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.