Murder: Passion vs. Gain vs. Plotted Gain vs. Revenge vs Batshit Crazy - Equal?

Great Debates
1

I was pondering how thoroughly strange it is to me that people who otherwise appear and function as though they are normal members of society and the human race, can make a decision to kill someone over money or other “things” - divorce would be costly, or there’s a big insurance policy, the reasons that usually come up in spousal murder. I’ve always found it astonishing. Crimes of passion or fear or crazy I can at least intellectually process, but Joe Regular Guy deciding it would be cheaper to kill his wife than divorce her just floors me.

Which brings me to the debate.

The murder types are “plotted gain” which is what I opened with. Otherwise normal person with a normal life chooses to kill someone they know because that’s more beneficial than anything else, or so they see it.

Simple “gain” is kind of gain/fear: murder of a stranger in the commission of some kind of theft. Burglar kills homeowner or stickup guy kills 7-eleven clerk. They are panicked, adrenalized, decide to kill to cover their tracks.

Passion: Well, we know what that is. Wife comes home to find hubby in bed with another women, goes nuts.

Revenge: Duh.

And finally, Batshit Crazy. That would be the serial killers, generally speaking. The folks who do it because they want to for some reason, usually a sexual compulsion.

So…are all these kinds of murders equivalent? Is unlawful killing unlawful killing, period? Or should we consider the motives, circumstances and mental health of the person doing it?

Strange as it seems, I think that the least shocking? Evil? I don’t know what the word is… the batshit crazy people, while their crimes are generally more disgusting in the details (Dahmer lunching on his victims), are more “forgivable” I guess, in that such people ARE batshit crazy, and they are compelled by forces they really have almost no control over. (“Forgivable” doesn’t mean we cut them loose or anything, I’m not saying that of course. I’m just talking about our reaction to the crimes more than anything.)

Next in line would be passion killers, who i think are actually pretty rare. I’ve been upset in my life, but not so much that my brain disengaged to the point where killing someone seemed like an option. But I could imagine it under really terrible circumstances… I know of someone who almost killed their husband when they found him in the act of molesting their daughter, but realized that killing him then would be worse in terms of lasting effects than what she caught him doing. But that kind of passion-in-the-moment reaction I could see.

Then gain/fear - yeah, such people are bad to begin with, they are stealing, but it’s still not so much about wanting to hurt another person as protect yourself. Screwed up, of course, but not as much as…

Revenge killers. Although, kinda depends on the nature of what you’re seeking revenge for.

And the worst of the worst for me is the otherwise normal dentists and insurance salesmen who decide that killing Wife 1 to make room for Wife 2 is an acceptable option.

2

I do think motive matters. For example, I do agree with you that compulsive killers are morally the least to blame. In fact their compulsive/irrational nature means that treating their behavior as a moral problem is foolish. Moral teachings won’t deter them, and trying to reform them with punishment is futile. Someone like that, you either treat them medically until they aren’t killers anymore - if you have the capability - or you keep them away from society forever regardless of what the standard penalty for a crime like that would be.

Murder for gain is the exact opposite; instilling moral standards DOES help, since moral, non-compulsive people don’t commit coldblooded murder for profit. And punishment and the threat thereof DOES work, because it impacts the “profit” part of the equation for the people who aren’t moral.

So yes, we should as you put it “consider the motives, circumstances and mental health of the person doing it”. Because the point of the justice system should be to keep society as just and safe as it can, which means it should use the strategies that are the most effective, and which reflect how much to blame the target is.

3

Of course there are differences of degree in moral culpability. This is true for any offence. But since murder is an intentional killing (an inaccurate but sufficient generalisation for present purposes), then it is so close to the top end of the range of moral culpability on any version that the window within which one is discriminating between offenders and offences is pretty narrow.

I would however disagree with you about your classification of serial killers as “batshit crazy”.

The definition of insanity for this purpose varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but it typically revolves around the present of a mental illness (and being a serial killer is not of itself a mental illness). Typically, the illness is schizophrenia or one of the other well known psychotic disorders. These are the people whose break from reality is so severe that at the time of the offence they thought that they were God, or that the victim was Satan, or that voices in their heads were commanding them to do it, or the like. (I would pause to emphasise that while most insane people who kill have schizophrenia or a similarly debilitating illness, the vast majority of people with schizophrenia are not a risk to the community.)

Again jurisdictions differ, but not all DSM4 “disorders” necessarily qualify, as the DSM4 itself is careful to point out.

In addition to a requirement that the driver of the offending behaviour be a mental illness, it is typically also necessary that the accused be deprived by the illness of one or more moral capacities. The English case (M’Naghten’s case) which is a useful starting point for these discussions gave a number of these, such as the capacity to know that what one was doing was wrong. (If you are busy stabbing Satan while believing you are the angel Michael, you clearly don’t think what you are doing is wrong.) A dead giveaway that a person is not insane, or not insane enough, under this head is typically the length to which they go to avoid being caught. If a killer does not get that his actions are wrong, why is he trying to hide?

The point of all this is that insanity is for obvious reasons a fairly narrow defence. It is not good enough to come up with the sort of casual reasoning that runs that anyone who would commit crime X must be “nuts” and therefore anyone who does commit crime X has a defence of insanity.

You mention serial killers driven by weird sexual motivations. Paedophiles generally are driven by weird sexual motivations, and they have a “disorder” they can claim under the DSM4. But they almost never have a defence of insanity available, nor should they.

Similarly, serial killers who are driven by perversions are typically not insane. They almost certainly have a diagnosable disorder under the DSM4, again almost certainly one of the personality disorders. But these are not the sort of reality-distorting disorder that one typically thinks of as insanity.
My point in all of this is that we should not think of serial killers as insane.

The truly insane who kill are so disorganised when they do so that it is spectacularly unlikely that they would have the cognitive resources to conceal what they had done and organise themselves to do it again. Serial killers simply do not live in a world where reality is distorted in the way that people with bi-polar disorder or schizophrenia do. To serial killers, a car is still a car, a human a human, and a killing a killing, and the sense of pressure to commit the offence comes from within. It is not perceived as coming from outside themselves, as it typically is with insane command hallucinations.
I would thus disagree with your hierarchy of villainy. People who commit multiple murders are more morally culpable than those who commit only one. Those people are also more morally cuplable because of the degree of premeditation attached to their crimes. And they are not to be excused merely because their thought processes and motivations are so foreign to ordinary people as to be difficult to relate to. They do not go on the bottom of the heap.

4

I wasn’t really saying that batshit crazy = insanity defense. My thoughts were more about personal view than legal ones.

5

I’ll note that in societies with weak or nonexistent rule of law, the murder rate is quite high. For example, in Neolithic Britain, 5% suffered a skull fracture from someone else and 2% died from such injuries. In Australia, murder rates for aboriginal Australians are 10 times higher than that of other Australians.

I don’t know how Stoid’s taxonomy of motives would apply in pre-law societies.