Are you under the impression that "It's illegal to kill him; therefore he isn't a threat." is a valid argument?!?
Where did you get that from? Not from what I said.
Of course I got it from what you said. That is the exact argument you made.
me: can everyone please stop repeating the ridiculous canard that a murderer is no longer a threat to society when he's in prison?
you: Simply claiming that it is a canard doesn't make it a canard.
me: what makes it a canard is the fact that people repeat it all the time plus the fact that it isn't true.
you: The fact is, it is true. It is true because the judicial system does not allow us to kill for any reason other than self defense...and that must be only if your (or companion/s) life is under immediate threat. And the circumstances, your act of killing in self defense may be judged to be excessive. If so, it is you who faces the legal consequences of your actions.
That is the fact of it.
What is it you think the phrase "It is true because..."
means? How the heck should anyone read that, other than you offering the fact that your judicial system doesn't allow you to kill murderers as support for the claim that they aren't threats to society?!? So if you meant to express an argument other than "It's illegal to kill him; therefore he isn't a threat.", then you botched the job. What argument did you intend to make?
So in America you would be legally justified in shooting and killing someone trying to commit rape? Really?
Certainly. If a woman is being forced down by a guy trying to penetrate her, and she's somehow able to reach a gun, your government would threaten her with a long prison term unless she elects to submit to the rape instead of using it to stop him? Really? To my mind that makes your government her co-rapist, every bit as much as my government would be if it told her she had to be transvaginally ultrasounded before being allowed to remove the results of a rape from her uterus.
So if it is wrong to kill someone for inadequate reasons legally, ie, your life is not under threat, it is also wrong ethically.
Are you suggesting that something being illegal implies it's unethical? You know the Underground Railroad was illegal, right?
Irrelevant, a particular law may be or it may not be. Whether a law is fair and just, therefore ethical, is a matter of examining the law in question. I was referring to the legality and ethics of execution, either by the individual or by the state.
So you're saying in this case it's both illegal and unethical, but you're not saying the one implies the other?
What's absurd is that you make your own interpretation of my comments, and run with the flaws as if there is no chance you are mistaken. I'd suggest that you read more carefully and ask questions before arguing against strawman of your own making.
Oh for the love of god! English has rules; I'm reading carefully; your words speak for themselves. What is it you think the grammatical construction "If X, Y."
means? If you are either using Humpty Dumpty semantics or writing carelessly, that's not my fault. Why on earth did you claim if it is wrong to kill someone for inadequate reasons legally, it is also wrong ethically, if you didn't mean to express the opinion that the former implies the latter?!?
Given the reasons outlined above, to kill for any reason other than self defense when your
life is under immediate threat is both illegal and unethical.
Let's suppose for the sake of discussion that your inference isn't fallacious, as far as it goes. Well, now you have a lemma. Where does it take you? We weren't arguing about whether it's unethical. We were arguing about whether a murderer in custody is a threat to society. How do you get from "Killing him is unethical." to "He is not a threat."? You're familiar with Hume having pointed out the difficulty of getting from "is" to "ought", I presume? You seem to be leaping the chasm in the opposite direction. How are you getting from an "ought" to an "is"?
It's not fallacious, it's the law: the use of excessive force.
Well, since you derived a moral conclusion without including a moral premise, it sure looks likely to be fallacious. Have you solved Hume's infamous conundrum and found a way to get from "is" to "ought"?
And the argument was broader than ''whether a murderer in custody is a threat to society'' because of the issue of justification for killing. Whether it is justified to kill someone who is in custody and has been removed from society. I think it suits you to go off into another direction altogether.
You mean, off in the direction I started this argument with you in order to go? You made three claims. I disputed claim 2, because I consider it offensive propagandistic reality-avoidance. If you don't want to defend claim 2 because you care more about claim 1 and claim 3, suit yourself; but if you don't want to defend claim 2, why have you been arguing back at me?
So your claim that a convict in custody is no longer a threat to society isn't true.
You make these proclamations as if they are Gospel.
You say that as though I were making unsupported assertions and hadn't just supplied abundant evidence. What is it you think the words "the 19-year-old shoplifter beaten to death with a table leg by Robert Stewart"
mean?
How is a killer incarcerated within a high security prison a threat to people on the outside....do you think he spits over the exercise yard walls, or something? What is the threat?
You think you can just blatantly replace "society" with "people on the outside" and then argue that I'm saying he's a threat to people on the outside, when I've already made it abundantly clear I'm talking about people on the inside and made a stink about you treating prisoners as not counting as part of society? And
you accuse
me of a strawman? Geez!
I.e., you're trying to hairsplit between "threat" and "threat to society". Since when are people no longer part of society once they're in the prison system? Are you taking for granted that nobody you personally care about will ever shoplift and get arrested and go to jail and be assigned a psychopath for a cellmate?
For heavens sake...any reasonable person would not need the condition of incarceration, individuals that are separated from the rest of the population living their normal lives on the outside, explained. Do you really need me to explain that someone locked in a high security cell cannot stroll down Main street, stop for a coffee, or carry out a murder? You are the one splitting hairs.
So your definition of "society" is "people who can stroll down Main street and stop for a coffee"?!? It seems to me a guy who steals and is therefore locked up for 90 days to teach him not to do it again is no more a non-member of society than a guy who can't stroll down Main street and stop for a coffee for 90 days because he busted his leg.
(Incidentally, Stewart wasn't in a high security cell. He was in the same lockup as the shoplifter even though he'd been convicted of murder because when he committed the original murder he was a teenager too.)
What is it you think I'm implying, apart from implying you should quit telling people jailed murderers aren't a threat to society?
You tell tell me. You made the remark - ''Prison guards do not have superhuman abilities either. Guards get careless. A lot of guards really don't give a damn if prisoners attack one another -- sometimes they'll even set up the situations themselves, to make up for no longer being personally allowed to beat up prisoners. And most of the inmates killed by the murderers on my list would be perceived by a fair fraction of the population as having it coming, so good riddance; this limits the effort that will be put into protecting them.''
So what does ''good riddance'' (even if that is not your personal view) imply?
It implies that murderers in prison are a threat to society, and they're going to continue to be a threat to society, because most of society's members don't care enough about the welfare of the fraction of society they've sent to prison to make the effort and spend the money it would take to make prisons safe. If teenage shoplifters were the face of murdered prisoners it might be different, but they're the minority. The average murdered prisoner is either a murderer himself, or a rapist, or a prison gang thug. So they don't get a lot of sympathy, and prisons will remain dangerous, even for teenage shoplifters.
And this still misses the point that prison guards are trained for the job of handling risky prisoners, they made their choice of career in full knowledge of the problems of their work place.
That's doubtful. People tend to become prison guards because they're low-skilled and they need jobs. In the U.S. at least, they tend to either quit in horror within a few years or else get their empathy ground out of them; and if they fail to protect prisoners from one another they have powerful unions to protect their jobs. Making prisons safe is a hard problem.
We're killing people by proxy; the least we can do is tell the truth to ourselves about it.
Only if you want to play a pedantic game of splitting hairs. Prisons are institutions of society and their purpose is to isolate or remove individuals that pose a public risk from the public - 'public' meaning society at large...if that needs spelling out. How many violent inmates escape high security prisons?
So when you said "A convict in custody is no longer a threat to society.", you meant "A convict in custody is no longer a threat to those members of the public who are at large." and you don't care about the ones who currently aren't at large? Would you feel that way if it was your kid brother who did something stupid and got himself jailed?