I would like to briefly clarify some details about a certain proposal which was previously discussed elsewhere. First, I am not necessarily endorsing this policy. Merely noting, that in a world burdened by so many challenges, containing so many competing ethical dimensions along which to judge, and in which so many efforts have been expended and so many policies implemented only to fail, it behooves us to at least entertain, if not seriously consider, policy propositions of an unconventional nature. If you are unwilling to open your Overton window wide enough to let such ideas enter in, then fair enough. But at least, friends, let us peer out to observe their contours and form as they smack unwittingly into the glass.
The proposal is such: that every citizen ought to be granted one murder, which should be allowed to them without punishment by the state, with perhaps some reasonable limitations set thereon such as are useful to the maintenance of public order. Additional murders beyond the first, of course, should bear the full judgment of the law.
Now, to keep things fair, this policy would not give individuals the right to enlist the might of the state, or of any other unwilling individual, in the service of carrying out their proposed murder. They can only rely on their own judgment, resources, craft, and will. And of course, the potential murderee is fully permitted to defend themselves, relying on their right to self-defense, as well as the use of their own allowed murder if they have not yet used it. These considerations would put some natural and necessary limitations on the practice. It might also be limited to citizens (as both murderer and murderee), or at least to people residing within the country. (All of this to say, the model here is Dexter, not Death Note.)
And of course, this would not preclude individuals who murdered more than one person from claiming right to self-defense or other extenuating circumstances when prosecuted for their murders exceeding the limit. Nor would it protect perpetual ill-doers from being prosecuted fully for any additional murders exceeding the policy limit of One (1). The idea of this policy is merely that the first murder should be treated leniently, and if found reasonable by any plausible standard, left unprosecuted.
In practice, this policy would result in many societal benefits.
The direct positive use of this policy would be to allow those cunning criminal elements of society against which the justice system previously proved insufficient champion for the people, to be reduced or eliminated by the more proactive (and athletic) pro-social elements. People would once more dare to reasonably avenge those wrongs against them and theirs where evidence for a classic prosecution to move forward was insufficient, but which the true situation was known to all relevant parties, their hands stayed formerly only by the looming specter of the might of the state. Corollary to this, criminals would no longer dare offend so boldly against the persons and interests of law-abiding citizens, knowing that where formerly an offender could count on outrunning the weighty but slow and over-burdened hand of state justice, they now would be swiftly confronted by private retribution, up to and including that most ultimate of reprisals.
Some limitations on this right, as I mentioned before, would still be necessary. Murdering innocents for no reason would not be an acceptable use of the one-murder rule. And some reasons would require more scrutiny than others. Murdering other murderers or those who have wronged one personally or one’s family would be the most clear, acceptable usages (confer Freesia). Murdering children would probably require some additional scrutiny – or additional caveats, such as for abortion, which I will come to in a moment. Other reasons would fall into more of a grey area, but the courts would surely err on the side of permittance.
Murdering people over business matters would be a regrettable but inevitable occurrence. Likely, businesses would eventually evolve norms around when this policy was acceptable to implement and when not, and blacklist those companies and businessmen that violated the informal rule. Since the policy only applies to those murders committed personally, in theory any unscrupulous business mogul would only be able to take advantage of it once. Even if he were to attempt to convince others to act on his behalf to commit subsequent murders, there would be obstacles – he would need to persuade any potential proxy to use up their own single personal murder, and even so there would be a risk that the court would find the proxy’s connection to the victim insufficient justification for the policy to pertain. The legality of the matter would be little different than hiring a professional hitman under current law, as can be (as a purely practical matter) and is indeed currently done, the only difference being that it is currently slightly more clearly illegal. A law allowing a CEO to personally walk up to one of his competitors and stab them in the street, but only one competitor one time, doesn’t really change much – especially if all those competitors compensate by employing even tighter private security. The business world is perhaps the sphere most likely to be rational enough to treat this policy reasonably. And a return to personal duels fought in the street isn’t the worst thing that could happen.
Would this policy eliminate political corruption among politicians for fear of assassination, à la Akametsu? Unlikely – even fear of death does not, after all, make human nature infinitely malleable. Certainly, it would spur an upsurge in business for private security companies. Would the policy make the country ungovernable through an universal unwillingness to hold political office for fear of assassination? Surely not. Even now, people try to assassinate politicians, sometimes successfully but more often not. After all, it is not as if murder is somehow prohibited currently in a physical sense. Crazy people, or those who care not for consequences, can roll up on you and murder the life out of you any time they please, supposing you possess insufficient physical security. This is true now, and will still be true under the proposed policy. Only, right now the law-abiding, consequence-fearing citizens of the land have no recourse against such actions other than through the state-run legal system. Counter-murder? Risky. Even the self-defense argument can fail in some cases. A one-murder policy would end the total control of legal violence by the state and in a small part redistribute it, for the most part to the sane and reasonable citizens who are best equipped to carry it out with all due justice.
An additional benefit of this policy would be a neat solution to the perennially divisive question of the legality of abortion. Under this policy, a woman, if she has not yet used her free murder, would have the right to abort an unwanted pregnancy – if only done the once. This could be enforced, for example, by requiring anyone getting an abortion to relinquish their ability to bear future children. (Abortion is already an invasive procedure, so from one perspective this additional procedure would not add undue burden.) (Cases such as ectopic pregnancy which would inevitably result in the death of both mother and baby if allowed to proceed should not count, I feel, since they rather fall under the category of triage. Abortion in the case of rape, which has been pointed out cannot count as a principled exception while maintaining a pro-life stance, should then mostly be covered by the one-murder rule, most women in this situation likely/hopefully not having yet taken advantage of their murder. I think an additional concession to this case should be that the mother should be allowed, if she bears her unwanted child to term, to auction off said child to whichever childless couple is willing to pay the most, and to keep the proceeds of this auction tax-free, as an apology from the government for not maintaining a level of rule-of-law which would have prevented the situation in the first place.)
Of course, the downside of this policy would be some inevitable increase in violence among the citizenry. But would it result in a free-for-all of killing, à la The Purge? Unlikely. After all, most people who choose not to murder do not do so out of mere fear of the law. They choose not the murder out of the explicit belief or ethical intuition that murder is wrong – that life is sacred and valuable – and that it would stain their soul to unjustly kill another human being for personal gain. Some people, of course, do not obey such ethical standards. These people will still be brought to justice under the one-murder policy, either for lacking sufficient justification for their first murder, or for committing additional murders thereafter. Or, if somehow all of this falls through, the policy creates yet another failsafe – some law-abiding, ethical person might choose to use their one murder to eliminate an unethical murderer for the larger benefit of society. Thus, under this policy, the nets of justice are many.
And would some additional violence truly be such a downside? An official recognition that some degree of violence is inevitable in any modern society, even the more orderly ones, would lend itself to a general increase in the alertness and preparedness of the citizenry. After all, it stands to reason that in a country with the right to bear arms, the citizens should be allowed to use them! (In a country where certain weapons were disallowed, murders committed by unpermitted weapons under the one-murder policy could be judged more harshly – or perhaps the murder itself, provided it was a first murder, could be excused, even while the possession of the illegal weapon itself could be prosecuted. Or more simply, weapons restrictions could be eliminated altogether.)
Some might still fear that such a policy would lead to anarchy and chaos. But the nature of a society depends much more on the quality of its citizenry than the details of its rarely-read ten-thousand-page legal codes. In a society of criminals and psychopaths, most acts – economic, violent, or otherwise – will tend towards evil and injustice. In a society of good, wise, and well-intentioned citizens, most acts, even those of violence, will tend towards justice and order. For a brighter, better, bloodier world, a world in which justice is supreme, I give you the policy – One Murder Per Person, Please!
Literal Explanation Required 