I especially like the last one; but treason has a bad reputation that it doesn’t deserve. Nobody unconditionally owns the support or loyalty of another. That has to be earned and maintained. It’s always a two way street.
If loyalty isn't owed, then it's not treason. The Declaration of Independence is a good explanation of why loyalty was no longer owed and thus independence was not treason. To call it treason is to take King George's side of the matter.
I don't see any point in redefining something evil as "sometimes good." We don't redefine self-defense as murder and then say that murder has an undeserved bad reputation.
If we are going to redefine things, I would be more amenable to saying that loyalty is a two-way street and that violations in either direction are treason. Thus, it was King George who committed treason against his American colonies.
Murder is the intentional killing of the innocent. That's not how law defines it....
That is how law defines murder. Homicide is the killing of another, innocent or otherwise, in self defense, by accident or negligence, and by deliberateness--murder.
Which illustrates Thomas' point about the difficulty of (re)defining things.
If the law defines murder separately from homicide, it is usually as the unlawful killing of another etc. The Federal version of this says "murder is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought." The last condition captures the 'intentional' aspect; but innocence is a philosophical concept rather than a legal one. It would be very hard to establish that someone was 'innocent' in a court of law; 'not guilty' is as close as we usually try to get. It's legally murder even if they aren't innocent, for that matter, provided that you did it intentionally and maliciously.
6 comments:
I need the first one of these on a t-shirt.
Eric Hines
I especially like the last one; but treason has a bad reputation that it doesn’t deserve. Nobody unconditionally owns the support or loyalty of another. That has to be earned and maintained. It’s always a two way street.
If loyalty isn't owed, then it's not treason. The Declaration of Independence is a good explanation of why loyalty was no longer owed and thus independence was not treason. To call it treason is to take King George's side of the matter.
I don't see any point in redefining something evil as "sometimes good." We don't redefine self-defense as murder and then say that murder has an undeserved bad reputation.
If we are going to redefine things, I would be more amenable to saying that loyalty is a two-way street and that violations in either direction are treason. Thus, it was King George who committed treason against his American colonies.
Murder is the intentional killing of the innocent. That's not how law defines it; that's how philosophy defines it. The law is often the problem.
Murder is the intentional killing of the innocent. That's not how law defines it....
That is how law defines murder. Homicide is the killing of another, innocent or otherwise, in self defense, by accident or negligence, and by deliberateness--murder.
Which illustrates Thomas' point about the difficulty of (re)defining things.
Eric Hines
If the law defines murder separately from homicide, it is usually as the unlawful killing of another etc. The Federal version of this says "murder is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought." The last condition captures the 'intentional' aspect; but innocence is a philosophical concept rather than a legal one. It would be very hard to establish that someone was 'innocent' in a court of law; 'not guilty' is as close as we usually try to get. It's legally murder even if they aren't innocent, for that matter, provided that you did it intentionally and maliciously.
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