Yes, I have morals. I understand and adhere to the principles of right and wrong, and I feel guilt when something happens to someone if I think there was a tiny chance I could have prevented it. I also think that religion is a nonsense. So I don't know what guides me, but its not religion.

Ahem, not trying to turn this into a religious thread. What I should have said was “In fact, apart from religion (and not all people are religious) there is no compelling reason to follow any moral standard at all other than what you happen to feel is right.”

While you may not feel killing another person is wrong, how and the world are you going to compel another person who believes differently not to do it without the use of physical force? You can’t appeal to moral virtue, as this other individual simply has a different moral code from you. I merely brought up religion as the one construct I see that enables us to non-forcibly (in the physical sense) place our moral codes onto others. To be sure, I am very uncomfortable discussing religion is this light, as it seems to denigrate the whole faith thing into a means of non-physical control. However, pragmatically it seems to me that it is the only alternative to physical restraining those who have different morals than “society”.

You have a point there Bitt.
You personally cannot kill anything, I also have problems when actually holding the club.

Can most people realize they are hypocrites when discussing murder and/or hunting?

What I should have said was “In fact, apart from religion (and not all people are religious) there is no compelling reason to follow any moral standard at all other than what you happen to feel is right.”

That's fair, although I think that it's more than ``happen''.

a means of non-physical control

One of my major problems with religion, but:

it is the only alternative to physical restraining those who have different morals than “society”.

At which point is becomes a government, which probably is what the ancient Jews needed, but is long since outdated by now (A religious-based government, that is), as a government based in religion is bound to mark those that don't agree as criminals.

But, as I said, I have no desire to make this about religion.

I agree 100%. Prison should be feared. Sod all that human rights nonsense - if you have violated someone else's human rights, why should you get to keep yours? Especially as many households don't have the same facilities/luxuries as prisons. Why should criminals get computer games, comfortable beds, gym facilities? My vote would definitely be for concrete cells, bread + water (plus whatever minimum required to survive) and hard labour as exercise.

At which point is becomes a government, which probably is what the ancient Jews needed, but is long since outdated by now (A religious-based government, that is), as a government based in religion is bound to mark those that don't agree as criminals.

Government based on anything is bound to mark those who don’t agree as criminals; if it didn’t it would be failing in one of it’s major responsibilities. And that’s what we have here: a burglar who is engaging in activities society has marked as criminal. The question is how society can enforce it. If everyone agreed on the same moral virtues, than it wouldn’t be a problem. However, everyone doesn’t and I see no way to convince the outliers other than to point guns at them and lock them up.

I am a big fan of that, but in old England they used to call it "Australia".
Thats quite a nice place to live now too !

Yes, but the basis for the criminality is that it affects other citizens. A religious government will tend to mark things as criminal that have no effect on other citizens. For example, prostitution and purchasing alcohol on Sunday mornings.

Isn't fake morality fun
Like prohibition, which did nothing more than increase the power of the mafia in the US.

I find the old laws most fun.
These are the ones that no-one can be bothered to get removed from the statute books. Here is a great set of examples http://www.equerry.com/html/fun/eq_humor-shl.htm

You can bet that most of them are still there!
What makes it even more scary is the fact that every so often, the local nuts in power will start to enforce some ancient law.
I recall this happened up north when they decided to arrest someone for cursing in front of children.
http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=16529

In reply to:

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"A Wyoming community passed this one: "No female shall ride a horse while attired in a bathing suit within the boundaries of Riverton, unless she be escorted by at least two officers of the law or unless she be armed with a club." And continues with this amendment to the original: "The provisions of this statue shall not apply to females weighing less than ninety pounds nor exceeding two hundred pounds."

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- Are these f'ing for real???

My favourite...

"The rider of any horse involved in an accident resulting in death shall immediately dismount and give his name and address to the person killed."

Can you imaging getting arrested for one of these "crimes" ?!?!?

You will notice the fact that the jokers in power call themselves "lawmakers". They don't see it as their responsibility to clean up. That is the courts job, as well as the poor schlub who has been arrested and is spending time in jail of course.

Sad fact is, most laws are created and voted on by politicians. You get what you pay for!

Lack of faith in the legal system, me? Never!

Were we living in a country of vigilante justice where the punishment for burglary was death, then Martin should not have been convicted. Thankfully we don't live in such a country. People who are driven to attempted murder in response to such provocation are certainly victims in many senses, but that doesn't make it OK for them to start executing kids - not even antisocial ones.

On one hand, death is the ultimate price, and shouldn't be handed out so lightly. On the other hand it's no effort to avoid it in this case. Choosing to not burgle is in fact the "do nothing" alternative. If you go out of your way to put yourself in such a situation, you're implicitly agreeing to whatever mistreatment comes your way. (in my opinion )

"We don't have a death sentence for burglary in this country and we don't want one either."

I wouldn't cry too hard over one for stupidity. "Don't steal" is a pretty simple concept.

Agreed…..

Occupation - Thief – Hazards – Being shot and possibly killed while at work.

This martin guy was in the wrong. Maybe he shouldn't still be in prison but he is..

I am much more disgusted that OJ is not in prison or dead already for brutually murdering 2 people.

Also more disgusting is that you can be a police chief in the US even if you have a violent background.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030509/ap_on_re_us/police_chief_shootings_4

Why should criminals get computer games, comfortable beds, gym facilities?

Because the fundamental concept of imprisonment is supposed to be rehabilitation, not punishment.

The vast majority of prisoners are not confined for life; they are going to be back out on the streets again when their prison term is finished. Do you think our prisons should be nothing more than advanced training centers to make these criminals even more proficient at their criminality than when they began their incarceration?

I, for one, would not feel comfortable in an environment where every released prisoner re-entered society as a bitter, brutalized, totally angry misfit whose sole purpose in life was revenge on the people that made him that way.

That said, our prisons do a miserable job of rehabilitation. Just look at the recidivism rate for confirmation of that. Many people a lot smarter than I am have tried to come up with a better system and failed. I wish I had the answers, but I don't.

It has been shown time and time again that fear of punishment is NOT a deterrent to crime. Criminals do not perform their crimes with the intention of being caught. I don't think making prisons even more brutalizing than they are now is a viable solution to the problem.

tanstaafl.

Well said, Doug. There was a short article in one of recent SciAms (I can't find it right now) about US experts warming up again for rehabilitation aspect of the penal system (Europaens never abandoned it), with statistics showing 20%-50% better (i.e. lower) recidive rates if thugs were not simply punished.

Speaking of being disgusted at justice or lack thereof, how about Tulia case?

The man broke the law. So I suppose they have a legal right to keep him in jail. The problem is the law is bullshit. I admire the man. He has the character to not give in, and stand by what he did. It kind of reminds me of The Crucible.

We don't want burglars, and we don't want people getting shot. If everyone was armed, there would be no burglars and nobody would get shot. I don't have much remorse for a dead thief. It's been proven that areas with less restrictive guns laws have less crime and areas with more restrictive gun laws have more crime. And areas that previously had relatively low restrictions on guns and then started restricting gun use, had increases in crime, and vice versa. The bottom line is more guns in the hands of the common man equals less crime. It makes a criminal's job much harder.

If someone breaks into my house, he's either going to jail willfully, or one of us is gonna die. Contrary to what wfaulk said, if that happened in the US, he would not have gotten jail time. If a burglar is in your house, you have the right to kill him. And that's the way it should be. Wfaulk, if someone comes into your home, rapes your daughter and tries to kill you, what are you gonna do? Hide in the corner and cry? Call the police? Hell no. You need to find your balls and kill the son of a bitch before he kills you. I don't care if he's a crackhead just trying to steal my tv, it'll be the last time he breaks into my house, one way or another.

Guns in the hands of good citizens will keep the peace. Disarming men like Tony Martin will not solve crime. In fact, it will only proliferate it. And Britain won't solve their crime problem until they either realize this or start putting criminals in jail for good.

Stop talking out of your ass.

I can't find an example in the twenty seconds I went looking, but there are any number of cases in the US where people have been sent to jail for killing people who illegally entered their homes. The one I specifically remember is the guy who heard someone outside his house, got his gun and waited for the guy to come in and then shot him. He got convicted of first degree murder, IIRC.

And having someone come into my house and commit further crimes is not the same as hearing someone leaving and then shooting them in the back. One of the guys was obviously already out of the house.

This does not excuse the burglary at all, and the guy does have the right to protect his stuff (if not with a gun in the UK), but he already did that, and then killed the guy anyway.

If you can't find any, I would be happy to link stories of people rightfully defending their homes. But you do have a point, that if the burglar is outside of the home and running away, then the shooter could be convicted.

If you can't find any, I would be happy to link stories of people rightfully defending their homes.

I don't deny that this is the case. Many burglars come into homes who have no qualms about killing its inhabitants. I feel that if the occupants feel like their well being is in danger then they have the right to defend themselves.

But these were two junkies who wanted to steal some stuff to support their habits (most likely). Unless the homeowner really thought that they were about to release some SBDs while their backs were to him, he was in no danger, and he knew it. He wanted to punish those two guys, and he did.

Fortunately, the law recognizes that it's not up to the individual citizen to be judge, jury, and executioner. It allows for private citizens to prevent crimes and (I assume this is the case in the UK as well as in the US) perform citizens' arrests. But, again, the crime had already been prevented.

Honestly, and this is totally tangential, it looks to me like there would be better ways to defend that house than lying in wait with a gun. In the picture I saw, there were many windows broken in. I somehow doubt that those two guys broken them all. It looked to be in a state of general disrepair. Now, if the homeowner was poor and couldn't afford to fix it, then that's one thing, but the articles said that it was one of at least two occupances he owned and that burglars had previously stolen hundreds of pounds worth of furniture, so I find it unlikely that he's poor. Installing glass may well prevent the burglaries. And a cheap alarm system is probably not out of his range. That's not to say that this sort of thing should be required, but he seems to have the wherewithal to do this, and the cost of that ought to be less than the cost of a human life, as wretched as it might be. It should definitely be less than living in jail for years.

I actually wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that he was lying in wait for someone to show up so he could shoot them.

well.... I find it kind of disturbing the attitude of some here. Since when does the value of your TVset be equal to the value of any human life?
And that less restrictive Gun control lowers the crimerate is just bullshit. That perhaps may be the case in the states. But if you compare the homocide rate in "civilized" USA and the homocide rate in most of Europe you se a BIG difference!

I recently watched michael Moores "Bowling for Columbine" And he does have some points.. Allthough his approach is 'tacky'(?) or tasteless (?).. Allthough his point where Americans seems to take the law into their own hands and thinking it justified hit straight in the bullseye. And his statistics of homocides committed speaks for itself...

I think he really does have a point where he says that americans seems afraid.. Allthough I can see why.... Its a deeply rooted problem that wont be solved over night..

About the punishment vs rehabilitation prison issue, I think that society have alot to gain with the sentiment of rehabilitation. Less crime is committed, and the general attitude of the people is more humane.

Its not simply the value of a TV set as you put it. Its a violation of someones HOME. Not just a house, but your home and your family. Thats worth more to me than the life of some crack addict burgular.

I don't think any of us can say how we would react until we've actually been there. I hope we never have to either. But if it did happen to me, and someone close to me was killed by them, I would have hoped I'd done EVERYTHING possible to stop them - if I happen to have a gun at the time, I may well use it. I won't know until it happens.

In reply to:

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While you may not feel killing another person is wrong, how and the world are you going to compel another person who believes differently not to do it without the use of physical force? You can’t appeal to moral virtue, as this other individual simply has a different moral code from you. I merely brought up religion as the one construct I see that enables us to non-forcibly (in the physical sense) place our moral codes onto others. To be sure, I am very uncomfortable discussing religion is this light, as it seems to denigrate the whole faith thing into a means of non-physical control. However, pragmatically it seems to me that it is the only alternative to physical restraining those who have different morals than “society”.

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The problem, as I see it, is simply that the moral code that binds society together and makes it a society rather than just a bunch of individuals is not taught well enough. Maybe enforcement is part of that problem, but something has taken the large majority of us and made us decide internally that we don't want to steal, lie, torture and kill.

Society is altruism. Society is the principle that we work better as a team rather than as a diaspora of individuals. The reason society ultimately works is because each member decides to be a part of it and work together. Giving everyone the right to do whatever they want is Anarchy, and there is good reason why this always seems to be portrayed in the same light as lawlessness and mistrust.

In a perfect world everyone would simply move around to fit into the social group that best suited them. See Neal Stephenson's book The Diamond Age for an excellent example of this. Each group ultimately has penalties and punishments for members who don't conform, and those penalties are naturally harsher when you move into groups that require a smaller degree of personal responsibility. Bud, for example, is allowed to get a skull gun and do what he likes with it, until he actually gets caught. Hackworth, on the other hand, internally rejects any desire for such power over his fellows; but Hackworth is an inventor and a Neo-Victorian and thus actually commands far greater power over people. It is Hackworth's choice to exercise restraint in this that defines his role in society.

My personal conviction is that we now have a society where morals and social requirements are barely taught at all formally. We've devolved from the old school system that taught three languages, a variety of humanities and sciences, and enforced a strict discipline - and thus produced people who could force themselves to do great things - to not forcing any student to do anything if they don't want to and therefore giving them no determination and drive at all. They just hang around hoping it will all be handed to them on a platter and complain when it isn't.

Sorry, boys and girls, but what no-one's taught you is that this society works on the idea that you actually have to work to have stuff. Stuff is the reward for doing work. We have this legal system to protect that because we recognise that it often appears easier to steal the stuff rather than work for it. We can't send you off to your own land where no-one has to do any work and everyone starves, because we don't have a place like that, so we have to do the next best thing and shut you away from the rest of society for a while.

Just on a side thought, just imagine if you fitted the prisons out with exercise bikes that put the power they generated back into the grid? Would you get any power put back into the grid? Maybe they could pay their way by generating electricity? I mean, in centuries gone by they used to have giant treadmills or endless staircases or pedals that would push paddles through pits of sand - all things that did nothing but made the prisoners work. These days about the hardest thing they do is to put earpads back on airline headsets. Make 'em work, I say! That way even if you're put in prison unfairly you can still do your work with a good conscience.

I tried to be good and expound my moral theories but I got distracted.

Have fun,

Paul

I agree with you that one shouldn't be eager to kill, but being that when a theif breaks into your home and tries to steal your stuff, you should be able to defend it with full force at your discretion without having to worry about going to jail for protecting your home. Afterall, the theif brings it on himself.

I recently watched michael Moores "Bowling for Columbine" And he does have some points..

Ah, yes. Bowling For Columbine. The fictional documentary. (http://www.revoketheoscar.com)

well.... I find it kind of disturbing the attitude of some here. Since when does the value of your TVset be equal to the value of any human life?

Is a TV set worth a human life? I don't think so. What about a hundred tv sets? what about a thousand? What about every red cent and every piece of property in this country? Is a murderer's life worth more than a victim's? Is law and order worth a human life? Should we just start handing out tv sets to whoever wants one? What if I want my own tv set? Maybe we should just have anarchy. I bet that will bring down the homicide rate.

What would you do if you were being robbed of your tv set? Call the police? So they can use their guns to stop the criminal? Why shouldn't you be able to use your own gun to stop the criminal? Then you can let the theif decide whether or not his life is worth a tv set.

Whether you like it or not, guns will eventually be used to stop criminals, whether by you or by the police. This is the same line of thinking that people have when they complain about how animals are killed inhumanely. Then they goto to the supermarket and buy that animal's dead body, yet they can't bear the thought of killing that animal. And yet they attack the very people who do the dirty work for them. It's a fact of life - if you want to survive, it's either you or the animal. If you want to live in peace, it's either you or the criminal.

Twenty years of Oprah have caused the pussification of America. Tony Martin isn't a criminal; he's a crimestopper.

The police will use the same standard you as an individual have to use when deciding to shoot someone. The police can't shoot someone untill they threaten to harm someone. In the US, you are also allowed to shoot someone should they threaten to kill you. You can't kill them for threatening to take your TV set.

Matthew

You can't kill them for threatening to take your TV set.

And, as any good mafioso will tell you, dead people don't talk. So if it were legal to kill anyone who threatened to take your TV set, there would be a lot of dead people who allegedly threatened to take TV sets.

Thankfully, in this country, you need to be able to prove that you were in direct danger if you decide to bust a cap in someone's ass. If it were any different, we'd have gun-toters popping off on anyone who walks by their property with so much as a gleam in their eye.

Whether they threaten to steal is irrelevant. It's the action that matters. If someone breaks into your house, you have the legal right to shoot them dead. Even if they were only stealing a 5 cent stick of gum. Perhaps it varies from state to state, but in Louisiana, the use of deadly force is legal if someone breaks into your home, is attempting to break into your home, or is carjacking you.

I don't believe it would be legal to kill someone simply because they verbally threatened you on the street. Now maybe if they stuck a gun in your face and threatened you...