If you had the legal authority to kill anyone you wanted at any time would you do it?

[Exi]

Apparently most everyone would kill if given the chance.

Who knew!?

 

[Exi]

Murderers and their moral authority.

 

[sub_thug]

I was with you up until this part. You probably should have somewhat of a problem with exposing children to the killing of their parent, regardless of whether or not said parent is criminal scum of the highest order.

If there is literally no other way of dispatching said criminal, I suppose I could understand that sentiment. Otherwise, it seems unnecessarily cruel and detached. You'd be doing more harm than necessary - and to innocents, no less.

Most of the time, this is the most practical thing to do. One of the many benefits to attacking your enemies at night is that you generally have an idea of where they will be. In many cases, they are in their beds at home. If you can snatch them up, do so. Don't hurt said innocents, but that sure as hell won't stop a reasonable person from shoving a black hood over the head of the bad guy and quickly moving that person out the door to the detention facility.

Here's another moral quandary for folks who are interested: Let's say you are in a place where there are both Sunni and Shia Muslims. You have a Sunni prisoner who you believe is a bomb-maker that has killed 10 Americans already, but you don't have any evidence that would be enough to convict him in an American court of law. You have testimony from people in the village, but that's it. You have just captured him in accordance with your mission, and now you are trying to figure out which jail to send him to. If you send him to a Sunni jail, whether he's guilty or not, he will be released from jail within 3 days because he is a Sunni. If you send him to a Shia jail, guilty or not, he will be killed for his crimes because he is a Sunni. Where do you send him?

 

[Archie Goodwin]

let's say your government elelected to to the position of "Messenger of death" giving you the power to kill anyone you wanted anytime you wanted would you kill people? You could walk into any prison or jail or end the life of anyone you feel like needs to die and no matter who it was it would be completely legal and up to your discretion.

Yes. Absolutely. Without question. #dreamjob

 

[5crew]

@sub_thug
I continue reading the rest of the thread and your posts after I made my reply to you.

You obviously isn't the type I mentioned in my initial post and my first reply to you. I did mentioned "Normal" people won't be able to do that. You seems to be a military person so you are out of this category. You were trained to do something and probably have to be good to serve your nation. I respect that.

But as mentioned, "Normal" people won't be able to do it. The "" is not in any way used in a negative form.

 

[sub_thug]

Yeah, let me know when you actually killed something.

Half the people that say they will kill someone probably can't even kill animals for meat themselves. Willingly taking a life isn't as easily as most people believe is.

I'm the type that will full out support a vigilante that does that. But I can't be sure I will be one myself. It's easy to say you can do it. It's usually the people that believe they can do it that can't when faced with it.

Haha, you missed big chunks of this thread. I have killed before, although none of these people were in the US. They've pretty much all been in the Middle East. I said that stuff from a position of tacit knowledge. It's not as hard as people make it out to be.

For what it's worth, I grew up hunting deer, wild pigs, and water fowl.

 

[MarcoW]

could they kill you in self defense?

 

[sub_thug]

@sub_thug
I continue reading the rest of the thread and your posts after I made my reply to you.

You obviously isn't the type I mentioned in my initial post and my first reply to you. I did mentioned "Normal" people won't be able to do that. You seems to be a military person so you are out of this category. You were trained to do something and probably have to be good to serve your nation. I respect that.

But as mentioned, "Normal" people won't be able to do it. The "" is not in any way used in a negative form.

Understood. No worries.

I would argue that there isn't a big difference between me and most people though. I wasn't brainwashed to kill, only instructed on how best to do it. I think it's amazing on how easy that stuff gets turned on in humans. It's probably a good thing, as we are creatures that are desperate to survive. We do really well at it too.

I don't have it in front of me, but I remember reading a study about how police differed from non-police when put into police training situations where the LEO had to decided to shoot or not to shoot. Overwhelmingly, the non-police were way more aggressive than the police were. They were shooting all the time, suggesting that this was an inherent characteristic within people. Humans, for better or for worse, seem to be extremely violent. We turn it on so quick too, and I think we would do well to try and understand this.

 

[MadSquabbles500]

Of course I will, but I have several people I want to kill. Do I get one a day, or just one kill in a lifetime?

 

[BearGrounds]

Most of the time, this is the most practical thing to do. One of the many benefits to attacking your enemies at night is that you generally have an idea of where they will be. In many cases, they are in their beds at home. If you can snatch them up, do so. Don't hurt said innocents, but that sure as hell won't stop a reasonable person from shoving a black hood over the head of the bad guy and quickly moving that person out the door to the detention facility.

Here's another moral quandary for folks who are interested: Let's say you are in a place where there are both Sunni and Shia Muslims. You have a Sunni prisoner who you believe is a bomb-maker that has killed 10 Americans already, but you don't have any evidence that would be enough to convict him in an American court of law. You have testimony from people in the village, but that's it. You have just captured him in accordance with your mission, and now you are trying to figure out which jail to send him to. If you send him to a Sunni jail, whether he's guilty or not, he will be released from jail within 3 days because he is a Sunni. If you send him to a Shia jail, guilty or not, he will be killed for his crimes because he is a Sunni. Where do you send him?

I would have to be immersed in that situation in order to be able to truly make a decision.

But to entertain the hypothetical as it's been given, you said that I believe him to be guilty. Given that, I'd probably choose option B.

 

[Horse Style]

Humans, for better or for worse, seem to be extremely violent. We turn it on so quick too, and I think we would do well to try and understand this.

You would think most people would understand this after taking a history class. History is littered with violence of varying degrees and this is from the winners' POV. I could imagine if the losers somehow wrote history, we'd learn about a much more gruesome side of things.

 

[5crew]

Haha, you missed big chunks of this thread. I have killed before, although none of these people were in the US. They've pretty much all been in the Middle East. I said that stuff from a position of tacit knowledge. It's not as hard as people make it out to be.

For what it's worth, I grew up hunting deer, wild pigs, and water fowl.

Yep, I did and made another reply which you obviously read.

I still disagree with your statement on "not as hard as people make it out to be" though. It is entirely possible that you have this belief because you grew up hunting and joined military. Most people can't even skin a chicken if they were asked to. Asking this group of people to kill a human being when they can't even kill an animal would be difficult. Even within the opposite group of people that hunt, the numbers will be low as well.

I'm sure you weren't brainwashed or anything. But TRAINED as you yourself stated. I agree that our basic instinct is survival and when it comes to kill or be killed, almost everyone will kill. But this thread isn't about self-defense. It's about intentionally going out to seek people to kill, there is a huge difference in that.

I'm going to pull a random number out of my ass to make a point I truly believe.
1 out of 1000 people could kill for moral reasons they believe in.
1 out of 1000 of these people could continuing killing the second/third/fourth/blahblah without going insane and doubting their own act.
That makes 1 in 1m capable of doing what this thread really request.
We have 7b world population, so 7000+- of these people could exist.
I'm sure almost none exist in Sherdog.

EDIT:
It's really not about being timid or "pussy'. Modern humans just aren't equip with the proper mental capabilities to do that.

Also, considering the crap load of typos made in this post, I think 3am is a good time for me to sleep. ^^

 

[sub_thug]

You would think most people would understand this after taking a history class. History is littered with violence of varying degrees and this is from the winners' POV. I could imagine if the losers somehow wrote history, we'd learn about a much more gruesome side of things.

Absolutely. But somehow, many seem to think that it is not in the nature of people to do harm to one another in an anarchic system. This seems terribly misguided. If we are hoping to decease violence in the world, then we need to incentivize it. The reason that the US and China won't go to war with one another any time soon is because we have created webs of interdependency, making it foolish to engage in a military conflict. Therefore, we are incentivized to resolve our conflicts differently. We, as a culture, should look into expanding these webs, reducing our requirement to engage in a force-on-force conflict. As such, free trade is a good thing, and we can't be ashamed of making good business deals. Some of this fair trade nonsense is actually getting in the way of good interdependencies. I'm starting to head off on a tangent though, so I'll stop...

 

[Hans Gercmiov]

I absolutely would but there's only one person I wish death on and they deserve it.

 

[BearGrounds]

You would think most people would understand this after taking a history class. History is littered with violence of varying degrees and this is from the winners' POV. I could imagine if the losers somehow wrote history, we'd learn about a much more gruesome side of things.

One doesn't even need a history class, they simply need to observe nature.

 

[sub_thug]

Yep, I did and made another reply which you obviously read.

I still disagree with your statement on "not as hard as people make it out to be" though. It is entirely possible that you have this belief because you grew up hunting and joined military. Most people can't even skin a chicken if they were asked to. Asking this group of people to kill a human being when they can't even kill an animal would be difficult. Even within the opposite group of people that hunt, the numbers will be low as well.

I'm sure you weren't brainwashed or anything. But TRAINED as you yourself stated. I agree that our basic instinct is survival and when it comes to kill or be killed, almost everyone will kill. But this thread isn't about self-defense. It's about intentionally going out to seek people to kill, there is a huge difference in that.

I'm going pull a random number out of my ass to make a point I truly believe.
1 out of 1000 people could kill for moral reasons they believe in.
1 out of 1000 of these people could continuing killing the second/third/fourth/blahblah without going insane and doubting their own act.
That makes 1 in 1m capable of doing what this thread really request.
We have 7b world population, so 7000+- of these people could exist.
I'm sure almost none exist in Sherdog.

EDIT:
It's really not about being timid or "pussy'. Modern humans just aren't equip with the proper mental capabilities to do that.

I think a bit of this is how humans kill today though. Please entertain me for a moment.

When calculating range with the naked eye, I was taught something really useful and also important. At 100m, I can see the features on your face. At 200m, I can't see your face anymore. At 300m, your hands disappear, so your arms move as one unit. At 400m, I can't see your head; it becomes a blob on top of your shoulders. At 500m, I can't see your legs move independently anymore. At 600m, you're just a speck that moves around. Past that, I'm using a heavy weapons system, sniper rifle, or I'm calling in some sort of explosives on your ass. So that's pretty cool, but why is it important?

Killing people who you can't see is fundamentally easier than killing someone right next to you. At 200m, a target that I can engage standing up without supporting my rifle on anything. It took me about 45 rounds to do, but I've made a 200m pistol shot before with 9mm once. At that distance, I can't see your face anymore. You aren't mentally a person to me. You're an 16-bit video game character that I might see fall down when I hit you, and that's it. I think this plays an important part, in addition to the adrenaline of when bullets are coming in. You get really focused on funny stuff when your adrenaline is spiked like that, so you're not thinking about moral concepts. As I said in another post, you did all the thinking about it that you're going to do before the fight starts. If you're in it, you're in it. It's kind of like sky-diving. Once you're in that plane, your ass is jumping. The time to think about if you were too scared or not was when you were on the couch at home thinking about what you wanted to do next Saturday. For violence, once that first bullet hits your truck, you're done thinking about it. It's time to fight, whether you thought you were going to get in a fight that day or not.

 

[Harmonica]

I'm not sure I fully understand your POV/argument here.

We, as a society, already allow our courts to sentence certain criminals to death. If you're in accordance with that, why would doing it yourself, if given the authority, be cowardly?

I wasn't aiming at that. What I meant was that people who abstain from certain acts just because they could face legal or other consequences are nothing more than calculating opportunists - cowards. For instance, someone rapes your wife. You know the perpetrator's identity and would gladly kill him but you won't because you might end up getting killed yourself or doing time in case you succeed. In other words, your actions aren't determined by a moral code but by whether the outcome is favorable or not.

 

[Harmonica]

Yeah, let me know when you actually killed something.

Half the people that say they will kill someone probably can't even kill animals for meat themselves. Willingly taking a life isn't as easily as most people believe is.

I'm the type that will full out support a vigilante that does that. But I can't be sure I will be one myself. It's easy to say you can do it. It's usually the people that believe they can do it that can't when faced with it.

Depends on the mindset and the situation. The closest I came to killing a man was when this chump broke a bottle over my head while I was arguing in his favor with fellow bouncers. He got in a fight with one of them, got his ass handed to him and came back with a bottle. When he approached me, I calmly explained the realities of the situation to him, saying that deepening the conflict doesn't benefit him in any way whatsoever. As I was telling him to go about his business, he yelled "Motherfucker, do you know who I am" and hit me over the head with said bottle. I got a swift takedown, mounted him and unleashed a barrage of punches which he couldn't defend since I placed my knees on his armpits. He was beaten pretty badly, blood was gushing from several holes I made in his head but this fucker was still going. It was hardly a surprise really, since he was coked out of his mind. When he turned his back on me, I secured a rear naked choke and pressed as hard as I could. If there were no witnesses around, I would have killed him and wouldn't feel one iota of guilt over it.

It is then that I concluded what I am arguing in this thread.

 

[BearGrounds]

I wasn't aiming at that. What I meant was that people who abstain from certain acts just because they could face legal or other consequences are nothing more than calculating opportunists - cowards. For instance, someone rapes your wife. You know the perpetrator's identity and would gladly kill him but you won't because you might end up getting killed yourself or doing time in case you succeed. In other words, your actions aren't determined by a moral code but by whether the outcome is favorable or not.

Thanks for clarifying.

I understand what you're getting at now, but I think it's a bit more complex, and not so black and white.

Say you have children with said woman, and getting put away for a vigilante killing will remove their father from their lives (not entirely, as they can still visit you in prison, but certainly in a very meaningful way). Are you still a coward for not going after the person to kill them personally (if you indeed wish them dead/punished), in lieu of allowing the authorities already in place to do so, so you can remain free to raise your children?

Can certain situational factors never cause two aspects of one's moral code to conflict?

 

[Harmonica]

Thanks for clarifying.

I understand what you're getting at now, but I think it's a bit more complex, and not so black and white.

Say you have children with said woman, and getting put away for a vigilante killing will remove their father from their lives (not entirely, as they can still visit you in prison, but certainly in a very meaningful way). Are you still a coward for not going after the person to kill them personally (if you indeed wish them dead/punished), in lieu of allowing the authorities already in place to do so, so you can remain free to raise your children?

Can certain situational factors never cause two aspects of one's moral code to conflict?

Look, it's just my personal code of honor stemming from my unique character and experiences, not something I expect all the people to do in said situation. I understand where you're coming from and doing things your way would get you no judgment from me.