Assume, for the sake of this thread, that you are a hitman; a professional killer. People pay you money to murder somebody who they want dead. You’ve been doing this for several years and you plan on continuing your career.
You are hired by a woman to kill her husband. As per your usual arrangment, she pays you in advance. You plot out the crime and show up at their house one day when you know the husband will be there alone. You go there and see him in his garage. You sneak up behind him and kill him. You throw the body in your trunk to take it to your usual spot for disposing of bodies.
On the way, you stop to see the wife to show her the body and verify that you’ve done the job. But she’s shocked when she sees the body. Not from any sudden sense of remorse; she’s shocked because the man you’ve killed isn’t her husband. The dead man is her husband’s best friend. Apparently he sometimes stops by the husband’s garage to borrow tools and this was where you saw him and mistook him for the husband, who apparently had left the house for some reason.
It turns out the best friend was borrowing more than tools; he and the wife had been having an affair. This was why the wife had decided to have you kill her husband. She wanted him dead so she could marry the best friend.
She’s now so upset that her lover is dead that she’s saying she’s going to go to the police and confess everything. This will also obviously implicate you. So to protect yourself, you kill the wife and take both bodies to the disposal site.
Now you’re faced with the ethical dilemma of the thread. You were hired to kill the husband but he’s still alive. You got paid for the job but your client is now dead (at your hand). Do you follow through and kill the husband?
As should be obvious, you have no ethical issues with committing murder. You’ve killed plenty of people in the past and you plan on killing more in the future. This is an issue of professional standards to you.
If your agreement was with the wife, and you killed her in the second act, with whom would you still have a contract with and how would you pay the money back?
I don’t get what could make me think killing the husband was now necessary or helpful or my duty or anything. Any points in favour of killing him anyway are (to me) cancelled out by the law of unintended consequences.
Kill the husband, and kill the wife of the best friend for completeness. Lay a claim against their estates for the extra three (you’re a hitman, not a murderer, and hitmen get paid).
Leave the husband alive. No sense in extra risks. She failed to brief you on everything you needed to know to successfully complete your job. (Also, apparently you aren’t very good at your job, since you didn’t know what your target looked like, or verify his identify before you killed him.)
He shoulda got a picture of hubby. I think if I were hiring a thug to do a bit of dirty work for me I hope we would have a basic understanding of who to kill. Number one rule: know your target.
Like Sunny said, leave the husband alive. He doesn’t know you, and with his wife and her lover now dead, guess who becomes the prime suspect for the murders?
Not you. (Though I hope your funds from the wife were untraceable.)
I went with “Don’t kill the husband. Your client’s dead so nobody cares if he’s killed. It’s free money for you.”
But only because I didn’t want to fight the hypothetical presented in the OP; were I an actual hitman, I would always insist on a current photo of my intended target, and then verify that just to be doubly sure I wasn’t being set up in some way.
Given the scenario as presented, I would let the husband live as another poster said it just adds risk to me and there is no additional benefit, easy math on this one.
Anonymously contact the husband and tell him what has transpired. Offer him the opportunity to buy back the contract his dead wife instituted. That’s how [del]we[/del] they do it.
I want my pie. And I am not going to kill the husband but more because he will be an obvious suspect and time wasted on him and his contacts gives me better time to move on to the next hit.
I went with “It’s the wife’s fault you had to kill her and that cancels your agreement.”, but really I feel the “Don’t kill - keep the money” options are not mutually exclusive or all that well thought out. What I’d like to see is a business lawyer’s analysis of the contract involved.
No, actually what I, the hitman, have discovered is a loophole in the whole business. You don’t owe a kill, or the money back, to a client who is dead. So take the money, kill the client, every time.
I’m not killing the husband or giving the money back for several of the reasons in the poll. There is no sense taking an unnecessary risk by killing the husband or returning the money. The wife is dead, so she’s not going to be leaving a bad review on hitmen.com, and since there isn’t a client, there isn’t a job anymore.
There isn’t a contract once the wife is dead. There is no legal personage to whom I owe the service; her estate doesn’t want or require the hit be carried out. I have no reason at all to kill her husband, and good reasons not to.
I suppose it depends on how hitmen.com reviews work.
If, when someone takes a job, it is noted that the job has been taken, and there has been no review of a satisfied client, that could be bad on ratings.
Other than that, though, if there isn’t actually a third party that is regulating or at least reviewing your work, there really is no reason to kill the husband at this point, well, unless he’s a dick.
As fr the money, I’d travel down to the border and give it to some homeless immigrants for them to spend on wings and pizza.
