I’ve run about 15 miles in the past few days, which my calves are informing me was a very bad idea. I’ve decided to blame all of you for not magically apprehending my folly and talking sense into me. A new hypothetical is my revenge.
Here’s the sitch. On a certain alternate Earth, New York City is being terrorized by a (very human) home invader whom I’ll call the Roddenberry for reasons that will shortly become clear. In addition to hand phasers, tricorders, and so forth, the Roddenberry has a personal transporter implanted in his brain. Not only can he teleport himself into and out of private homes with a thought, but there’s also a deadman switch in the implant. If he’s knocked unconscious–even knocked down–he’s 'ported back to his headquarters for medical care of NextGen standards. He’s been gut-shot, healed himself in an hour, and returned to take his vengeance.
And there’s more. The Roddenberry also has an agonizer. When pressed to a victim’s flesh, this little gizmo stimulates the nervous system to cause terrible pain. Victims report that it feels like being burned alive. Afterwards they uniformly suffer PTSD requiring extensive therapy to overcome, and some have committed suicide in despair. But no one ever dies of the treatment itself. The Roddenberry is careful to prevent that, telling his captives that he wants them to have nightmares about him for a long, long time and promising to visit again once they finally recover. Over the past 52 weeks, he’s teleported inside about one home a week (always when the residents were home) and tortured everyone there–man & woman, adult & child.
Now we at Evil Enterprises are not on the side of truth & justice by any means. But there’s a line we don’t cross, and torturing women & kids is way on the other side of it. So the behest of Mayor Bloomberg (and for an outrageous fee), we’ve put together some tech to…persuade…the Roddenberry to mend his ways. We can’t yet track him to his headquarters (it’s shielded against sensors), but we’ve provided the police with the means to track his transporter signal the instant he breaches a home, and then to remotely cause the gizmo to blow up inside his brain, killing him instantly without endangering anybody else. We could come up with a non-lethal solution, but that’s gonna take work and time; the technomages estimates it’s another month, maybe a month and a half, to accomplish that.
Should the police use the device we’ve provided them to kill the Roddenberry as soon as he strikes again? Wait the four to six weeks it’ll take technomages to provide a another solution? Something else? Why?
I don’t think the death penalty is ever justified. I also think there is great technological value in capturing Rod alive, questioning him, and analyzing his teleportation device. In fact, the technological value of a teleporter to mankind is SO high that it potentially cancels out the suffering of all his victims to date. So let’s work on the non-lethal capture method–if you can prevent your associates from going renegade and killing him recreationally, that is.
I think it would have great technological value to Evil Enterprises. If you have any sense at all you’ll eschew immediate lethality and opt for capture, interrogation, and reverse-engineering.
Killing the Roddenberry as described in the OP is not the death penalty. The death penalty is a judicially-mandated punishment requiring due process of law (arrest, indictment, trial, appeal, et cetera). The procedure outlined in the OP is more akin to shooting an armed criminal in the middle of a heist to prevent him from killing, raping, or robbing his intended victim.
Or murder. I suppose the hippies among us might call it murder, and though I am not a hippie I also believe in calling a spade a spade.
The Justice League branch office is a couple blocks down the street, dear one. Nobody from Evil Enterprises is going to play vigilante for free.
Ah, but the question is what THE CITY should do. Consider for purposes of this thread that you’re Bloomberg or Jack McCoy or Kate Castle’s boss or whatnot.
Good point. Yeah, I agree. I’m against the death penalty, but I don’t think it’s <i>always</i> wrong, just <i>usually</i> wrong. Killing someone when it’s the only way of preventing them committing a serious crime is a good exception.
This sounds like a crime roughly equivalent to rape in seriousness. To bring the OP into earth-terms, would it be acceptable to shoot a guy if that were the only way to prevent his raping multiple victims?
I’d say so. Once he’s caught, you have several options none of which result in his committing further crimes. But if he’s at large, and your choices are either to let him go commit further heinous crimes or to kill him, I think killing him is a moral choice.
Needlessly complex hypothetical. It’s the same as asking whether it’s okay to kill a violent serial rapist, only everything is dressed up for a Star Trek convention. The answer, btw, is yes. It’s absolutely okay to kill such a person.
My cunning plan: You did say that the Justice League branch office was down the street. How many speedsters do they have? If they have at least one Flash-level (and I think they’ve got more than one in DC), then have him/them race to wherever the person screams “Roddenberry!”, grab the wretch, and put a world of hurt on him while the guy is standing up and conscious. Heck, he’s the Flash. He could grab the agonizer and give the guy a taste of his own medicine.
The Flash must hang onto the villain, so that if he does manage to teleport back, the Flash can run around and do damage there, giving Superman time to track him by some GPS type thing, and then the villainous organization can be thoroughly thwarted.
Is it ethical? I’m not sure. Would I do it? Yes, absolutely.
Sometimes to be a good person, one must act unlawfully, and accept the consequences of that choice (legal, spiritual, social, whatever). So I’d order the execution, and then take my lumps.
It might be more ethical if we had the means to try him in absentia and get a death warrant first. I’m not sure our judicial system is set up for such a case, since an accused has the right to face his accuser. Can we treat it, legally, like a deadbeat parent case? Can we publish notices in the newspapers saying, “Your trial will be held next Tuesday, better show up if you want to face your accuser, otherwise your court appointed Defense Council will do his best without you”? I have no idea. My wikipedia lay law degree suggests we can’t. But I wouldn’t be averse to making this a(nother) test case, by doing it anyway and letting someone drag me to the Supreme Court to sort it out later. Again, perhaps not ethical, but I’m okay with that.
Why yes, I generally come up Chaotic Neutral on Alignment tests, how could you guess?
This in a heartbeat. No question. But not as the official in charge. In that position I would have to adhere to the ethics and laws of the people I am elected to represent. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of my ethics. But as a private citizen given that power, I’d off the sucker without blinking an eye.
I don’t think the value of his tech would cancel out the victims’ suffering in any meaningful sense, but it would possibly make it worth waiting a bit to see if we can get our hands on the tech somehow. But in the interest of not fighting the hypothetical, I’m going to assume that the rest of the world already has a lead on creating this tech and we won’t lose it for good if we off Roddenberry.
As to killing him, hell yes. If it only happens when he’s in the process of invading a home and torturing people, I don’t have any ethical problem with it at all. If the decision were to flip the switch and kill him now wherever he is, rather than wait for his next attack, that’d be more difficult - but I’d still do it.
IMO people who prey on other people have forfeited their right to live. (And by this I mean sociopaths, serial killers, serial rapists, and the like, not common thieves.) I decided long ago that in a wild west situation where there’s no chance the law will be able to deal with a predator, I will personally whip up the lynch mob. I’m lawful good, but more dedicated to the good part than the lawful.
I believe that by violating the social contract, they have forfeited their right to freedom. But nobody is allowed to take away someone else’s right to live*. In this sense, suicide remains morally permissible but murder (state-sanctioned or otherwise) does not.
I have no problems with permanent solutions to seemingly insolveable problems. If there really is NO doubt, then go for it.
On the other hand, I’m against the death penalty in the US because it’s kinda pointless. On the one hand, occasionally someone is proven innocent after the fact, and on the other, the process itself takes up far more time, money and resources than just keeping them in jail. So, the inefficiency bothers me.
Gonna kill this guy quick, or is he going to hang around the rest of his life going to intergalactic board meetings?
Obvious wisecrack. Why would Bloomberg have paid Evil Enterprises’ budget-breaking fee if the JLA was available? They don’t charge.
How are you going to get this death warrant? I can conceive of no way in the American judicial system to try the Roddenberry, whose known only by pseudonym.
Except the Roddenberry isn’t being shot in the act of even attempt of rape or assault; he’s being killed in the act of trespassing. By the terms of the OP, the window of opportunity to murder him (and thus save his victims from torture) only comes before he has made any overtly threatening act (other than the trespass, that is).
I’d say so. Once he’s caught, you have several options none of which result in his committing further crimes. But if he’s at large, and your choices are either to let him go commit further heinous crimes or to kill him, I think killing him is a moral choice.
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The rest of the world doesn’t; otherwise Mayor Bloomberg wouldn’t have turned to a band of known thieves, extortionists, and arms dealers for help. And obviously EE has similar tech in general; they just don’t know enough about the specific modifications the Roddenberry has made to the general idea of a transporter to track him at this time.
Seems to be cheating to me. If the mayor or police chief gives the EE-provided killing mojo to a civilian to use, that’s still the same as the city doing it.
“To live outside the law, you must be honest.” If you’re gonna execute a guy because that’s the best solution to the problem (i.e., the solution that prevents the most suffering the quickest), then do it your ownself, don’t pretend you’re not doing it by recruiting a civilian. If the mayor’s not willing to commit the requisite cold-blooded murder, he should wait the predicted four to six weeks for the non-lethal countermeasure.
What you want to do is knock out the transporter device, then render him unconscious so he can’t escape by more normal means. Everyone he has used the agonizer on gets to use it on him - twice. Then hang him.
