“It is generally undesirable for members of my own culture / social class to murder each other without just cause.”
Before you respond, note that “Person X committed murder in Society Y and it was okay,” is not a counterexample. You will need to present an entire culture which was
sustainable, and
has no general aversion to unjust intra-class murder.
… and, I guess if you’re still going for it, one which existed in Europe since 1000BC.
That’s like saying that in modern-day U.S., the culture is “totally casual about people killing each other, any social class, no reason necessary,” and justifying that by linking to a web page discussing the penalties for murder in present-day American law.
As that Wikipedia page will tell you, wergeld was a legal penalty for killing imposed on the guilty person. Today, punishing murder with fines sounds unusual (though perhaps not so much when you consider that wrongful death torts still exist), and this is indeed a sign of significant cultural change, but the idea that killing people was seen as an OK casual thing to do among the old Germanics, or any other historical people, is just ludicrous.
You’re committing fallacy of reinterpreting past cultures in terms of your own culture.
Weregild was not a penalty, and had nothing to do with guilt. It was debt towards family to compensate for their economic loss with no consideration of “guilt” whatsoever. Wikipedia doesn’t say so, but it was debt of extended family to extended family.
Thinking in terms of “guilt” doesn’t even make that much sense to cultures that organized society in terms of clans or families instead of individuals. Such cultures used to be very common. Even as late as 19th century there was no legal personhood for most women, and there still isn’t much of it for young people (they’re treated as children instead far longer than makes sense; more or less like women were treated in earlier times).
Weregild was not a penalty, and had nothing to do with guilt. It was debt towards family to compensate for their economic loss with no consideration of “guilt” whatsoever. Wikipedia doesn’t say so, but it was debt of extended family to extended family.
As you say, these people were illiterate, and they didn’t leave much record of their feelings and abstract opinions in these cases. But the fact is that if you killed someone, you’d be obliged to submit to legal sanctions, and if you failed to do so, you were in big trouble. This is not a situation that follows after acts that are considered “totally casual,” and whatever were the old Germanic words used to describe people in this situation, “guilty” seems to me like an accurate modern English translation. The fact that these sanctions were administered at clan level changes nothing.
Even as late as 19th century there was no legal personhood for most women,
That is true when it comes to property rights, contract law, etc. for married women. But it doesn’t mean that killing women was legal, married or not. You are making invalid analogies.
Weregild was not a penalty, and had nothing to do with guilt. It was debt towards family to compensate for their economic loss with no consideration of “guilt” whatsoever.
The wikipedia page also says that
The payment of weregild was an important legal mechanism in early Germanic society; the other common form of legal reparation at this time was blood revenge.
Emphasis added. How is legal blood revenge consistent with the interpretation of murder as nothing but an economic debt owed to the family?
ETA: Besides which, even if murder were only bad because of the financial loss to the extended family, murder would still be bad. Giving a reason why murder is bad isn’t to say that murder is not bad.
There was no “murder”, no “guilt”, and no “penalty”, and no “legal reparation” (in narrow modern sense) anywhere here. These concepts make no sense in such cultures. Intentional killing is treated identically to a common accident.
You might be confused by historical record, as cultures without centralized states and legal systems it brings tends to lack writing as well—so most of our records come from highly unusual subset of cultures with centrally enforced law, relatively individualistic societies etc.
There was no “murder”, no “guilt”, and no “penalty”, and no “legal reparation” (in narrow modern sense) anywhere here. These concepts make no sense in such cultures. Intentional killing is treated identically to a common accident.
Your disagreement is with the terminology used in your own cite. But the terminology doesn’t matter. If your cite is anywhere in the neighborhood of accurate, then these cultures held that something wrong had happened — that is, some imbalance had occurred that had to be righted — when one person caused the death of another. Perhaps they considered intentional killing to be no worse than a common accident. But another way to say that is that they considered unintentional killing to be just as bad as intentional killing.
You might be confused by historical record, as cultures without centralized states and legal systems it brings tends to lack writing as well—so most of our records come from highly unusual subset of cultures with centrally enforced law, relatively individualistic societies etc.
If the cultures you want to use for your argument left sparser evidence, then that means that you should be less confident about your interpretation of the moral thinking that was behind the written laws that they did leave behind.
In fact, you have a greater burden of proof than your interlocutors. You are saying that a culture that left less evidence was different in a particular way from most of the cultures for which we have better evidence, whereas your interlocutors are saying that the less-evidenced culture was probably about the same in this particular way. That means that your hypothesis is more complicated, and so a priori less likely.
For another example—killing own babies was extremely widespread, not even condemned in any way in most cultures including pre-Christian Rome. It was just as casual as abortion is today.
Or killing family members who disgraced your family in any way (your judgment) is widely praised in many cultures.
You’re right about this. Attitudes towards infanticide vary greatly between cultures, and in many cultures, both past and present, the recognized authority of the senior family/clan members has included the power to enforce their will, and the standards of behavior, by threats of death against the subordinate family members.
But again, all this always happens within a legal structure with clear rules about what constitutes unlawful killing, and serious penalties for those who kill unlawfully. This legal structure may have the form of unwritten folk custom, but people living under it are no more capable of ignoring it than the citizens of modern states can ignore the codified criminal laws. (In fact, even less so, since many laws nowadays are enforced only sporadically or not at all, and flouted widely and openly.)
You might be confused by historical record, as cultures without centralized states and legal systems it brings tends to lack writing as well—so most of our records come from highly unusual subset of cultures with centrally enforced law, relatively individualistic societies etc.
You don’t have to reach for misty prehistory, or even for particularly exotic and remote parts of the world, to find examples of traditional societies where the formal state-enforced law is largely irrelevant. For example, there are still ongoing clan blood feuds in some places in the Balkans, specifically in parts of Albania. These examples show a huge problem with informal revenge-based folk justice, namely that vengeance for individual killings can easily escalate into out of control clan warfare. Yet all this only goes to show how serious a transgression it is.
Easy, before Christianization Germanic (and some other Indo-European) cultures were totally casual about people killing each other, any social class, no reason necessary.
You were to provide an example of a culture where murder without cause wasn’t generally undesirable. But instead you pointed to a cultural that quantified exactly how undesirable they considered murder to be. It looks like they imposed pretty heavy fines, especially for the murder of those with high status. So they must have considered the murder of such people to be pretty undesirable.
Impact of Christianity was very shallow at first, and limited to social elites. It took something like century or two for it to really replace previous norms.
Care to name a few that I cannot counter with some European culture of last 3000 years, without even going any further?
“It is generally undesirable for members of my own culture / social class to murder each other without just cause.”
Before you respond, note that “Person X committed murder in Society Y and it was okay,” is not a counterexample. You will need to present an entire culture which was
sustainable, and
has no general aversion to unjust intra-class murder.
… and, I guess if you’re still going for it, one which existed in Europe since 1000BC.
Easy, before Christianization Germanic (and some other Indo-European) cultures were totally casual about people killing each other, any social class, no reason necessary.
That’s like saying that in modern-day U.S., the culture is “totally casual about people killing each other, any social class, no reason necessary,” and justifying that by linking to a web page discussing the penalties for murder in present-day American law.
As that Wikipedia page will tell you, wergeld was a legal penalty for killing imposed on the guilty person. Today, punishing murder with fines sounds unusual (though perhaps not so much when you consider that wrongful death torts still exist), and this is indeed a sign of significant cultural change, but the idea that killing people was seen as an OK casual thing to do among the old Germanics, or any other historical people, is just ludicrous.
You’re committing fallacy of reinterpreting past cultures in terms of your own culture.
Weregild was not a penalty, and had nothing to do with guilt. It was debt towards family to compensate for their economic loss with no consideration of “guilt” whatsoever. Wikipedia doesn’t say so, but it was debt of extended family to extended family.
Thinking in terms of “guilt” doesn’t even make that much sense to cultures that organized society in terms of clans or families instead of individuals. Such cultures used to be very common. Even as late as 19th century there was no legal personhood for most women, and there still isn’t much of it for young people (they’re treated as children instead far longer than makes sense; more or less like women were treated in earlier times).
taw:
As you say, these people were illiterate, and they didn’t leave much record of their feelings and abstract opinions in these cases. But the fact is that if you killed someone, you’d be obliged to submit to legal sanctions, and if you failed to do so, you were in big trouble. This is not a situation that follows after acts that are considered “totally casual,” and whatever were the old Germanic words used to describe people in this situation, “guilty” seems to me like an accurate modern English translation. The fact that these sanctions were administered at clan level changes nothing.
That is true when it comes to property rights, contract law, etc. for married women. But it doesn’t mean that killing women was legal, married or not. You are making invalid analogies.
The wikipedia page also says that
Emphasis added. How is legal blood revenge consistent with the interpretation of murder as nothing but an economic debt owed to the family?
ETA: Besides which, even if murder were only bad because of the financial loss to the extended family, murder would still be bad. Giving a reason why murder is bad isn’t to say that murder is not bad.
Your paradigm blinds you to reality.
There was no “murder”, no “guilt”, and no “penalty”, and no “legal reparation” (in narrow modern sense) anywhere here. These concepts make no sense in such cultures. Intentional killing is treated identically to a common accident.
For another example—killing own babies was extremely widespread, not even condemned in any way in most cultures including pre-Christian Rome. It was just as casual as abortion is today.
Or killing family members who disgraced your family in any way (your judgment) is widely praised in many cultures.
You might be confused by historical record, as cultures without centralized states and legal systems it brings tends to lack writing as well—so most of our records come from highly unusual subset of cultures with centrally enforced law, relatively individualistic societies etc.
Your disagreement is with the terminology used in your own cite. But the terminology doesn’t matter. If your cite is anywhere in the neighborhood of accurate, then these cultures held that something wrong had happened — that is, some imbalance had occurred that had to be righted — when one person caused the death of another. Perhaps they considered intentional killing to be no worse than a common accident. But another way to say that is that they considered unintentional killing to be just as bad as intentional killing.
If the cultures you want to use for your argument left sparser evidence, then that means that you should be less confident about your interpretation of the moral thinking that was behind the written laws that they did leave behind.
In fact, you have a greater burden of proof than your interlocutors. You are saying that a culture that left less evidence was different in a particular way from most of the cultures for which we have better evidence, whereas your interlocutors are saying that the less-evidenced culture was probably about the same in this particular way. That means that your hypothesis is more complicated, and so a priori less likely.
taw:
You’re right about this. Attitudes towards infanticide vary greatly between cultures, and in many cultures, both past and present, the recognized authority of the senior family/clan members has included the power to enforce their will, and the standards of behavior, by threats of death against the subordinate family members.
But again, all this always happens within a legal structure with clear rules about what constitutes unlawful killing, and serious penalties for those who kill unlawfully. This legal structure may have the form of unwritten folk custom, but people living under it are no more capable of ignoring it than the citizens of modern states can ignore the codified criminal laws. (In fact, even less so, since many laws nowadays are enforced only sporadically or not at all, and flouted widely and openly.)
You don’t have to reach for misty prehistory, or even for particularly exotic and remote parts of the world, to find examples of traditional societies where the formal state-enforced law is largely irrelevant. For example, there are still ongoing clan blood feuds in some places in the Balkans, specifically in parts of Albania. These examples show a huge problem with informal revenge-based folk justice, namely that vengeance for individual killings can easily escalate into out of control clan warfare. Yet all this only goes to show how serious a transgression it is.
You were to provide an example of a culture where murder without cause wasn’t generally undesirable. But instead you pointed to a cultural that quantified exactly how undesirable they considered murder to be. It looks like they imposed pretty heavy fines, especially for the murder of those with high status. So they must have considered the murder of such people to be pretty undesirable.
Note that that continued until Christianity was still pretty popular. Thus, there were specific rules about the weregild for clergy members.
Impact of Christianity was very shallow at first, and limited to social elites. It took something like century or two for it to really replace previous norms.