The Appropriate Limits of Legal Speech P.1 - Page 9 - OG Myth-Weavers

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The Appropriate Limits of Legal Speech P.1

 
Quote:
Originally Posted by canjowolf View Post
Why should you accept guilt for their crime when you told them not to do it?
You're quite right: in your example, you wouldn't be nearly as responsible as when you engineered for them to kill someone. at most, it could be considered negligent manslaughter. But all in all, an accident is an accident. You're just as responsible as when, say, you accidentally knock a flower pot off the windowsill and it caves in someone's skull: you didn't want someone to die, but you still caused it to happen.
That is to say, at least, if you saying it was the reason, and by not saying it, this could be avoided. If you couldn't help it, you couldn't help it.

Which is generally the rule: whether a human is or is not in the equation, you're equally responsible. if you tried to kill someone by means of an emotionally unstable person, or by means of poison, it's murder. If you make an accidental comment and it, outside of your control, backfires, you're less responsible, but not because a person was involved: you're less responsible because it was an accidental act and it backfired outside of your control.

Quote:
Originally Posted by canjowolf View Post
Edit: Let's say person L really wants to kill someone. They tell you that they are planning on killing Person M. You convince them that killing person M is a bad idea and they tell you that they won't do it. They still secretly want to kill someone though and go out and kill person K without saying anything about it. Should you hold yourself responsible for the death of person K? I say no. Even though your actions contributed to person K's death, you in no way attempted to harm person K and did not harm them through negligence. For the sake of this argument assume that you don't have the power to stop person L and that they kill person K before you can do anything to stop it.
Same thing applies here: you're not guilty because it was unforseen, accidental, and outside of your control. Not because it happened to be so due to others being involved.

Laws have nothing to do with morality. Laws are (at best) about serving the common good and maintaining order in society. Confusing morality with law leads to a breakdown of both, as everyone believes themselves to be a moral person.

You've not answered the second question.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ikul View Post
Next question: if I know that a person's upbringing has given him violent tendencies, is spending two months feeding them enough reasons to hate someone enough to kill them reason enough for me to be morally responsible?

Not only did I answer it thusly:
Quote:
That depends. Morally, yes. in terms of should it be legally? unless you kept them in an environment where yours was the only source of guidance they had, no.
Now, if they are in a compund with you and your religious devotees then yes, in my mind if we could discern your intent then you should be held culpable for the murder
i quoted the question before the answer. I'm getting really tired of being accused of "ducking" questions I have already answered...

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bbender View Post
Hypothetically: what if you tried to use reverse psychology and told him not to do it, intending that he did it anyway and assuming that it would be more likely because you told him not to?
Then you are trying to convince them to do it, even if you are using a non-standard methodology. If you are successful then I will not argue that you should not be morally accountable for their actions.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ikul View Post
You're quite right: in your example, you wouldn't be nearly as responsible as when you engineered for them to kill someone. at most, it could be considered negligent manslaughter. But all in all, an accident is an accident. You're just as responsible as when, say, you accidentally knock a flower pot off the windowsill and it caves in someone's skull: you didn't want someone to die, but you still caused it to happen.
That is to say, at least, if you saying it was the reason, and by not saying it, this could be avoided. If you couldn't help it, you couldn't help it.

Which is generally the rule: whether a human is or is not in the equation, you're equally responsible. if you tried to kill someone by means of an emotionally unstable person, or by means of poison, it's murder. If you make an accidental comment and it, outside of your control, backfires, you're less responsible, but not because a person was involved: you're less responsible because it was an accidental act and it backfired outside of your control.

Same thing applies here: you're not guilty because it was unforseen, accidental, and outside of your control. Not because it happened to be so due to others being involved.
In this example the death of K was not entirely out of your control. For the purposes of this example let us assume that had you said nothing then person M would have been killed and person K would not have (I don't believe that this assumption does any harm to my argument. It makes the consequences of your actions harder to foresee, but no less real) However, it was both unforeseen (and possibly not reasonably foreseeable) and accidental. Therefore I believe that just because your actions cause or contribute to something bad happening, that does not necessarily mean that you are morally accountable for the bad happening. It could have been unforeseeable and accidental.

The question of guilt if L's actions were predictable (which would be similar to the 'push a person in front of a train to save other people' scenario) is an entirely different topic and should be discussed in a different thread if it is to be discussed. (just to head people off at the pass so to speak).

Edit: My purpose here is to reinforce my claim of option C.) You can influence a person's behavior without magic. You do not hold responsibility for such behavior. I believe that both opinions B and C are possible, depending on the circumstances.

You do realize that magic was not invoked as the only means to manipulate someone, but instead as the only means to be certain of intent. I then extrapolated that the same magic (reading intent) would allow *more effective* manipulation which might alter hypothetical criminal responsibility.

You are arguing against a point which has not been made...

Quote:
Originally Posted by silveroak View Post
Not only did I answer it thusly:

i quoted the question before the answer. I'm getting really tired of being accused of "ducking" questions I have already answered...
Oh, no, sorry... That's an honest mistake. What you answered was,

Okay, if I know that a person's upbringing has given him violent tendencies, is spending two years feeding them enough reasons to hate someone enough to kill them reason enough for me to be culpable?

The new question is,

if I know that a person's upbringing has given him violent tendencies, is spending two months feeding them enough reasons to hate someone enough to kill them reason enough for me to be morally responsible?

And to save us all some time, I'll provide the whole line of questions.

if I know that a person's upbringing has given him violent tendencies, is spending two days feeding them enough reasons to hate someone enough to kill them reason enough for me to be morally responsible?

if I know that a person's upbringing has given him violent tendencies, is spending two hours feeding them enough reasons to hate someone enough to kill them reason enough for me to be morally responsible?

if I know that a person's upbringing has given him violent tendencies, is spending two minutes feeding them enough reasons to hate someone enough to kill them reason enough for me to be morally responsible?

Quote:
Originally Posted by canjowolf View Post

Edit: My purpose here is to reinforce my claim of option C.) You can influence a person's behavior without magic. You do not hold responsibility for such behavior. I believe that both opinions B and C are possible, depending on the circumstances.
If you do not hold responsibility for how you influence other people's behavior, then I am not responsible if I influence person B's behavior, because the latter is a specific case of the former.
If I can influence their behavior, I can influence it so that they kill person C, again, because the latter is a specific case of the former.

So, a particular case of the claim "You can influence a person's behavior without magic. You do not hold responsibility for such behavior." is, "You can influence person B's behavior in such a way that they kill person C. You do not hold responsibility for such behavior."

There is a difference between influence and determine. If you seed clouds with silver iodine you *might* get rain. But if your method of killing has culpability of their own then that must inherantly decrease your own culpability- though not always on a 1:1 ratio. I'm not going to try and set dividing lines for how much time versus what legal degree of culpability someone should have if we could somehow determine intent- that is what juries are for.
Look, you are treating this as a monodimentional analysis "do you hold responsibility for how you influence people's behavior"? Of course you do. That however is not the orriginal question, which was if A tells C that B is having an affair in hopes that c will kill B, and c does, did a commit murder? Culpability can be moral, or legal, and can varry with numerous circumstances. What if a tells C about B's affair hoping c will divorce B but instead C kills B? The orriginal question hinged on the question of intent to influence someone's behavior as much as it did actual influence. Where i have taken seriosu exception is to te idea that spreading a rumor with intent to kill is somehow the equivelent of firing a gun at someone. What conflation others may have assumed from that does not represent my position, and I see a great many people here arguing not with what i have said but with what thye thought i meant.
Which in some ways illustrates my point, in that their behavior is not my fault.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ikul View Post
If you do not hold responsibility for how you influence other people's behavior, then I am not responsible if I influence person B's behavior, because the latter is a specific case of the former.
If I can influence their behavior, I can influence it so that they kill person C, again, because the latter is a specific case of the former.

So, a particular case of the claim "You can influence a person's behavior without magic. You do not hold responsibility for such behavior." is, "You can influence person B's behavior in such a way that they kill person C. You do not hold responsibility for such behavior."
Yes. I believe that this is true in some circumstances, one of which is unforeseeable and accidental effects, as outlined above. (Where we are using responsibility to mean moral responsibility rather than some synonym for causality).




 

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