Acts of violence and murder have historically proved difficult to accommodate in standard accounts of the formula of universal law (FUL) version of Kant’s Categorical Imperative (CI). In “Murder and Mayhem,” Barbara Herman offers a distinctive account of the status of these acts that is intended to be appropriately didactic in comparison to accounts like the practical contradiction model. I argue that while Herman’s account is a promising one, the distinction she makes between coercive and non-coercive violence and (...) her response to concerns with the classification of the latter as imperfect duties raise significant questions about the status of some duties. I suggest that we look, instead, to Kant’s treatment of suicide in The Metaphysics of Morals for an account of norms of non-violence and, in particular, to the connection between this duty and concerns with inner freedom and moral health. I argue that we can use this account to inform our general understanding of duties prohibiting killing and violence, and that the resulting account is a promising one. (shrink)

(2013). The Murderer's Salute: News Images of Breivik's Defiance After Killing 77 in Oslo. Journal of Mass Media Ethics: Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 57-59. doi: 10.1080/08900523.2013.755077.

From the author of Wittgenstein's Poker and Would You Kill the Fat Man?, the story of an extraordinary group of philosophers during a dark chapter in Europe's history On June 22, 1936, the philosopher Moritz Schlick was on his way to deliver a lecture at the University of Vienna when Johann Nelböck, a deranged former student of Schlick's, shot him dead on the university steps. Some Austrian newspapers defended the madman, while Nelböck himself argued in court that his onetime teacher (...) had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. David Edmonds traces the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle—an influential group of brilliant thinkers led by Schlick—and of a philosophical movement that sought to do away with metaphysics and pseudoscience in a city darkened by fascism, anti-Semitism, and unreason. The Vienna Circle's members included Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and the eccentric logician Kurt Gödel. On its fringes were two other philosophical titans of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. The Circle championed the philosophy of logical empiricism, which held that only two types of propositions have cognitive meaning, those that can be verified through experience and those that are analytically true. For a time, it was the most fashionable movement in philosophy. Yet by the outbreak of World War II, Schlick's group had disbanded and almost all its members had fled. Edmonds reveals why the Austro-fascists and the Nazis saw their philosophy as such a threat. The Murder of Professor Schlick paints an unforgettable portrait of the Vienna Circle and its members while weaving an enthralling narrative set against the backdrop of economic catastrophe and rising extremism in Hitler's Europe. (shrink)

Murdering Animals confronts the speciesism underlying the disparate social censures of homicide and “theriocide”, and as such, is a plea to take animal rights seriously. Its substantive topics include the criminal prosecution and execution of justiciable animals in early modern Europe; images of hunters put on trial by their prey in the upside-down world of the Dutch Golden Age; the artist William Hogarth’s patriotic depictions of animals in 18th Century London; and the playwright J.M. Synge’s representation of parricide in fin (...) de siècle Ireland. Combining insights from intellectual history, the history of the fine and performing arts, and what is known about today’s invisibilised sites of animal killing, Murdering Animals inevitably asks: should theriocide be considered murder? With its strong multi- and interdisciplinary approach, this work of collaboration will appeal to scholars of social and species justice in animal studies, criminology, sociology and law. (shrink)

This paper presents the results of the semiotic analysis in which the story of Krystian Bala, a Polish author who was convicted of murder, is studied in detail. The presented case study focuses on the interactions between real and fictional worlds, in particular, on the possibility of amalgamation of a real author’s and a fictional storyteller’s roles. Furthermore, the double-dimensional analysis of reality and fiction is complemented and broadened by an in-depth examination of how this story has inspired other (...) authors. By discussing real events and texts of culture based on them, this paper aims at presenting the process in which the writer who had turned to be the murderer became the protagonist of artistic creations of others, and, in consequence, a part of a broader socio-cultural phenomenon. (shrink)

Winner, 2002 French Translation Prize for Nonfiction Murderous Consent details our implication in violence we do not directly inflict but in which we are structurally complicit: famines, civil wars, political repression in far-away places, and war, as it’s classically understood. Marc Crépon insists on a bond between ethics and politics and attributes violence to our treatment of the two as separate spheres. We repeatedly resist the call to responsibility, as expressed by the appeal—by peoples across the world—for the care and (...) attention that their vulnerability enjoins. But Crépon argues that this resistance is not ineluctable, and the book searches for ways that enable us to mitigate it, through rebellion, kindness, irony, critique, and shame. In the process, he engages with a range of writers, from Camus, Sartre, and Freud, to Stefan Zweig and Karl Kraus, to Kenzaburo Oe, Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler. The resulting exchange between philosophy and literature enables Crépon to delineate the contours of a possible/impossible ethicosmopolitics—an ethicosmopolitics to come. Pushing against the limits of liberal rationalism, Crépon calls for a more radical understanding of interpersonal responsibility. Not just a work of philosophy but an engagement with life as it’s lived, Murderous Consent works to redefine our global obligations, articulating anew what humanitarianism demands and what an ethically grounded political resistance might mean. (shrink)

In this Article I will challenge the tendency to discount the severity of domestic homicide, a phenomenon I call "the domestic discount." I will argue against automatic mitigation-the imputation of provocation or diminished capacity-simply or merely because the relationship" between victim and defendant is domestic or sexually intimate. I will argue that the traditional hot blood/cold blood dichotomy is an imperfect guide to the moral grading of homicide offenses. In particular, reliance on it has led to the under evaluation of (...) the seriousness of some domestic homicides. It is my contention, or hypothesis, that the conclusions I draw from the study of capital domestic cases can be generalized to the entire domain of domestic homicides: If homicide laws were purged of patriarchal values, the remaining principles that underlie our grading of homicide offenses would be consistent with the rejection of a domestic discount; the worst domestic murders like the worst predatory murders would rank among the most reprehensible crimes. (shrink)

The Law Commission for England and Wales has published for consultation a proposal for an offence of first degree murder. A person found guilty of this offence whether as a principal or an accomplice will receive a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment. It is argued that the conditions for liability as an accomplice put forward by the Commission do not fulfil the Commission's aspiration for a "parity of culpability" between principals and accomplices. The discussion has general implications for the (...) reform of complicity laws. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 122.2 (2001) 270-274 [Access article in PDF] Elizabeth S. Belfiore. Murder among Friends: Violation of "Philia" in Greek Tragedy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. xix + 282 pp. Cloth, $55. In explaining the kinds of situations that are dreadful or pitiable, Aristotle tells us in the Poetics (1453b14-23) that all actions occur between friends (philoi), enemies, or neither: the classification is evidently meant (...) to be exhaustive, and the third term, is added to the usual binary, friend or foe, for the sake of greater precision. Acts between enemies or neutral parties do not arouse pity, apart from the nature of the event itself (pathos). What one wants, then, is situations in which they occur en tais philiais, such as brother killing brother, son father, mother son, son mother, and the like--in other words, to judge from the instances Aristotle offers, when violence takes place within the family. The somewhat odd phrase, "within affective relationships"--embraces familial bonds, whereas en tois philois would, I believe, have suggested rather friends who are unrelated by blood.Such, at least, is my interpretation of the passage. Elizabeth Belfiore disagrees: in an appendix to the first chapter of her book, in which she discusses my published views on the question, she maintains that here "the noun philos surely has the same range as philia, and both refer primarily, if not exclusively, to relationships among close blood kin" (20). Whatever the sense of philos, however, Aristotle clearly means that tragedy is best at eliciting pity when it deals with tensions within the family, and, as Belfiore notes, such bonds are "central to more than half" the extant tragedies (xv)--and relations by marriage are not included in this figure. Of those fragmentary plays whose plots can be reconstructed with some confidence (Belfiore analyzes 141), 69 involve harm or the threat of harm to blood relatives, according to Belfiore. A dozen more focus on spouses, again classified separately under the heading "reciprocal relationships," which covers also xenia and suppliancy (202-3), although Belfiore (6) notes that Aristotle lists marriage under philia sungenikê (NE 9.4; EE 7.6-7), while guest-friendship belongs rather to koinônikê (supplication is not discussed in NE 8-9). "Reciprocal relationships" is thus a problematic class, since it includes bonds that the Greeks would, I think, have seen as quite distinct. Be that as it may, "Murder among Kin" might have been a more suitable title for this volume, especially [End Page 270] given that violence between friends in the narrow or modern sense is virtually nonexistent in Greek tragedy. It is an unfortunate consequence of broadening the meaning of philos that this circumstance goes unexplained in Belfiore's discussion.Before examining Belfiore's argument in more detail, let me first give an overview of the structure of the book. It falls into two halves of about equal length. The first part consists of a general overview of philia relations in Greek literature, followed by close readings of five tragedies. These include Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris, where the danger is fratricide; Aeschylus' Suppliant Women, the theme of which is defined as "the suppliant bride"; Sophocles' Philoctetes, which is treated as a play about xenia; Euripides' Andromache; and Sophocles' Ajax, in which suicide is taken to be a violation of the most intimate kind of philia, that which obtains with oneself (the chapter title is "Killing One's Closest Philos").The second part consists of three appendices, the first of which summarizes the plots of the surviving tragedies other than the five singled out for treatment in the body of the text. These are arranged by category: blood kinship, subdivided in turn into "parent harms child," "child harms parent," "sibling harms sibling," and "harm to other blood kin" (17 plays in all); reciprocal relationships, covering marriage, xenia, and "suppliancy"; and exceptional plays, including Sophocles' Ajax and Euripides' Andromache. Within each subcategory, plays are treated by author, with individual works arranged in alphabetical order of the English titles. Thus, "parent harms child" begins with Aeschylus' Eumenides, followed... (shrink)

Some people believe that God made it a condition for His forgiveness even of repentant sinners that Jesus died a sacrificial death at human hands. Often, in the New Testament, this doctrine of Objective Atonement seems to be implied, as when Jesus spoke of his blood as ‘shed for many for the remission of sins’ , or when St Paul said that ‘Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures’ . And for many centuries the doctrine was indeed accepted (...) by most if not all Christian theologians. It seems in fact to be an essential part of Christianity, which adherents of that religion cannot reject without undermining the authority both of their scriptures and of a very long tradition. It looks then as if objections to the doctrine are objections to the Christian scheme itself. Here is one of them. As the Gospels present it Jesus was murdered, by one or more of Pilate, the Sanhedrin and the Jewish mob. Given Objective Atonement, God ordained the sacrificial death of Jesus, and so, as it seems, this murder. Murder requires freedom on the killer's part. And many have doubted that an action can be both free and ordained by God. Leave that aside. A good God would in any case not make it a condition for our forgiveness that someone acquired the guilt of murder. (shrink)

Originally titled “Is It Murder in Tennessee to Kill a Chimpanzee,” this article argues in some detail that typical legal definitions of “murder” as involving the intentional killing of “a reasonable being” would require classifying the intentional killing of chimpanzees as murder.

Crime stories attract audiences and social buzz, but they also serve as prisms for perceived threats. As immigration, technological change, and globalization reshape our world, anxiety spreads. Because journalism plays a role in how the public adjusts to moral and material upheaval, this unease raises the ethical stakes. Reporters can spread panic or encourage reconciliation by how they tell these stories. Murder in our Midst uses crime coverage in select North American and Western European countries as a key to (...) examine culturally constructed concepts like privacy, public, public right to know, and justice. Working from close readings of news coverage, codes of ethics and style guides, and personal interviews with almost 200 news professionals, this book offers fertile material for a provocative conversation. We use our findings to divide the ten countries studied into three media models; we explore what the differing coverage decisions suggest about underlying attitudes to criminals and crime, and how justice in a democracy is best served. Today, journalists' work can be disseminated around the world without any consideration of whether what's being told (or how) might dissolve cultural differences or undermine each community's right to set its own standards to best reflect its citizens' values. At present, unique reporting practices persist among our three models, but the internet and social media threaten to dissolve distinctions and the cultural values they reflect. We need a journalism that both opens local conversations and bridges differences among nations. This book is a first step in that direction. (shrink)

Marquis’s account of the ethics of abortion is unsatisfactory but not as Christensen implies baseless. It requires to be amended rather than abandoned. It is true, as Marquis asserts that murder and abortion both might deprive people of something of value to them, in particular, the life of a sort that might have been to them worth living. However, it is mistaken to conclude, as Marquis does, that murder and abortion are thereby morally equivalent. Not all deprivation is (...) wrongful. Not all that is wrongful is wrongful because it deprives someone of something. Contrary to what Christensen asserts, and Marquis seems to accept, it is not solely those discernible people who currently exist who might be deprived by our current actions. It is not only towards and concerning such living discernible people that we can have moral duties. It is not only such living discernible people who can be the beneficiaries of our generosity. Hence, contraception and the emission of greenhouse gases are, like abortion, issues that raise significant moral questions; however, they might each be properly answered. Nonetheless, it does not follow that is morally equivalent to each other far less than they are all morally equivalent to murder. If and when they are morally wrong, they can be different wrongs. (shrink)

'For if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination' Thomas De Quincey's three essays 'On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts' centre on the notorious career of the murderer John Williams, who in 1811 brutally killed seven people in London's East End. De Quincey's response to Williams's attacks turns morality on (...) its head, celebrating and coolly dissecting the art of murder and its perfections. Ranging from gruesomely vivid reportage and brilliantly funny satiric high jinks to penetrating literary and aesthetic criticism, the essays had a remarkable impact on crime, terror, and detective fiction, as well as on the rise of nineteenth-century decadence. The volume also contains De Quincey's best-known piece of literary criticism, 'On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth', and his finest tale of terror, 'The Avenger', a disturbing exploration of violence, vigilantism, and religious persecution. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

_Murdered Father, Dead Father: Revisiting the Oedipus Complex_ examines the progressive construction of the notion of paternal function and its central relevance in psychoanalysis. The distinction between the _murdered father _and the _dead father_ is seen as providing a paradigm for the understanding of different types of psychopathologies, as well as works of literature, anthropology and historical events. New concepts are introduced, such as "_a father is being beaten_", and a distinction between the _descriptive après coup_ and the _dynamic après (...) coup_ that provides a model for a psychoanalytic understanding of temporality. The book includes a reflection on how the concepts of the _death instinct_ and the _negative_, in their connection with that which is at the limits of representability, are an aid to an understanding of Auschwitz, a moment of rupture in European culture that the author characterizes as " the murder of the dead father". Perelberg’s book is an important clinical and intellectual marker, and will be required reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, anthropologists, and historians, as well as students in all these disciplines. (shrink)

Using a U.S. and a Canadian example, in this article we argue that news reports of murder, especially of the heavily covered signal crimes that become part of community storytelling, often employ predetermined formulas that probe intrusively into the lives of those involved in the murder but ultimately come away with only cheaply sketched, stick-figure portraits. The thesis is that crime coverage that is formulaic tends to produce cynicism and a distance between the reader and those involved in (...) the crime. However, a deeper and more caring probe into the causes and consequences of crime could lead the community to wider conversations about responsibility, social justice, and reconciliation. What is required to expand the reporting of murder stories is more of the ethic of care that can serve to both deepen the public's understanding of the individual crime and widen the community's dialogue about its significance. (shrink)

Embarrassed by the apparent rigorism Kant expresses so bluntly in 'On a Supposed Right to Lie,' numerous contemporary Kantians have attempted to show that Kant's ethics can justify lying in specific circumstances, in particular, when lying to a murderer is necessary in order to prevent her from killing another innocent person. My aim is to improve upon these efforts and show that lying to prevent the death of another innocent person could be required in Kantian terms. I argue (1) that (...) our perfect Kantian duty of self-preservation can require our lying to save our own lives when threatened with unjust aggression, and (2) that Kant's understanding of moral duty was that duties are symmetrical , such that if one has a duty to perform a given action on one's own behalf or to protect one's own rational nature, then one also has a duty to perform similar acts on other's behalf or to protect their rational nature. Thus, that the individual protected against aggression by means of deception is not oneself should be of no consequence from a Kantian perspective. Lying to the murderer is thus an extension of the Kantian requirement of self-defense. (shrink)

It is possible to defend the death penalty for aggravated murder in more than one way, and not every defence is equally compelling. The paper takes up arguments put forward by two very distinguished advocates of the death penalty, Mill and Kant. After reviewing Mill's argument and some weaknesses in it, I shall sketch another line of reasoning that combines his conclusion with premisses to be found in Kant. The hybrid argument provides at least the basis for a sound (...) defence of execution for the most serious murders. (shrink)

Ali (Ethics and Information Technology 17:267–274, 2015) and McCormick (Ethics and Information Technology 3:277–287, 2001) claim that virtual murders are objectionable when they show inappropriate engagement with the game or bad sportsmanship. McCormick argues that such virtual murders cannot be wrong on Kantian grounds because virtual murders only violate indirect moral duties, and bad sportsmanship is shown across competitive sports in the same way. To condemn virtual murder on grounds of bad sportsmanship, we would need to also condemn other (...) competitive games. I argue, contra McCormick, that virtual murders performed within massively multiplayer online roleplaying games can be wrong on Kantian grounds when they are exploitative. Exploitation occurs when virtual murder treats the player controlling the victim in a way that they have no opportunity to consent to (i.e. as a mere means in Kantian terminology). I argue that some virtual murders involving inappropriate engagement (Ali, Ethics and Information Technology 17:267–274, 2015) and bad sportsmanship (McCormick, Ethics and Information Technology 3:277–287, 2001) are exploitative in this way and therefore also wrong on Kantian grounds. (shrink)

At least ten useful little reasons why we should reject efforts to introduce voluntary euthanasia. An alternative version of the case in the New Law Journal against voluntary euthanasia, but this version contains some user-friendly links.

Who was responsible for the murder of Sennacherib? This question fascinated Assyriologists for most of the twentieth century, until a new interpretation of an obscure, fragmentary letter convinced many that a disenfranchised elder son of Sennacherib, Urad-Mullissu, had hatched the conspiracy. Since the publication of this text in 1980 by Simo Parpola, near consensus has developed about these events. In this paper I reexamine the issue and revive the theory that Esarhaddon, Sennacherib’s son and successor, may have been behind (...) the assassination, rather than his elder brother. I do not question the coherence of Parpola’s interpretation, but I suggest that the field may place undue confidence in a single broken, decontextualized letter. More importantly, the evidence implicating Esarhaddon is ample. I extend six arguments that point toward Esarhaddon’s guilt, most of which are derived from Esarhaddon’s own account of events in his famous Nineveh A inscription. I do not propose that we can establish Esarhaddon’s guilt conclusively at this remove, but I conclude that the weight of this evidence equals, if not surpasses, that which points to a plot concocted by Urad-Mullissu. (shrink)

Malapportionment—electoral districts with divergent ratios of people to representation—was ruled to be unconstitutional in a widely venerated series of cases before the Warren Court. Those cases held that a principle of political equality, ‘one person, one vote’, is required by the Constitution. But what is the content of that principle? Many Justices and commentators declare that it is vague, empty, circular, or meaningless. This creates a murder mystery. Malapportionment was killed; but by what, exactly? This Article seeks an answer (...) by focusing on the Court’s commitments about the scope and strictness of one person, one vote: it is a broad (rather than narrow) principle of rough (rather than exact) equality. As such, one person, one vote requires an equal number of people per district and an equal number of votes per voter; and it requires a roughly equal number of people per district. These commitments are attractive in isolation. But, this Article shows, they are objectionable in conjunction: they entail that one person, one vote is too permissive, as it only requires a roughly equal number of votes per voter. If your vote is roughly equal to mine when your district is fractionally more populous than mine, your vote is also roughly equal to mine when I can cast fractionally more votes than you. -/- Since this problem follows inexorably from the Court’s commitments about the scope and strictness of one person, one vote, there are two possible solutions. First, one person, one vote could be broad a principle of exact equality; administrability may then justify underenforcing the principle in distributing voters to districts, but not in distributing votes to voters. Second, one person, one vote could include a narrow principle requiring rough equality in apportionment, as well as a distinct principle requiring exactly equal votes per voter. These solutions have important constitutional implications—including for resolving the population baseline at issue in malapportionment, which remains uncertain after Evenwel v. Abbott. But neither provides an easy way out. Each makes one person, one vote either too restrictive or too permissive. -/- This puzzle brings to light why the operative principle in a venerated series of cases is deeply unclear and unsettled. But it has a special significance beyond that. One person, one vote lies at the heart of America’s constitutional democracy, which is already under considerable threat. On the one hand, if the content of the principle is too restrictive (or too uncertain), then objections to its constitutionality are considerably strengthened. On the other hand, if it is too permissive, then one person, one vote provides little constraint on Vice-President J.D. Vance’s recent proposal to give extra votes to parents, as well as myriad similar policies and procedures that would erode voters’ equality at the ballot box. (shrink)

The paper focuses on violence, claiming that it is not action, but silence and inaction that become?murderous?, given that we are forced into a permanent and impossible process of choosing between responsibility for the other and the possibility of responding to a call for help. Still, this position is not final and the author offers certain alternative strategies, such as rebellion, goodness, critique and shame.

There has been a shift in belief from God to nature. This shift is educational and based on theories and methodologies revealed by science that contradict the importance of and existence of a God. This shift has transformed society through education to a lack of ethic and moral terpitude.

In a rational system defences should interlock with the elements of the offence to ensure that conviction labels are differentiated according to the defendant’s degree of wrongdoing and culpability. The overall grading structure of criminal homicide, as represented in contemporary doctrine, goes some way to reflect this ethic. But the substance lacks precision and, in some key details, moral coherence. The recent Law Commission Consultation Paper, in a pragmatic and sensible attempt to rid the law and procedure of murder (...) of the malign influence of the mandatory sentence, has unnecessarily compromised such structural coherence as it currently enjoys and which could properly form a satisfactory basis for reform already precise and morally coherent. This is evident both in relation to the abandonment of the attack based template for the fault element in murder, and also in the unwillingness to view the partial defences as affecting the wrong in homicide as opposed to the grade. (shrink)

(2013). Visualizing a Mass Murder: The Portraits of Anders Bering Breivik in Danish National Dailies. Journal of Mass Media Ethics: Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 64-67. doi: 10.1080/08900523.2013.755083.

In 1951 Eric Voegelin dedicated a long and very dense essay to the Utopia of Thomas More, subsequently integrated in a larger portrait of the Renaissance political thought. The critical interpretation of Voegelin focuses on the breakdown of the traditional order and the emerging of a new vision of Man and Politics in the early sixteenth century, and particularly on the risks related to the mundane eschatology of which the work of More is involuntary and somewhat inconsistent anticipation.