Number 91 : March 1998 |
I was pleased that Theo considered my reply to Mark Griffin in C90 worth expanding on, because I was afraid it was rather too simplistic. I had thought that it might be easier to contribute to what seemed to be a fairly new topic, but then I realised it had connections with previous discussion; so I apologise if I am going over old ground.
It was a bit silly of me to say "Murder is murder" without defining murder, so perhaps that is where I had better start. Murder means the unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of a human being. Malice is defined as ill-will or evil intention. Assassination refers particularly to the killing of political or religious leaders; and as I cannot think of any modern country where it would not be against the law for a person from another country to walk in and kill one of its leaders, assassination must be murder.
I agree with Anthony Owens (C90 p.7) that assassination as policy is not a good idea because it creates martyrs, which would be likely to prolong and intensify the conflict rather than ending it. Also, in practice it might be impossible to identify the key figure without whom the conflict would collapse. The assumed leader might not be that figure.
Now for Theo's comments, and, as he says, there are complex issues involved as soon as one begins to think of degrees of murder or degrees of guilt. Theo says that it must have to be clear to the guilty party at the time of the offence that the act is wrong. That might apply in a civilised society where killing human beings is considered wrong. But if someone is brought up in a society which includes, let us say, Xs and Ys, where all the Xs believe that the Ys are evil and should be killed, and all the Ys believe that the Xs are evil and should be killed it would not be easy to overcome that kind of conditioning. In fact I don't think it would be even necessary for the two sides to think of each other as evil. I'm thinking here of the Maori Wars when the protagonists apparently not only thought it was quite acceptable to kill, eat and enslave members of other tribes, but to change allies and fight now with and now against another tribe, or even the British army when they were "the enemy".
The most dangerous terrorists are surely those who believe that what they are doing is right.
Enormity: I'm not sure that I can follow this properly. I think that the attitude towards Myra Hindley is not simply hatred, but a deep-rooted fear of something too horrible to comprehend. "Bombers who may also have killed children". Presumably this means terrorist bombers, but it made me think of the RAF men who flew in bombers and suffered nightmares for years afterwards. Leaving that aside, how should we regard someone who placed a bomb in the car of someone he thought deserved to die, but found too late that the man's neighbour had borrowed the car to take her children to school?
Autonomy: I can agree with Theo here. Ordering someone else to kill must be more morally repugnant than accepting the blame and the guilt oneself. However, getting back to the simplicity of my statement "Murder is murder", at the back of my mind was a strong feeling that one should beware of romanticising assassination and thus appearing to condone it. I have a similar distaste for hearing convicted murderers described as "political prisoners".
Of course, I also have a dislike of hearing something described as murder when it does not fit the definition. If I may go back to C89 p.21, Anthony Owens says, re abortion, "If the state....... wants to legalise murder, fine, but why not call it what it is?
So I come back to the (legal) definition of murder: "the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought." If abortion is legal, it is not murder.
This does not mean that abortion should be taken lightly, and I doubt very much whether it ever is taken lightly. But falsifying one's terms is no help to rational discussion.
Sheila Blanchard
Sheila : we’ve covered much of my thoughts on the above before. For reasons of time & space I’ll forebear making further comment for the moment.
Theo