alt Hacker NewsIf the punishment from the state is a slap on the wrist, it doesn’t justify retaliatory murder, but justifiable homicide when you know you’ll be raped again and perhaps killed yourself changes the calculus. No one should take matters into their own hands, but no one should be put in a position where that seems remotely appropriate.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/10/khachaturyan-s... | https://archive.is/L5KXZ
The way I see it, there are 2 concepts - morality and legality.
Morality is complex to codify perfectly without contradictions but most/all humans are born with some sense of morality (though not necessarily each the same and not necessarily internally consistent but there are some commonalities).
Legality arose from the need to codify punishments. Ideally it would codify some form of morality the majority agrees on and without contradictions. But in practice it's written by people with various interests and ends up being a compromise of what's right (moral), what people are willing to enforce, what is provable, what people are willing to tolerate without revolting, etc.
> retaliatory murder
Murder is a legal concept and in a discussion of right and wrong, I simply call it a killing.
Now, my personal moral system has some axioms:
1) If a punishment is just, it doesn't matter who carries it out, as long as they have sufficient certainty about what happened.
2) The suffering caused by the punishment should be proportional by roughly 1.5-2 to the suffering caused to the victim (but greater punishment is acceptable is the aggressor makes it impossible to be punished proportionally).
Rape victims often want/try to commit suicide - using axiom 2, death is a proportional punishment for rape. And the victim was there so they know exactly what happened - using axiom 1, they have the right to carry out the punishment.
So even if they were not gonna be raped again, I still say they had the moral right to kill him. But of course, preventing further aggression just makes it completely clear cut.
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> No one should take matters into their own hands
I hear this a lot and I believe it comes down to:
1) A fear that the punisher does not have sufficient proof or that aggressors will make up prior attacks to justify their actions. And those are valid fears, every tool will be abused. But the law is abused as well.
2) A belief that only the state has the right to punish people. However, the state is simply an organization with a monopoly on violence, it does not magically gain some kind of moral superiority.
3) A fear that such a system would attract people who are looking for conflict and will look for it / provoke it in order to get into positions where they are justified in hurting others. And again, this is valid but people already do this with the law or any kind of rules - do thing below the threshold of punishment repeatedly to provoke people into attacking you via something which is above the threshold.
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BTW thanks for the links, I have read the wiki overview but I'll read it in depth tomorrow.