To me, the part of this comment that smacks of empathy failure is where you say “That their daughter has died is very little excuse.” Short of organic disease, the murder of one’s child is about as good an excuse for irrationality as a human can possibly offer.
To me, the part of this comment that smacks of empathy failure is where you say “That their daughter has died is very little excuse.”
My original version (which I truncated because the comment was getting too large) was perhaps more clear. It explained that it is an excuse in a similar way to “he was abused as a child” is an excuse to abuse children when an adult. It kind of explains it a little and perhaps warrants a lesser punishment but it doesn’t directly justify it. This is distinct from the more direct kind of excuse like “self defense”, “they had been abusing me consistently” or “they killed my daughter and I was getting revenge” where the actual behaviour is closer to being the right thing to do in the circumstances.
The above was condensed into ‘very little’ because I sometimes manage to refrain from exploring all tangents.
Different meanings of child. To parents someone is always their child no matter how old they are. This is a distinct notion of child as in “human below the age of maturity”. Child in this sense means closer to genetic/memetic offspring that they have raised.
To me, the part of this comment that smacks of empathy failure is where you say “That their daughter has died is very little excuse.” Short of organic disease, the murder of one’s child is about as good an excuse for irrationality as a human can possibly offer.
My original version (which I truncated because the comment was getting too large) was perhaps more clear. It explained that it is an excuse in a similar way to “he was abused as a child” is an excuse to abuse children when an adult. It kind of explains it a little and perhaps warrants a lesser punishment but it doesn’t directly justify it. This is distinct from the more direct kind of excuse like “self defense”, “they had been abusing me consistently” or “they killed my daughter and I was getting revenge” where the actual behaviour is closer to being the right thing to do in the circumstances.
The above was condensed into ‘very little’ because I sometimes manage to refrain from exploring all tangents.
And the accepted length of childhood is once again incremented...
Edit: Parent comment is no longer phrased so as to carry this implication.
Different meanings of child. To parents someone is always their child no matter how old they are. This is a distinct notion of child as in “human below the age of maturity”. Child in this sense means closer to genetic/memetic offspring that they have raised.
Fair enough, but it probably should have been phrased as “murder of one’s child”.
Ok, fixed.
Thanks!