From: Smigrodzki, Rafal (SmigrodzkiR@msx.upmc.edu)
Date: Thu Apr 11 2002 - 12:47:09 MDT
Kai Becker [mailto:kmb@kai-m-becker.de] wrote:
This will still make the punisher guilty of hurting other people, including
the assumedly criminal. This is what I mean: No one can escape his
responsibility - and/or guilt. A hurts B, B hurts A, both A and B are
guilty and responsible for everything they do or do not.
### Wouldn't you agree there is a difference between "guilty" and
"responsible"? Guilt cries out for punishment, as I wrote before.
Responsibility merely describes the causal relationships between a person
and an action.
Imagine A shoots B in a burglary, and B still manages to reach A and hit him
with a baseball bat. Is B *guilty* of battery? No, by the presently
prevailing convention (which of course could change), B is not guilty of
anything, merely responsible for damaging A's head. We won't punish him.
-------
Even police officers and judges are responsible for their deeds and so are
politicians and soldiers. They get absolution for it from their society as
long as they stay to the common and the written moral (the law), but they
are still responsible. A cop who kills a criminal is still a killer, a
soldier who kill an "enemy" is still a killer. He personally is responsible
for pulling the trigger or dropping the bomb.
### Everybody, especially the enforcers, should take responsiblity for their
actions. As long as their actions are morally right, the society should
praise them. It's not bad to hurt bad people.
-------
(NB, English is not my native tongue and I fear I have a problem to explain
properly what I mean with guilt and responsibility...)
### Schuld? Verantwortlichkeit?
------
> If killing of supporters, even
> the proud (and therefore guilty) families of suicide bombers turns out to
> be the only way of reducing the number of 16-year-olds smeared on cafe
> walls, then such killing is not a crime - it's a just way of defending
> the innocent.
This position is clearly outside the humanist philosophy, preventive
killing of potential(!) criminals or even their relatives. Think about it:
you and your family executed, because your brother is a political
extremist.
### If my brother was the Unabomber, I would call the FBI, just like Mr
Kaczynski did when he read his brother's manifesto. If I knew that my family
member planned to kill innocent people, I'd rather kill him myself than be
sullied by his act. Those who boast about their brother or sister being a
suicide bomber, and take the 25 000$ reward from Saddam Hussein, are forever
tainted by the blood spilled in their name, and as a last resort can be
targeted, if needed to stop others from even greater atrocities.
-----
This is the policy of fascist or other extremist "state over
people" regimes. It's also military thinking, to calculate human beings
like cattle without rights and dignity - collateral damage means dead
innocent people. As I've said: there is no civilization in war. And it
doesn't relieve soldiers or politicians - or you - of their guilt and
responsibility.
### I recognize no rights and no dignity in the guilty ones - they gave it
away by murdering innocents, or actively supporting such acts. Sure, it's
just my private attitude, but then so is yours. The main difference is that
adoption of your ideas will mean a lot more dead innocent people, with their
murderers happily enjoying their "rights" and "dignity".
Rafal
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