - the reason that you don't kill someone who kills has nothing to do with whatever they did.  You....shouldn't....kill.  It's a simple rule.  It's not one we have to agree with to understand.  Do you understand?

"You. . . shouldn't. . . kill (people)," you mean.  Again, we've established that you not only kill animals, but relish the act of doing it for fun.  So harm and suffering in and of themselves are not the objection-- there's something special about people, ALL people, even the greatest pedophiliac murderer, that is sacrosanct to you.  Why would that be?  I'm saying that human life is NOT intrinsically valuable, and that to claim it is is either an emotional opiinion or a religious one-- in either case, irrational.  All the talk about morality of execution-as-murder takes human exceptionalism as axiomatic-- but I do not accept that axiom.

If a society organizes itself around the normative belief that we shouldn't kill people, which isn't human exceptionalism..just a normative declaration....it would be a breach of that normative declaration to kill people.  A society need not believe in or posit human exceptionalism to reject killing people, even killers. 

I wonder, though....do you think that a society formed around the belief that we shouldn't kill people and animals, a more inclusive taboo, would be more or less conducive to capital punishment than one that did believe in human exceptionalism?

The social contract can have a rational veneer:  "If we do not agree that killing (people) is wrong, then ourselves or our children may be killed.  And that would be counterproductive."

Sounds rational, but the truth is more like: "I'm a social animal with instincts for love, and the idea that someone I care about might be harmed is abhorrent.  If one of my children were killed, it would be emotionally and psychologically devastating, something I know to be true because even imagining it is terrifying."

I'm glad you agree that this sounds rational.  Speaking of rational sounding things.  It can be true that a society of lawless murderers would be counterproductive to the goal of...well...society, as well as us feeling a certain way about our children.  

As I said before, if you don't give a shit about something, you don't worry too much about the morality of it.  It's ALL emotional, and any rational argument is just spackled on after the fact.  It's not rational turtles all the way down.

The difference between a subjective motivation for x such as a persons emotional response to x, and a relative motivation for x such as a social contract that asserts x...is that the latter doesn't give a shit about the former.  Societies enforce compliance.  Things permissible and things taboo both contain items that individuals can be emotionally invested in - and things which we're not.  It's the good of society, however, and not the satisfaction of a given individual, that any relativist norms are premised upon.