BigBallinStalin wrote:
And how do we treat such humans, Mets? In the real world, we call such people "murderers"--even if they didn't know right from wrong.
Argumentum ad populum. Yes, many people use this terminology when referring to this situation. Our moral vernacular is not quite advanced enough to do otherwise, because usually we are focusing on what happened to the victim. That does not mean that we always
ought to believe the perpetrator is guilty of murder, or that if you specifically ask people what think they about this situation, that the person in question is guilty of murder.
Many insane people lack a capacity to know right from wrong, but when they murder people, we still call it "murder" because it's not like "legitimate" killing slips into vulgar relativism.
We do have terms for things like "legitimate" killing as you mean it. Manslaughter is one.
Killing is another. We can say that one person
killed another without using terminology such as "murder," and everyone will know that one person killed another. That term describes the causal action, but it does not describe the moral judgment of the action (like "murder" does). If you continue to call it murder even after a jury trial exonerates the person in question from murder (for example, by reason of insanity, or because it was determined that the killing was not intentional), then you are simply incorrect as a matter of empirics. Or, your moral beliefs about murder are different from that reflected in most liberal societies, in which case you should elaborate on that. Either way, as it stands this argument is weak.
Either way, Metsianism prescribes reduced sentences and possibly therapy sessions for Metsian murderers
"Metsian" murders are
actual murders. In modern democracies we try to be civil people and understand that context matters. We don't give the death penalty to young children for example. Are you suggesting that we should, and that there is zero moral distinction between a nine year old killing someone and a legal adult killing someone?
