Ooh, I hadn't expected a moral debate on "is killing people for money bad".
I think part of the problem is that the idea of a non-affiliated professional assassin is common in fiction but rather unrealistic in real life.
In real life, I imagine the closest you usually get are mob hitmen and army/spy operatives, who (I imagine) are comparatively normal people with the right skills who kill people for "good enough" reasons.
Those people are probably less dangerous than those with an ideological justification for killing someone, because even if the ideological justification is often right (eg. self defence), it's possible for ideological justifications to spiral out of control and justify Really Bad Things (TM).
But fictional "professional assassins" seem to do it just for the money, and it's not clear if they're supposed to be like hitmen, who are basically normal but in a situation where killing-for-hire makes sense, or supposed to be sociopaths or sadists who don't see anything wrong with killing people for a reason they don't agree with, or positively enjoy it.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-03 10:43 am (UTC)I think part of the problem is that the idea of a non-affiliated professional assassin is common in fiction but rather unrealistic in real life.
In real life, I imagine the closest you usually get are mob hitmen and army/spy operatives, who (I imagine) are comparatively normal people with the right skills who kill people for "good enough" reasons.
Those people are probably less dangerous than those with an ideological justification for killing someone, because even if the ideological justification is often right (eg. self defence), it's possible for ideological justifications to spiral out of control and justify Really Bad Things (TM).
But fictional "professional assassins" seem to do it just for the money, and it's not clear if they're supposed to be like hitmen, who are basically normal but in a situation where killing-for-hire makes sense, or supposed to be sociopaths or sadists who don't see anything wrong with killing people for a reason they don't agree with, or positively enjoy it.