Honestly, I undefstand why he might have wanted to kill that CEO, but he is still a murderer, so the last thing that anyone should do is to support him and his murder. This betrays a lack of morality.
I fully agree that whoever murdered that CEO should be charged and face trial by jury.
That being said, if I was on the jury, based on my current knowledge and understanding, I would not be able to recommend a guilty verdict.
If we are going to live within the framework we’ve built, the system must have integrity and so he should face trial. But the system and framework was never meant to be apart from humanity, so the difficult nuances of human reality should be present in the verdict.
The way I see it, is that the jury should determine guilt, regardless of the punishment, which is determined by the law. So I would say he is guilty.
Murder is a grave crime, and while it is possible to rationalise it using radical ideologies and it seems to me that Luigi was personally affected by the healthcare system, but this changes nothing.
When someone commits murder, kills another human being, he loses a part of their humanity in a way. Turns away from his morality, from his soul. This is what “crime and punishment” is about, I certainly reccomend the novel. No rationalisations will compensate for the horror that is a murder of a fellow human being.
And the people that treat him like a hero are doing him a disservice. How is he supposed to understand the gravity of his moral offence and regret it if he is lauded for it? I feel nothing but pity for the man.
How is he supposed to understand the gravity of his moral offence and regret it if he is lauded for it?
I want to ask a difficult question of you. Why does he need to do this? I’m not being cute, I’m being sincere, because I think this comes down to a sense of sanctimony that just doesn’t exist in reality. There is no cosmic scorecard, no universal force or karma, nothing beyond what we have in the world in front of us. So I ask in, with that in mind, what is the actual moral imperative you feel that he must experience this weight and regret? What is different in the world if he does not?
Beyond that, I’d like to state that I’m well aware of the jury’s role in determining guilt, not punishment, and stand by my statement that I would be unable to recommend a guilty verdict. It’s not out of a desire for him to serve lesser punishment, it’s out of an understanding that humanity and murder are nuanced and that not all killing is murder, and sometimes you do in fact need a dragonslayer to keep the village safe.
A person that commits murder and does not feel guilty is a person that turns away from his soul. I believe that any person that strays away from our values and morals is losing something very important.
So this is not a case of what would change in the world, as you put it, but what would change for the murderer. What kind of person will he be? I believe that every murderer suffers, in a sense, and again, I recommend you read “Crime and punishment”, it’s a masterpiece.
That being said, I would like to ask you a somewhat off-topic question about something you said:
There is no cosmic scorecard, no universal force or karma, nothing beyond what we have in the world in front of us. So I ask in, with that in mind, what is the actual moral imperative you feel that he must experience this weight and regret?
It seems to me that you are saying that the moral imperative I might feel is not ontologically grounded, since there is not higher power. But wouldn’t any morality then be not grounded in anything, if you accept both these criteria for what is legitimately moral and the atheistic worldview?
It seems to me that you are saying that the moral imperative I might feel is not ontologically grounded, since there is not higher power. But wouldn’t any morality then be not grounded in anything, if you accept both these criteria for what is legitimately moral and the atheistic worldview?
I’m going to be honest with you, I’m not smart enough to keep up with what you’re trying to say here. But if this is the “without god how can we have morality?” argument, I will just extend the standard reply that if you need a cosmic watchdog to prevent you from raping and murdering, perhaps your morality is not as pure as you believe. I believe the social contract and basic understanding that if we work together for the greater good, we all benefit, is basically enough to define morality when coupled with generations of evolutionarily-innate emotional responses that promote said well-being. I also understand that this morality, like all things, is not sacred, and thus capable of being influenced, being swayed, being wrong, and importantly evolving, adapting, and even rationalizing or coping with the difficult quandaries of human society that extend far beyond black and white. Again I don’t truly understand your question, but I tried to answer in earnest and hope that satisfies your curiosity.
edit: also I see you have been downvoted and feel compelled to tell you that I have not downvoted anything you’ve said. I know it doesn’t matter, but I think it’s relevant to the tone here.
While I would rather we talked about the other part of what I previously said, the one that relates to the murder, this is quite interesting too.
I was not saying that god is necessary for morality. I understood what you said previously this way: since there is no God or higher power, religious morality, and by extiention my supposedly religiously motivated statement(actually, I am not particularly religious) is unsubstantiated, to which I replied with an argument, that if this is the case, and if you apply the same criteria to every worldview, then no moral views are substantiated.
And I would like to address your counterargument. I did find it convincing when I was a “militant atheist” but now I recognise its inadequacy. It is arguing with a position that does not exist, it is based on a misunderstanding of an argument that theists often make. I will now expand on that:
When theists say that without God there is no morality, they mean that there is no objective morality. The argument is based on showing that the accounts of morality possible under atheism are contrary to our moral intuitions. Theists generally recognise that people can be moral if they are not religious, all of us have a sense of morality, since we are the “children of God”.
If there is no morality independent from subjective beliefs about morality, then, in practice, when someone says “this is immoral”, they are simply expressing their preferences. So if I say murder is wrong, this simply means I do not want it to occur, and I am urging everyone to not murder, so there is, in practice, no difference between subjective preference and morality, since morality is subjective.
So if we lived in a world where noone believed rape is wrong(animals do rape each other quite often), there is no sense at all in which the statement “rape is immoral” would be correct.
Since most people do not understand morality to be subjective in this way, this argument can be convincing.
Edit: another similar argument, is that atheists, while they can be moral, have no justification for their morality. It is also often misunderstood, and your counterargument is wrongfully applied, but I will not get into that.
No offense, but I don’t understand how this differs from my summary beyond just that you apparently enjoy pontificating. Like I don’t understand what part of what you said was supposed to be revelatory to me, I specifically told you that morality is not sacred; this isn’t news and I’m not ignoring or unaware of some secondary truth here. Yes, morality is influenced by society and thus yes it is subject to societal whims… Okay? But it’s also informed by generations of evolutionary response and the motivation is almost entirely overwhelmingly pragmatic. Your “bUt WhAt iF rApE sUdDeNlY oKaY” scenario is meaningless because there is no social benefit to that scenario. Morals are still founded a sort of pragmatic empathy; sure sometimes, maybe even often, we get this wrong, but we don’t need a guiding hand to teach us the basics of working together for the greater good. The question isn’t “will this send me to hell,” it’s “is this to the benefit of humanity?”
I am glad communists have started to feel so strongly about mass murder, but this man hardly was the sole reason his healthcare company chose this policy, and as far as I understand other companies did similar things. You are blaming an individual for institutional issues. While he is, obviously, evil, he is not, clearly, the cause of these policies. If he was not willing to implement them he would be removed.
But this is hardly relevant, this is, from a legal standpoint, murder, and thank God it is, since no sensible person would want to live in a society where someone can just murder anyone because of ideological convictions and political goals.
But from a moral standpoint this is, of course, still murder. We denounce the use of the capital punishment on the most horrible criminals, but when a CEO is murdered on the street, without trial, suddenly death is perfectly fine as a punishment. This is not self defense. This is not “defense” of anything. This is murder. And Luigi is a criminal, and I hope he realises the gravity of what he has done.
but this man hardly was the sole reason his healthcare company chose this policy
He was proud of it and could’ve done anything to prevent it. This company leads in false denials over all others.
You are blaming an individual for institutional issues
An individual at the top of an institution that does it with literally no remorse.
If he was not willing to implement them he would be removed.
Then get removed and work in another industry.
But this is hardly relevant, this is, from a legal standpoint, murder, and thank God it is, since no sensible person would want to live in a society where someone can just murder anyone because of ideological convictions and political goals.
No, in a sensible society what he’s doing would legally be murder, so, we wouldn’t have to do anything like this in the first place.
But from a moral standpoint this is, of course, still murder.
Justified murder, an act of defense of others.
We denounce the use of the capital punishment on the most horrible criminals, but when a CEO is murdered on the street, without trial, suddenly death is perfectly fine as a punishment.
He’s one of the worst possible criminals and deserved the death penalty. This country just doesn’t believe that mass murder is wrong as long as you’re making money off of it.
This is not “defense” of anything.
It’s a rejection of the notion that these CEO’s aren’t mass-murderers. They are, vigilante justice had to happen because there was no justice happening elsewise. If the courts were planning on doing anything, planning on doing a trial against this obvious murderer, then you’d have a point.
I am so sorry. I understand now I was very immoral when I said that lynchings are bad. I now see that due process is pointless, and we should just kill people we believe to be evil willy nilly.
Was there even a shred of a doubt that he wasn’t guilty of mass murder? Does anyone doubt that this person was in charge of this mass murder?
Is there even a 1% chance that he isn’t guilty of mass murder?
Beyond all reasonable doubt happened, this is no less legitimate than state-sanctioned violence. Again, i’d prefer the courts handle this… but this type of mass murder is perfectly legal.
The only question is, does this count as murder? and the answer is obvious, he’s killing people for more money, it should.
Lynching is bad, but there are exceptions for every rule, and this is an obvious exception. In this case, he killed to help save lives, so, there’s nothing wrong with that.
If you say lynchings are bad, that means that justice should be delivered by the state. But you seem to think, that it does not matter who does it. It seems like a contradiction.
When the state fails to deliver justice it becomes the duty of the people to carry it out. This was true when Harriet Tubman was smuggling slaves into free states and it remains true today. Do not confuse what is lawful with what is right.
Honestly, I undefstand why he might have wanted to kill that CEO, but he is still a murderer, so the last thing that anyone should do is to support him and his murder. This betrays a lack of morality.
I fully agree that whoever murdered that CEO should be charged and face trial by jury.
That being said, if I was on the jury, based on my current knowledge and understanding, I would not be able to recommend a guilty verdict.
If we are going to live within the framework we’ve built, the system must have integrity and so he should face trial. But the system and framework was never meant to be apart from humanity, so the difficult nuances of human reality should be present in the verdict.
The way I see it, is that the jury should determine guilt, regardless of the punishment, which is determined by the law. So I would say he is guilty.
Murder is a grave crime, and while it is possible to rationalise it using radical ideologies and it seems to me that Luigi was personally affected by the healthcare system, but this changes nothing.
When someone commits murder, kills another human being, he loses a part of their humanity in a way. Turns away from his morality, from his soul. This is what “crime and punishment” is about, I certainly reccomend the novel. No rationalisations will compensate for the horror that is a murder of a fellow human being.
And the people that treat him like a hero are doing him a disservice. How is he supposed to understand the gravity of his moral offence and regret it if he is lauded for it? I feel nothing but pity for the man.
Simple: killing mass murderers like Brian Thompson isn’t a moral offence
Fix your broken moral compass, you appear to prefer mass murderers mass murdering over someone stopping them
Do you support capital punishment?
I want to ask a difficult question of you. Why does he need to do this? I’m not being cute, I’m being sincere, because I think this comes down to a sense of sanctimony that just doesn’t exist in reality. There is no cosmic scorecard, no universal force or karma, nothing beyond what we have in the world in front of us. So I ask in, with that in mind, what is the actual moral imperative you feel that he must experience this weight and regret? What is different in the world if he does not?
Beyond that, I’d like to state that I’m well aware of the jury’s role in determining guilt, not punishment, and stand by my statement that I would be unable to recommend a guilty verdict. It’s not out of a desire for him to serve lesser punishment, it’s out of an understanding that humanity and murder are nuanced and that not all killing is murder, and sometimes you do in fact need a dragonslayer to keep the village safe.
A person that commits murder and does not feel guilty is a person that turns away from his soul. I believe that any person that strays away from our values and morals is losing something very important.
So this is not a case of what would change in the world, as you put it, but what would change for the murderer. What kind of person will he be? I believe that every murderer suffers, in a sense, and again, I recommend you read “Crime and punishment”, it’s a masterpiece.
That being said, I would like to ask you a somewhat off-topic question about something you said:
It seems to me that you are saying that the moral imperative I might feel is not ontologically grounded, since there is not higher power. But wouldn’t any morality then be not grounded in anything, if you accept both these criteria for what is legitimately moral and the atheistic worldview?
I’m going to be honest with you, I’m not smart enough to keep up with what you’re trying to say here. But if this is the “without god how can we have morality?” argument, I will just extend the standard reply that if you need a cosmic watchdog to prevent you from raping and murdering, perhaps your morality is not as pure as you believe. I believe the social contract and basic understanding that if we work together for the greater good, we all benefit, is basically enough to define morality when coupled with generations of evolutionarily-innate emotional responses that promote said well-being. I also understand that this morality, like all things, is not sacred, and thus capable of being influenced, being swayed, being wrong, and importantly evolving, adapting, and even rationalizing or coping with the difficult quandaries of human society that extend far beyond black and white. Again I don’t truly understand your question, but I tried to answer in earnest and hope that satisfies your curiosity.
edit: also I see you have been downvoted and feel compelled to tell you that I have not downvoted anything you’ve said. I know it doesn’t matter, but I think it’s relevant to the tone here.
While I would rather we talked about the other part of what I previously said, the one that relates to the murder, this is quite interesting too.
I was not saying that god is necessary for morality. I understood what you said previously this way: since there is no God or higher power, religious morality, and by extiention my supposedly religiously motivated statement(actually, I am not particularly religious) is unsubstantiated, to which I replied with an argument, that if this is the case, and if you apply the same criteria to every worldview, then no moral views are substantiated.
And I would like to address your counterargument. I did find it convincing when I was a “militant atheist” but now I recognise its inadequacy. It is arguing with a position that does not exist, it is based on a misunderstanding of an argument that theists often make. I will now expand on that:
When theists say that without God there is no morality, they mean that there is no objective morality. The argument is based on showing that the accounts of morality possible under atheism are contrary to our moral intuitions. Theists generally recognise that people can be moral if they are not religious, all of us have a sense of morality, since we are the “children of God”.
If there is no morality independent from subjective beliefs about morality, then, in practice, when someone says “this is immoral”, they are simply expressing their preferences. So if I say murder is wrong, this simply means I do not want it to occur, and I am urging everyone to not murder, so there is, in practice, no difference between subjective preference and morality, since morality is subjective.
So if we lived in a world where noone believed rape is wrong(animals do rape each other quite often), there is no sense at all in which the statement “rape is immoral” would be correct.
Since most people do not understand morality to be subjective in this way, this argument can be convincing.
Edit: another similar argument, is that atheists, while they can be moral, have no justification for their morality. It is also often misunderstood, and your counterargument is wrongfully applied, but I will not get into that.
No offense, but I don’t understand how this differs from my summary beyond just that you apparently enjoy pontificating. Like I don’t understand what part of what you said was supposed to be revelatory to me, I specifically told you that morality is not sacred; this isn’t news and I’m not ignoring or unaware of some secondary truth here. Yes, morality is influenced by society and thus yes it is subject to societal whims… Okay? But it’s also informed by generations of evolutionary response and the motivation is almost entirely overwhelmingly pragmatic. Your “bUt WhAt iF rApE sUdDeNlY oKaY” scenario is meaningless because there is no social benefit to that scenario. Morals are still founded a sort of pragmatic empathy; sure sometimes, maybe even often, we get this wrong, but we don’t need a guiding hand to teach us the basics of working together for the greater good. The question isn’t “will this send me to hell,” it’s “is this to the benefit of humanity?”
But is there a difference between preferences and moral imperatives?
Thank you for clarifying that you’re a religious nutter. I can now block your dumb ass in good conscience.
It’s not murder if you’re defending someone, this was a defense of countless against a mass murderer who planned to continue killing without remorse
I am glad communists have started to feel so strongly about mass murder, but this man hardly was the sole reason his healthcare company chose this policy, and as far as I understand other companies did similar things. You are blaming an individual for institutional issues. While he is, obviously, evil, he is not, clearly, the cause of these policies. If he was not willing to implement them he would be removed.
But this is hardly relevant, this is, from a legal standpoint, murder, and thank God it is, since no sensible person would want to live in a society where someone can just murder anyone because of ideological convictions and political goals.
But from a moral standpoint this is, of course, still murder. We denounce the use of the capital punishment on the most horrible criminals, but when a CEO is murdered on the street, without trial, suddenly death is perfectly fine as a punishment. This is not self defense. This is not “defense” of anything. This is murder. And Luigi is a criminal, and I hope he realises the gravity of what he has done.
He was proud of it and could’ve done anything to prevent it. This company leads in false denials over all others.
An individual at the top of an institution that does it with literally no remorse.
Then get removed and work in another industry.
No, in a sensible society what he’s doing would legally be murder, so, we wouldn’t have to do anything like this in the first place.
Justified murder, an act of defense of others.
He’s one of the worst possible criminals and deserved the death penalty. This country just doesn’t believe that mass murder is wrong as long as you’re making money off of it.
It’s a rejection of the notion that these CEO’s aren’t mass-murderers. They are, vigilante justice had to happen because there was no justice happening elsewise. If the courts were planning on doing anything, planning on doing a trial against this obvious murderer, then you’d have a point.
I am so sorry. I understand now I was very immoral when I said that lynchings are bad. I now see that due process is pointless, and we should just kill people we believe to be evil willy nilly.
Was there even a shred of a doubt that he wasn’t guilty of mass murder? Does anyone doubt that this person was in charge of this mass murder?
Is there even a 1% chance that he isn’t guilty of mass murder?
Beyond all reasonable doubt happened, this is no less legitimate than state-sanctioned violence. Again, i’d prefer the courts handle this… but this type of mass murder is perfectly legal.
The only question is, does this count as murder? and the answer is obvious, he’s killing people for more money, it should.
Lynching is bad, but there are exceptions for every rule, and this is an obvious exception. In this case, he killed to help save lives, so, there’s nothing wrong with that.
If you say lynchings are bad, that means that justice should be delivered by the state. But you seem to think, that it does not matter who does it. It seems like a contradiction.
When the state fails to deliver justice it becomes the duty of the people to carry it out. This was true when Harriet Tubman was smuggling slaves into free states and it remains true today. Do not confuse what is lawful with what is right.
So lynchings are fine, then?