Jealousy is not a good reason to use force.

Great Debates
121

BlackKnight, I think I found the main point of contention between us (but maybe not), but it is found in your response to Diogenes the Cynic.

You have taken a position that if someone cheats, since they have caused great emotional pain to their spouse, they have committed a great wrong, and therefore, it is morally permissable for a great wrong to be committed against them, like some form of violence by their aggrieved spouse, right on the spot. Right?

Here was your comment:

Then who decides who has committed great wrongs?

Before the Civil War, blacks didn’t have a right to freedom. That is why they were enslaved. Whether it was a “moral right” unrecognized by law is a pretty hollow sentiment for those that never experienced freedom.

Laws are the rules that society agrees to live by. But everyone is free to live by a separate moral code. The only problem comes into play when someone’s moral code conflicts with the law. Thankfully, most moral codes include the concept of obeying the local law (“when in Rome, do as the Romans do”).

If your moral code conflicts with the law, you can participate in civil disobedience, and try to get the law changed. It isn’t six of one, half dozen of the other. If you succeed, fine, but if you don’t, you will be subject to existing law.

As has been pointed out, it is reasoning like yours that is used by abortion clinic bombers. It is reasoning like yours that is used by terrorists. It is reasoning like yours that enabled the KKK to lynch blacks. Just because you think it is moral, doesn’t give you the right to enforce your own sense of what is moral. And it shouldn’t. That would be anarchy.

There is a difference between physically attacking someone on the street, and the police forcibly detaining, physically restraining, and incarcerating tht person. There is a difference between an elected/appointed judge, in a legal system, determining someone a stalker, and you determining that for yourself. You are not allowed to enforce your morals on someone else.

And you are not allowed to enforce your morals on your spouse, either.

So maybe it is your response to Eonwe that holds the clue:

What does morally permitted mean? Permitted by whom? or what?

And here is yet another approach, let me try to address what you claim I deny:

The difference is who has determined it to be wrong? Society has agreed that offensive violence is wrong. But that self-defense is acceptable. And physical force or violence necessary to enforce the law is acceptable. You really can’t see the difference?

Hypothetical: If my moral code held that anyone working on Sundays was committing a great wrong, and I saw you working on Sunday, I would be morally permitted to kick the shit out of you?

122

Damn, and there was me saying that I didn’t want to touch the issue of what constitutes a “right” with the proverbial pole.

However, I do feel it incumbent upon me to point out that what is meant by a “right” is a debate - in fact several debates - in and of itself (and one we have had many times on these boards). I suggest we don’t get too hung up on it, since it’ll be the biggest damn hijack you’ve ever seen. This includes Diogenes’ references to “the right to life, liberty etc” (may I remind him that the US is not the only country in the world and this debate is supposed to be taking place on a generic level, not a local legal level) and also BlackKnight’s “moral rights”, whatever they are supposed to be.

You are all of course welcome to entirely ignore me. But take this as a world-weary warning of the consequences of dragging such a nebulous concept into the arena. Start another thread on it instead and I assure you that provided the OP is well framed, you’ll have not a small response.

pan

123

Last time, I promise.

The “OP” shorthand has been used both ways you mention on this board, although it’s most prevalently used in the manner you described. I was unclear in my earlier post. Again, my apologies.

124

Eonwe: A right is not “granted by morality,” it is granted by public consent. I could give a long-winded, semantic dissertation on the difference between subjective perceptions of individual “moral” rights, and the obvious gross brutality of slavery, but I think we can agree that, on a simple, intuitive and visceral level, that one person trying to arrogate the authority to be a self-appointed “punisher” of an SO who does not live up to his own personal “moral” code is not in the same ball park with the fight against slavery and racism. Does this seem like an arbitrary distinction? Maybe, but let’s face it, We HAVE to make some distinctions and since there really is no such thing as empirical “right and wrong,” we basically have to try to find some universal agreements. We can mostly agree, for instance, that murder is bad. We NOW agree (mostly) that racism is bad. There will always be dissent, and some things will change as public opinion changes (medical marijuana, assisted suicide). This does not mean that one person, all by himself, may unilaterally decide that HIS moral opinion can supercede the basic rights of another person, rights that we, as a society, have already agreed that every person possesses. If somebody really wants to fight to change public opinion and obtain some sort of “wife-beaters’ rights,” then he may do so, but I doubt he would get very far. (Before anybody gets their panties in a bunch, let me be clear: A man who uses violence against his spouse is a criminal. There ARE no mitigigating circumstances.
Kabbes: I made no reference to “life, liberty, etc…” Are you sure you didn’t mix me up with another post?

125

I apologise deeply, Diogenes, it was AZ Cowboy that was making reference to these most American of rights and not you at all.

FWIW, and to make up for my error, I will echo your phrase: “A right is not “granted by morality,” it is granted by public consent”. Rights are meaningless outside of the context of a power that is able to protect them. Morality and rights are separate ideas and shouldn’t be confused.

pan

126

No problem, Kabbes, I think we’ve all mixed up our posters before. It’s easy to do.

I agree w/ everything else you said in your post.

127

Of course the presenting problem (Spouse #1 violating a fidelity/monogamy promise to Spouse #2 and discovered in flagrante delicto with Extracurricular Activity Person X) would largely be eliminated if people didn’t make such silly-ass promises in the first place.

::AHunter3 ducks projectile::

OK, OK, OK, so to some of you they are not “silly-ass promises”, because you’ve considered all the options, pondered relevant emotional considerations pertaining to the logistics of love and falling in love and getting your ashes hauled, had long heartfelt talks with your significant other, and decided that you (singularly and “you” the couple) would be much happier if you make such a promise.

But then, given the depth of your feelings and the extent to which you’ve considered and then rejected the other possibilities (e.g., that you might [singularly or both] be happier feeling free to fall in love and/or bed with someone else under conditions that might arise spontaneously, and that you might not wish to dissolve your current relationship were that to happen), it isn’t very likely that you are going to be in Spouse #1’s situation, so I didn’t really mean you.

But we have what are called “cultural imperatives” ('tudes, if you prefer) which, in my opinion and as per my observations, cause many many people to make the same type of promise without having considered the options and alternatives. They do it as mindlessly as NY City subway car riders say “bless you” when someone sneezes. Most of them are oblivious to alternatives (other than “sleeping around with anonymously interchangeable single people” or some such non-deep thing). Many of them don’t stop to wonder whether or not they personally will be happy with this arrangement; many others apparently suspect that they’ll experience it as a confinement and a restriction, but assume that nothing else would be tolerable to their partner with whom they haven’t discussed the matter. (In an environment where those 'tudes say that suggesting that one might wish for an alternative understanding is tantamount to saying “I don’t love you enough to do the fidelity/monogamy promise thing”, many people would consider even raising the issue with their partner to be an offensive behavior itself).

Those are the ones for whom it is a damn silly-ass promise to make. They are often going to end up in bed with someone else. And then they can’t tell their partner because by the rules they’ve agreed to they are at that point already malefactors and cheats.

128

kabbes, yes, I was the offender of inserting, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” into the thread. And I certainly appreciate your point. I am also in agreement with the apparent resolution Diogenes the Cynic and you have reached.

Regarding the “cultural imperatives” that AHunter3 mentions: the ones that are responsible for people not being open and honest about their desires for “extracurricular” activities (directly related to the 'tudes that would frown on such a conversation), are the same ones that folks in this thread have referenced as justification for violence upon ones spouse.

It’s almost a self-fulling prophesy, created contrary to human nature, and ending in spousal abuse.

129

So do you think there are ever mitigating circumstances? Other than self defense? What if I go into a bar, pick some random person, and start saying every horrible mean insighting racist offensive thing I can say to that person, phrased to be as crude and provocative as possible. But I never get near that person physically. However, I continue the verbal assault. Eventually, that person hits me.

Would you, were you judge, jury and executioner, judge, sentence and punish that person the same as someone who hit me out of the blue?

If so, then I just plain disagree with you.

But if you would view those two cases as different, then I don’t see how you can fail to view catching someone in the act as a mitigating circumstance. To many many people, their spouse cheating on them is about the most offensive and degrading thing that can possibly happen to them, and is thus quite comparable to continued verbal abuse.

Also, you keep saying that the husband has no right to hit the wife if he catches the wife cheating. And you say that the only rights are legal rights. But (and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong) I also don’t think you’re intending to confine your argument to those places and times where said hitting does happen to be illegal (which is not everywhere in the world right now, and not many parts of the US for much of its history). Am I right? So, if we’re restricting ourselves to legal rights, aren’t they pretty damn irrelevant?

130

Words are not an inducement to physical violence. Words do not cause injury. Cheating is not an inducement to physical violence. Cheating does not cause injury (I don’t give a rat’s ass about “emotional” injury). Where is wife-beating legal, Max? some cites please. What would hitting a cheating spouse accomplish exactly? is that going to make them love you? Or is it just petty revenge? Do you honestly think you have a “moral” right to inflict physical injury on an unfaithful spouse? If so, should the law be changed to allow this? What, precisely, should you be allowed to do? Should you be allowed to punch them, kick them? where? How many times? Can you kill them? Write the law as you would have it.

131

I strongly suspect that in countries that enforce strict Islamic law (in which the penalty for adultery is death), if a husband caught a wife committing adultery and beat or killed her, he would be let off with at most a slap on the wrist. However, I googled around for a while and could not find a reference one way or ther other… perhaps someone more familiar with the topic can provide some firm information?

You’re totally misinterpreting what I’m saying. I never said that:
-I, personally, would ever hit my spouse, or anyone else
-It would accomplish anything
-It would be the right thing to do
-It should be legal
-The law should be changed

or anything of that sort.
I shall attempt to make my point as clearly as possible: there are laws. And there are things that are against the law (crimes). And there are punishments for things that are against the law. However, there are often a wide range of different crimes that are quite similar (ie, all the different degrees of murder and manslaughter), and even for the same crime, the are wide ranges of sentencing. And that’s how it should be. Not all murders are equal. Not all assaults are equal. Not all grand thefts auto are the same.

So let’s look at a hypothetical situation: a man comes home from work and finds his wife doing it with the VCR repairman. He throws the repairman out, then shoves and slaps his wife a few times, then storms out. Did this man commit a crime? If so, what punishment should he receive?

Well, first of all, you (and various other posters to this thread) seem to have a very absolute view of violence, that is, “all violence is always wrong, period”. Which obscures the fact that there are very different degrees of violence. Slapping and shoving someone isn’t right. It isn’t good. But it is NOT even close to the same as beating someone until they’re black and blue, breaking limbs, punching them in the stomach until they miscarry, or any number of other really horrible things.

But someone who slaps someone is going to slide down the slippery slope to really abusive battery, right? Well, some might. But others probably wouldn’t.

Speaking solely for myself, I’m an extremely nonviolent person. I’ve hit a total of two people in anger in my life, both in high school or before, neither time causing even remotely serious damage (and one of them was my big sister). I would never ever punch or kick or beat my wife (if I were married). Never. And may my immortal soul go to wherever agnostics’ souls go when they’ve been bad if I’m lying.

And I also don’t think I would ever slap or shove my wife. But I can vaguely conceivably imagine that I might, at the peak of a horribly unpleasantly heated argument. Maybe. Possibly. Conceivably. I honestly doubt it, but it’s right at the borderline of what I can imagine doing if a whole bunch of things went wrong. But it would never go beyond that. Period. Doesn’t mean that slapping or shoving is OK, and it doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t deserve to be punished for it, but I don’t think it would automatically indicate that I was physically abusive in a broader sense.
OK, that was a bit of a tangent.

Back to our hypothetical situation. Man caught wife cheating, shoved and slapped her. I’m judge/jury/executioner. What do I do?

Well, first of all, this is very different from, and far less serious than, a man who catches his wife cheating and seriously beats her. And second of all, and this is the main thrust of my argument here, this is also very different from man who was just in a randomly bad mood and decided to take it out by pushing and slapping his wife.

A significant factor in the severity of punishment that I would condemn someone to is the extent to which his behavior needs to be changed because he’s an ongoing threat, and (if it comes to jail time) the extent to which he needs to be kept isolated because of the threat he poses.

Someone who is randomly in a bad mood and gets violent is obviously a quite serious threat to everyone around him, and that’s behavior that can’t be allowed to continue. But someone who gets violent because he found his spouse cheating on him is not in the same category at all. Being cheated on, at least for many people, is about as horrible a betrayal as its possible to experience. If someone has no record of violence, then gets violent when he catches his wife cheating, I don’t see him as posing a substantial threat to the population as a whole.
I can’t give you a precise sentencing guideline. But I would definitely charge this hypothetical man with a minor crime, and sentence him to a very minor punishment.

I hope that was all clear.

(Final thought: the problem I have with a statement like “physical violence is never OK” is not so much that I disagree with it, but that it erases all gradients. Murder is not the same as serious beating is not the same as a black eye is not the same as a shove. None of them are OK. But they are not-OK to very very different degrees)

132

Motives are not mitigating factors with regards to assaults. Anyone who slaps his wife for ANY REASON is a criminal.
Here’s a hypothetical: A random stranger approaches your mother at the mall, and to parallel your own hypothetical"…shoves and slaps her a few times, and runs off…" Is this still a “minor” crime demanding only a "minor " punishment. The assault is exactly the same. It is completely irrelevant WHY the assault occurred. Slapping is not “minor” it is an inexcusable violation of another person’s rights.

BTW just because something is permitted in an oppressive culture elsewhere in the world, does that mean it should be permitted here? I don’t understand your point.

133

So i can tell my kid “Fuck you you fuckin bitch, i’ll fucking gut you like a fuckin fish, you bitch cunt faggot nigger!!!” and they are not being hurt at all? Please. Get out of the house some, the real world is waiting.

134

Please note i do not advocate using those words ever, especially to children

135

We were talking about ADULTS here not CHILDREN. Let me kill this new herring before it goes any further. An adult should be expected to endure a little name-calling w/out psychological collapse.

136

Going back to the original OP…

The use of force is not an issue when the power of each person is equal or the power of the person that is the target of the jealous person is greater. People assault those that they feel they can do so with little risk of immediate harm to themselves. I would go as far to say that the power dynamics govern the degree of outrage the person is feeling towards another. If they know they can get hurt by assaulting the person, they will usually find another way to get over what has happened to them. The spousal abuse situations are a prime example of this. If a woman could match the physical force and power of a man you’d have less women as victims of domestic violence.

137

I’m not sure what you’re saying here… are you saying that in our legal system, motives can not legally be mitigating factors? Or are you saying that you don’t believe motives should be mitigating factors? If the first, I don’t believe you’re correct, although I am not a lawyer. If the second, I just plain disagree…

Yes. It was just a slap. It’s not nothing. It’s not something that I just laugh off. But neither is it the same crime, deserving of the same punishment, as someone beating my mother over the head with a tire iron.

You had many times previously this thread made statements like “you have no RIGHT to prevent your wife from…” and “your wife has the RIGHT to…”. You then claimed that the only rights that existed were legal rights. But legal rights are variable, both over time and over space, as I was attempting to demonstrate. So I find them to be a poor basis for an argument.

And if they aren’t the basis for your argument, what is?
(my position? I think it’s a bit of a gray area… on the one hand, people have the “right” to be free. On the other hand, contracts can be legally binding, and people don’t have the right to arbitrarily break them with no consequence. Is a marriage a contract? Well, it could be. Or it could not be. One could come up with a moral, rational, and logically consistent behavior code either way…)

138

Sure they do, unless the agreement held otherwise. But that’s beside the point. Max, do you believe someone should be able to enforce a contract through physical violence, either legally, morally, or on any other basis?

139

I agree with Cowboy here. Fidelity in marriage is not any sort of legally enforcable “contract,” and even if it were, there is no such thing as ANY civil contract which would permit physical retribution in case of a breach.
And that’s right, Max, motives (other than self-defense) are NOT considered as mitigating factors for assault in any American court of law. If you believe I’m wrong about this, then show me a cite. Show me one case where a sentence for assault was tempered because of motive.

Ok, I said that the only rights that mattered were those which were actually backed up by the weight of law. Of course I BELIEVE that people living in other, more oppressive governments have “moral” rights. (for lack of a better term) My point is that this is not MEANINGFUL. Having moral rights does not help them. Only changing the law will help them. This is beside the point anyway, because the only LAW that matters is the law that we are SUBJECT to. OUR culture has collectively decided that each individual has the right to be free from physical violence. If any particular individual decides that his personal interpretation of his own “moral” rights supercedes the laws that the bulk of our society have agreed upon, then that person has all the freedom of speech he wants in order to try to change public opinion (ala MLK) but ultimately it will still be the decision of society as a whole, as opposed to one individual if our “rights” are changed or ammended. MLK was not successful because he possessed “moral” rights. He was successful because he persuade his country alter its conception of LEGAL rights.

140

Uh, for the record, Diogenes the Cynic, I did not say that “fidelity in marriage is not any sort of legally enforceable contract”. I believe fidelity is at least a part of most marriage contracts, even if they are not legally enforceable. And, if I understand it correctly, in the few states that don’t have “no-fault” divorce laws, fidelity does effectively constitute breach and reason for termination with cause, providing the aggrieved spouse favorable terms in the divorce. In that case at least, I think fidelity may be “legally enforceable”, so to speak.

Nowhere is the concept that violence is means to enforce a contract, marriage or otherwise. Nor is is it a remedy for breach.