The $0000 question!
Oct. 12th, 2012 12:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackOften you get an argument something like this:
Moderator: Should so-and-so be prosecuted for such-and-such act of violence that was sort of self defence but maybe not?
A: Of course! It was murder!
B: No it wasn't!
A: Yes it is!
This is similar to Scott's Worst Argument in the World
The real question is, "is this something that should be punished under the law, or not". Usually you can say "the law should punish murder" and "we all know what murder is", and get a helpful shortcut to the answer.
However, you don't have a god-given right to have your vocabulary do your thinking for you. People define murder in slightly different ways depending on context: any killing, unpleasant killing, illegal killing, immoral killing, aggressive killing, etc. And people have slightly different ideas of what's ok in self defence. But there's no particular reason to expect that those will correlate on difficult edge cases: in fact, if they're determined basically by chance, they probably won't.
The real question with real consequences is "what should the law do" (or "what should we do")?
If you answer the question of "should we call this murder" it makes it easier to talk about, but doesn't actually tell you anything about the best outcome. However, it's seductively easy for both A and B to assume that if they decide "is this murder" they've answered the only question that matters, hence you may have A and B disagreeing violently about whether it's murder, when in fact they've no idea whether they agree or not about what should be done about it.
I call "is it murder" the Nought Thousand Dollar Question, because it sounds really emotive and important, but actually has nearly zero consequence to the actual debate.
Moderator: Should so-and-so be prosecuted for such-and-such act of violence that was sort of self defence but maybe not?
A: Of course! It was murder!
B: No it wasn't!
A: Yes it is!
This is similar to Scott's Worst Argument in the World
The real question is, "is this something that should be punished under the law, or not". Usually you can say "the law should punish murder" and "we all know what murder is", and get a helpful shortcut to the answer.
However, you don't have a god-given right to have your vocabulary do your thinking for you. People define murder in slightly different ways depending on context: any killing, unpleasant killing, illegal killing, immoral killing, aggressive killing, etc. And people have slightly different ideas of what's ok in self defence. But there's no particular reason to expect that those will correlate on difficult edge cases: in fact, if they're determined basically by chance, they probably won't.
The real question with real consequences is "what should the law do" (or "what should we do")?
If you answer the question of "should we call this murder" it makes it easier to talk about, but doesn't actually tell you anything about the best outcome. However, it's seductively easy for both A and B to assume that if they decide "is this murder" they've answered the only question that matters, hence you may have A and B disagreeing violently about whether it's murder, when in fact they've no idea whether they agree or not about what should be done about it.
I call "is it murder" the Nought Thousand Dollar Question, because it sounds really emotive and important, but actually has nearly zero consequence to the actual debate.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-12 12:51 pm (UTC)Introduction to Principles of Morals and Legislation (the link is to the relevant chapter, other chapters are accessible), first printed in 1780:
(Apparently "nugatory" means something like "trifling" or "trivial")
That said, the thoughts that slosh in my brain suggest this sort of thing (i.e. making judgements based on whether something is "murder" or not) might not be as silly as it looks, although perhaps still not entirely sensible. The highly speculative argument goes like this:
The word "murder" binds to a person's concept of murder; that concept can change over time, but it has a certain stubborn persistence; it can't just be arbitrarily redefined on a whim, not without mental effort at least. Imagine a concept of murder formed by seeing the word "murder" used in context many times; a person may not be concious of what their concept of murder is, but nevertheless may have one, and may use it to judge whether specific acts are murder or not; in fact, they may have a hard time not using it. It won't be an instinct, but once learned, it will be intuitive. Thus, they will have a somewhat-stable learned disposition to classify certain acts as murder and therefore bad.
Now stable dispositions are the bread and butter of virtue ethics, especially of the Aristotelian kind. So, with a little shoehorning, we could say that having a good concept of murder is a virtue, a disposition to be cultivated. In particular, a good concept of murder might have desirable properties other than suggesting the right action. It can have the emotional force to make you do the right thing, rather than merely knowing what the right thing is. It can let you make decisions quickly, when deliberating about what to do, it can help prune the search space, it can be useful in preventing you from cheating your conscience, etc. Also, I think there might be[1] game-theoretic arguments for this sort of thing - these sorts of stable concepts could be considered commitments, in effect implementing a precommitment strategy.
[1] As in, this line of reasoning has been sloshing around in my brain for a while and I think it's likely to be really important.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-12 07:15 pm (UTC)LOL. Yes, that's just right.