You really need to step outside and touch the grass. Might make you more grounded to reality.
The justice system has a finite amount of resources. Of course they should prioritize a brazen assassination for political purposes of a citizen going about his daily life peacefully rather than some gang-related murder.
Um… no they shouldn’t?
I get the point about finite resources, and I’m well aware of the real-life pressures on the justice system to prioritize the murder of a wealthy and powerful businessman over the murder of an obscure gang member.
But no, I don’t think it’s appropriate to conclude that the justice system should prioritize the former over the latter, or that it’s in any way a good thing for them to do so. Murder is murder, and the rich and powerful aren’t intrinsically more entitled to have their murderers caught than anybody else is.
(It could even be argued that for purposes of deterrence, keeping the peace, etc., it would be advisable to prioritize the gang murder over the CEO murder, because the gang situation is where the rule of law is most threatened overall and needs most support. CEO murders, on the other hand, would not become a significant crime phenomenon even if the police had taken much longer to catch Mangione, or had never caught him at all.)
What you are suggesting by contrasting “a citizen going about his daily life peacefully” vs “some gang-related murder” is that the CEO was, in fact, “going about his daily life peacefully,” which fails to understand that his “peaceful” decisions did, in fact, result in harm to real human beings who were ALSO going about their daily lives peacefully.
I don’t like your hierarchy. I think a murder victim is a murder victim, and it’s not okay to judge the worthiness of their lives before deciding whether to investigate.
Yes they are. Not the rich and powerful specifically, those are your words and not mine. But gang-on-gang violence by Joe GangBanger is not the same (i.e “murder is murder”) as the assassination of CEO Brian Thompson on the streets of Manhattan or for that matter the serial-killing of Granny Betty in her home.
It wouldn’t be a particularly good or sound argument but I agree it is one that could be made.
No, it isn’t the same.
How many CEOs have been murdered in the last ten years?
How many serial murders have been committed in he last ten years?
How many innocent bystanders have been killed in gang-on-gang violence in the last ten years?
Murder is murder, though. The laws against murder do not distinguish between the murder of nice people and the murder of not-nice ones.
And it’s a good thing for ruthless CEOs that they don’t, too. If some CEO puts into effect a policy that ends up causing thousands of unnecessary deaths, we as a society don’t get to just shrug our shoulders when a disgruntled survivor offs the CEO, and tell ourselves “oh well, if he didn’t want to be murdered then he shouldn’t have been so antisocial and callous about the lives of others.”
Likewise, even when a violent gang member gets murdered, we don’t get to shrug and say “oh well, if he didn’t want to be murdered then he shouldn’t have been so antisocial and callous about the lives of others.”
Murder is murder, and if we’re going to have a justice system at all, it can’t be one that arbitrarily decides that some people’s murders are intrinsically more important than others’.
Back when i was following this, a lot. It was fairly common for one gang member to shoot at another, miss, and the bullet went through the wall of a house and killed some kid doing their homework at the kitchen table.
I’m all in favor of reducing gang violence.
Ask yourself truthfully: the police has 50 coins to spend on murder investigating. They need 300 coins to follow up on all leads effectivelly. They have two murders to solve currently: The first case is Joe Blow who was shot in the head on a street corner by another gangbanger for selling fake dope. The second case is 12-year old Sally who was raped and had her head bashed in by a masked intruder during the night.
Please answer how the police should allocate the 50 coins to investigate each of these two murders at the same time. Remember, murder is murder.
Also, assume Sally is a sphere.
I laughed out loud.
Well obviously, they should pursue both murder cases, and focus their resources on the parts of each investigation that will produce the biggest breakthrough bang for the buck.
For instance, if somebody says that Joe Blow’s wife or Sally’s babysitter knows more about the murder than she’s telling, but she’s off in Cancun right now, the police should not spend their precious coins sending somebody to track her down in Cancun. Let that lead go for now, and follow up on the other leads that are likely to get results closer to home.
In particular, the police should not be spending one red cent making advance evaluations of which murder victim is more “worthy” of having their case pursued, based on criteria like age, gender, murder location, murder method, drug-peddling history, etc. That’s a complete pointless waste of money.
There is a significant difference here, though. Joe Gangbanger lives in a way that places his life in constant peril – perhaps it is not the way he would like to live, but his options are most likely severely limited, for what ever reasons. Mr CEO’s life is almost never in peril, just his revenue stream, but his decisions can lead to misery and/or death for many other people. Mr CEO is all but wholly unconnected to the negative effects of his actions while Joe Gangbanger is right down in the thick of it. Mr CEO bears a strong resemblance to Duke MightyDuchy who sends his young men to die in battle so that he can claim LesserBarony for himself.
I think you are assuming that little Sally is a more valuable person than Joe Blow. That’s a philosophically problematic position to take, but you also don’t know that. You don’t know who that 12-year-old is going to grow up to be; you don’t know what Mr. Blow will be in ten years, either. All you know is that each has had the opportunity to improve and contribute removed from them. The crimes are equally bad.
It might be emotionally harder to contemplate the murder of a child, but dead is dead.
This is why I’ve argued against the contention that libertarianism is nothing but a dog-whistle for corporate feudalism. Because the greed bastards would have to hide in vaults if there wasn’t a government enforcing laws against murder.
“That’s libertarians for you — anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars
If “there wasn’t a government enforcing laws against murder”, the “greed bastards” would just have squads of hired goons to murder anyone who disagrees or protests against them.
Stranger
Explaining why ancap utopias don’t devolve into tribalism and warlords’ tyrannical proto-governments is an exercise left for the reader.
Who here is arguing in favor of “ancap utopias”?
Stranger
Mostly, because they are fictional.
Nobody here, AFAICT, and I don’t think Lumpy was suggesting that anybody here was doing so.
ISTM that the connection is that we’re pointing out how not deferring to a hierarchy of social worth among murder victims is actually advantageous in the long run for the wealthy and powerful. Because the wealthy and powerful may believe they’re automatically high up on the social-worth scale, but if enough trampled-on little people feel otherwise, there will be a lot higher tolerance for the idea of murdering them.
The wealthy and powerful actually need society to maintain an egalitarian approach to investigating and deterring murder, so that the criminal justice system can protect the hated wealthy powerful people as well as the beloved ones. And I think that’s what reminded Lumpy of the similar paradox in the libertarian concept of ancap utopias.
ISTM, YMMV, ABBG, TPOG, etc.