My wife and I had a talk about this a few days ago. I think that a lot of it has to do with your notion of justice.
For me, justice and revenge are two mutually exclusive things- even though they can manifest themselves in the same actions. It all depends upon the mindset of the person administering it.
Justice hurts. You might get satisfaction out of it, but deep down, there should always be a sadness that it had to be meted out. I tend to think that’s why it’s so hard to come by…most people don’t want to make the sacrifice that it entails.
example:
a man murders his whole family. He is convicted and to be sentenced. Some might be glad that he is ‘getting what’s coming to him,’ even wish for further punishment (prison rape, etc.). But it’s my hope that a judge with a notion of justice would be able to say “You did this. You have to be locked up for the rest of your life. But you were once a human like me, and it makes me sad to do this. But I will.”
Like I said, it takes empathy and sacrifice to be just. And yes, I know that it’s naive.
While I do agree that they had a choice in how their lives turned out, and in fact more than a choice (which sounds so mild), I also believe that they grew up in a less than nurturing household with some obvious mental and psychological problems, and also let’s remember that Saddam ordered Qusay to assasinate political opponents when he was THIRTEEN.
In short, I don’t excuse anything they’ve done a la some lame ‘insanity’ plea, but my reference to feral dogs was that they didn’t have much chance or opportunity to do the right thing, even way back when they were children.
In fact, like I said in the pit, rather than celebrating, I’m forced to reflect on how sad it is, that they were once little five year olds, giggly, playing ball, running around like little kids, unaware of what evils their family held. It’s sad that they lost their humanity and moral compass at such a young age. It’s almost like they were dead a LOOONG time ago.
There’s a difference, I think, between being grateful that an evil person is no longer around to do evil things, and celebrating the death of said evil person.
The first is natural relief; the second is barbarically ill manners.
Another way of expressing what has been said here is that it would be hypocritical to be either grieving or neutral over the death of someone you despised in life. “Dancing on the grave” aside, isn’t it more inseemly to pretend a sympathy you don’t feel?
Well, now, that all depends upon what happens after death, now doesn’t it? According to some traditions, Uday and his brother are suffering, according to others, they’re involved in a cosmic orgy.
Frankly, I see nothing wrong with celebrating the death of an enemy. Call me barbaric, but we celebrate the victories of our favorite sports teams, even though the losers are still alive (and are witnesses to us dancing and shouting about a trivial event), whereas your enemy is now dead, and it doesn’t matter what kind of afterlife there is (if any), they don’t give a shit about what you’re doing! Rejoicing in the death of an enemy is as much about celebrating life as it is the death of someone you oppose.
I can’t believe someone just compared the celebration of the killing of two human beings favorably with celebrating a football victory.
[They were the sort that rejoiced in the deaths of others. Why would I want to be like them? When we can harbor so much hatred and coldness, we become part of the horror.
:dubious: So how’s come I haven’t set up my dictatorship and started slaughtering those who don’t believe in the Great Pickle God?
Face it, you are like them. Saddam, no doubt, in his own sick and twisted way, loved his children, just as you do. Hell, John Wayne Gacy loved his children, kept them out near the garage, IIRC. We all have the same feelings as those we consider monsters, its how we act on those feelings which separates us from the monsters.
Exactly. And celebrating the death of another human being is an act which I feel belongs firmly in the camp of the monsters. If the man with the bloody axe and the gleam in his eye who’s chasing me suddenly falls down a well and dies, I have no doubt that I will feel relief and possibly even exultation. But I hope that I will have the strength not to act on those feelings by celebrating his death. Because, as you say, such actions separate us from the monsters.
Since I’m a human being I can actually feel a wide variety of emotions all at the same time. So here it goes.
I don’t see how feeling hatred dehumanizes me any more then love. If I can love someone for who they are then it stands to reason that I can also hate someone for who they are. Obviously I think “hate the sin and love the sinner” is so much baloney. When someone I hate dies I don’t celebrate by dancing in the streets although I will admit that it does make me happy. Not only am I happy that the sons of Saddam won’t be bothering anybody in the future I am happy they’re dead.
On the flip side I’m also sad. I’d rather not hate anybody and it is sad when another human being becomes so evil. It isn’t as if they were born evil and in most cases that person does have someone else who loves them and is hurt by their deaths. Maybe not in the case of Saddam’s sons though.
Marc
Yes, I am a human being. I was just as surprised to find out as the rest of you.
So it’s wrong to celebrate the fact that you’re going to live? Got news for you pal, it’s necessary for things to die in order for other things to live. Life feeds on life. Even if you’re a fruititarian, you’re killing something in order to survive.
Right, and until someone can show me how celebrating the death of a monster is equal to slaughtering people for the sheer sport of it, I’ll keep doing it.
I would celebrate death for the same reasons I celebrate life. One enjoys the happiness of behaving correctly, one doesn’t curse proper behavior as a rule to follow begrudgingly. I act correctly, and I enjoy doing it. I enjoy others doing it. I feel that they deserve what rewards I can give them for acting correctly.
Celebrating the death of an enemy is the flip side of celebrating the life of a cherished friend. Human behavior follows a spectrum from excellent to devoid of morality, and I react accordingly to all of them.
Of course, the idea that someone exists that I should hate is sad, it would be nice if everyone was just like me in fact, but lacking that, I see nothing wrong with enjoying an evil person’s demise. I do not question (often) why we cherish our friends, nor would I question (often) why we loathe our enemies.
Good was done. If I accept them as evil, I don’t follow why I am supposed to feel like we were just doing our duty, ma’am, and that’s all to be said. Ding dong, the witch is dead, the wicked witch is dead.
Civilized? Civilization is exactly what factors into us hating them in the first place. While I don’t exactly see a need to parade around with their heads on poles, I don’t see the harm in a little schadenfreude. Seems perfectly natural to me.
While I neither support nor oppose such a philosophy, Evil Captor, I feel it necessary to point out that worldview directly contradicts Christian dogma about the nature of sin and thought.
Oh, he hasn’t been proven to have personally murdered or tortured anyone to death, though who knows whether or not he attended any lynchings back in the day … but he’s definitely an evil guy who died recently, and was in fact the subject of a thread on a related subject to this thread. In any event, I’m glad the old fart’s dead, much like Idi and the Husseins.
Why can’t I celebrate the fact that I’m going to live while at the same time regretting that another human being had to die to bring that about? Those are not contradictory. I’m alive, yay! But certainly it would be better if we both could live, if the axe-weilding maniac hadn’t picked up the axe in the first place. Of course, that didn’t happen; the maniac chose to pick up the axe and then it ended with a maniac down a well. But why can’t I still mourn that a fellow human being had to die? More importantly, why shouldn’t I?
Heck, let’s make it even less morally ambiguous. The maniac didn’t fall down a well. He got a nuclear bomb with the clear and stated intent of vaporizing me, my loved ones, the entire population of Madagascar and a doe-eyed, fluffy kitten, and I shot him dead just before he hit the button.
His hypothetical death was absolutely necessary by any standard. But you know what? I still hope that I would have the strength and compassion to mourn the death of another human being, even as I play with that kitten in the fields of Madagascar. I may not achieve that strength and compassion should that situation, heaven forbid, ever come to pass. But it’s the ideal I should strive for.
So what’s your point? Killing is necessary? Check, I agree. Killing another human being is sometimes necessary? Sad but true, it would seem.
But I shouldn’t find killing another human being abhorrent and regrettable whenever it occurs? Sorry, right there we part company. If I am ever placed in a situation where it becomes necessary to kill another human being I can only hope I have the strength to do what must be done and the compassion to regret the necessity of it.
First of all, I don’t think anyone is suggesting those two things are equal. Second, that’s a very odd moral yardstick.
It all depends upon the circumstances, don’t you think? If someone gave their life in order to save mine, it’s only right to mourn their passing. However, if it’s a case of my having to kill someone in order that I, my loved ones, or some other innocent person can live, then why should I waste my time mourning the loss of another human being? If they ain’t worthy of life, they ain’t worthy of tears.
**
Why? Why is it so important that as many humans as possible get to live? If it were so important, then every male at the age of puberty would be given a kit so that they could preserve their ejaculate in order that it might be combined with an egg (collected from women every time their bodies kicked one out) at some point in the future. We don’t do that, of course, because we all realize how totally impractical it would be.
**
Why is that an ideal? Because if you don’t strive towards that you’ll suddenly turn into a ravening loon and start slaughtering folks en masse? Many people, including myself, think that the term “humanity” applies not to a an organism that has a certain DNA sequence, but to anything which behaves in a manner which we humans have decided is a positive. So I would consider an animal or a hypothetical alien which acted in a positive manner to be as much a part of “humanity” as I am. Someone who is a serial rapist, mass murderer or any number of another horrible possibilities is not a part of “humanity” IMHO, and doesn’t deserve to be mourned, because their actions have shown that they have made the decision to reject the rules that humanity has chosen to adopt, thus they are rejecting humanity and I will not waste emotions on their death which are better served by mourning the loss of their victims.
**
Did you mourn for the contents of your dinner before you ate them last night? I didn’t, and if I didn’t mourn something like that, why, in the name of all the inanimate carbon graphite rods that have won employee of the month, would I mourn the death of someone who would be happy to kill me for the sheer sport of it?
**
Why should you feel compelled to waste your time and energy on someone who’d prefer to have you dead?**
Ah, but they are.
To provide just two examples from this thread. IAC, we are doing the monster a service by killing them, IMHO. Let’s look at a couple of possible scenerios, shall we?
In the first, we capture Saddam alive, and discover that he is mentally ill. A few years of therapy, perhaps some medication, and he becomes a completely rational human being, who has to live with the fact that he’s done some pretty horrific things in the past. Now, would you want to live knowing that you had done those things? Crazy or not, there’s no denying you were one bad dude. Better to just check myself out, than to go on living, I’d say. Besides, there’s a whole host of folks out there screaming for your blood. If one of them were to get hold of you, you can be certain that they’d have no problem in making you suffer as much as possible.
In the second, after Saddam’s captured, we find that he is sane and in full possession of his facilities and chose to commit his actions anyway. So we put him on trial, find him guilty (surprise!) and then lock him away like a calf being fattened up for veal for the rest of his life. Geeze, kind of cruel to do to a calf, but okay for a human? Better for us to put him down, so that he doesn’t spend the rest of his life simply waiting to die and thinking about what might have been. Instead of us torturing him, we simply provide him the means by which he can psychologically do the same thing to himself. (And we’ll not even get into what could happen to him if he was allowed to mix with the general population of a prison.)
In the third, we could “reeducate” a sane Saddam so that he no longer holds the beliefs that he currently does (A Clockwork Orange, anyone?). Now, what do we do with him? We can’t turn him lose in a society, he’ll be tortured and killed. If we lock him up we’re being cruel, because we’re confining a potentially productive member of society to tight quarters (I don’t care if it’s a palatial villa overlooking the French Rivera, it’s still nothing more than a guilded cage), who is going to have to spend the rest of their life looking over their shoulder, wondering when the assassin’s going to find them. Yeah, that’s how I’d want to spend the rest of my days as a total paranoid.:dubious:
Better to mercifully put them down as we would a sick animal than to allow them to continue to live, I say. I know that I’d prefer the death penalty over life in prison were I guilty of murder.
Don’t really think there is a true basis for debate here.
Getting back to the OP, should we rejoice at the death of someone who is considered evil? Hey, if you do, you do. If you don’t you don’t. A Clockwork Orange applies here. No one can tell you how to feel. You just do.
Some of us rejoice, some don’t. Nuff said.
I am not now and probably never will be qualified to determine who is “worthy of life” and who isn’t. Furthermore I am of the strong conviction that any human life is worthy of sorrow at its passing. Each individual human conciousness is unique, inexplicable, and wondrous, and my desire to celebrate the death of a human being is far, far less than my desire to celebrate the destruction of a stained glass window, or Niagara Falls.
Life, especially human life, is precious and its passing regrettable.
I did not say it was “important that as many humans as possible get to live”, and I find your sperm-storage scenario as ridiculous as you do. I said that in the hypothetical scenario I described I would prefer that both actors live. Quite a difference.
As to “Why?”, see above.
I feel it’s an ideal because of that whole “preciousness of life” thingy. And while I don’t fear turning into a “ravening loon” if I don’t strive towards my ideals (must…resist…rolleyes…smiley…) I do have this wacky idea that maybe it’s a good thing to strive to be the best person I can be, and to help make the world around me the best world it can be, because hey, life is brutal and the sun will explode one day and we’re all just brief candles in the darkness and all that crap.
I also don’t just apply the term “humanity” to an organism that has a certain DNA sequence. But I don’t ask anyone to meet my standard of behaviour before I apply the term “human”, either.
Which is where I part company with some in this thread, it would seem. It would be great if I could just label certain people as “evil” and “not human”; it would certainly be simpler, at any rate. I wouldn’t have to worry about empathy, or justify my own actions against the sub-humans. They’re not human, are they? Screw 'em. But that’s a cop-out, and quite frankly a dangerous one. It makes for easy moral decisions, but it also makes for lynchings.
I will not take it upon myself to judge who is human and who is not. I simply do not have that authority, and I doubt that anyone has.
Perhaps because I don’t feel eating a chicken pot pie and the death of a human being are equivalent situations. This is beyond silly.
Empathy. The shared human condition. The golden rule. Because I feel it’s the right thing to do.
In neither of your examples are the two acts being equated. In both, celebrating the deaths of the Husseins is put forward as a step towards the moral position of a mass murderer. Trenton is closer to New York City than Philadephia is, but that doesn’t mean I can see the Statue of Liberty from there.
However, I will amend my earlier statement. I am not equating the celebration of a death with mass murder.
Your hypothetical scenarios are perfectly fine examples of situations where killing a human being may be necessary or even the best of all possible options. That does not make it a thing to be celebrated.