this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
163 points (97.1% liked)
Ask Lemmy
31614 readers
1363 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Tech Support
No Stupid Questions
You Should Know
Reddit
Jokes
Ask Ouija
Logo design credit goes to:
tubbadu
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
So let's start with a hypothetical scenario. (I know strawman, but we're talking about meta levels of philosophy here and experiments like these usually serve very well to prove a point or contradiction in someone's logic)
If there is a serial killer who can never be satisfied and can escape any sort of containment given enough time. Is it wrong to execute them?
That actially gets into the second thing I mentioned.
My view is that morality is best seen to function in a sort of math-like way - individual acts have a fixed moral value, and the moral value of an entire course of action is the "sum" of all of the relevant "integers" that make it up.
So, for instance taking the life of another contrary to their will has a negative moral value always. There are no exceptions - the value of that individual act is always negative.
However, protecting people from a known predator has a positive moral value, and similarly always has that value.
And depending on the severity of the threat and the severity of the response, it's possible for the "sum" of those two acts to be positive, which is to say right, and even as the value of the individual act "taking the life of another contrary to their will" remains negative.
That's not to say or imply that I believe that acts can be assigned actual numerical values - rather it's just a way to conceptualize the matter - to hopefully provide the absolutism that morality needs to be even-handed while still allowing for the flexibility it needs to be useful.
So to your question - in and of itself, taking the life of another contrary to their will - even if that other is a serial killer - is wrong. However, protecting people from a known predator is in and of itself right. So the two need to be weighed against each other, and I would say that if the risk the killer poses is sufficiently great (certain or near enough to it to make no meaningful difference) and if there are no other at least equally certain methods to prevent future killing, then execution would be justifiable. Which is to say, executing him would have a positive moral vaue, in spite of the fact that taking the life of another contrary to their will always has a negative valie in and of itself.
There's much more nuance to all of this - issues with the necessary unreliability and potential deliberate misrepresentation inherent in predicting the future, differences of opinion regarding the relative values of various acts and thus potentially the final value of the course of action as a whole, different methods for resolving disagreements on those things, and so on and on. But that's grist for other mills.
I really like this response. This is how I approach it as well on a higher level.
However here we seemed to have glossed over "what is right and wrong" which is a very complex issue and might be biased by the observer.
Hobbes has touched on this subject and the whole construct of society as we know it in his book "The Leviathan"
What we might see as wrong in the case of the killer and their victims, on his end is just an expression of his free will. In his mind he might not be doing anything wrong, given different guidelines for moral or empathy. In fact he may not even consider his victims alive.
So we judge them based on our morals and views of good and evil. Are we correct or are they correct? Hobbes states that the morals of the majority are what we follow in a society. But it's just something that we've constructed.
Edit: once again I'm using a case in where the situation is very obvious and clear cut. But think about when there is more nuance. A society views a certain race or species as a food source or livestock (think us and cows, or us and farmed fish) Are we correct or are we wrong to do what we do?
I think that the focus on the violation of the will of one by another defeats relativism.
The killer's expression of his will is not simply something he is doing, but something he is doing to another, and the will of that other must have priority.
If the will of the person upon whom the act is committed isn't held to be paramount, then the entire concept of interpersonal morality collapses. So an act that brings harm to another contrary to the will of that other must be seen to be wrong entirely regardless of one's personal views on the matter
Note though that that's subject to the essentially "mathematical" concept of morality I addressed elsewhere. That an act that brings harrm to another contrary to the will of that other is necessarily and without exception wrong does not preclude the possibility that it might be justified, if it serves to prevent a greater wrong or bring about a greater right - if it's such that the negative value of the act in question is offset by a greater positive value, such that the "sum" of the specific "integers" that make up the entire course of action is positive.