[Jack Simth]

Originally posted by Simeron:
Perhaps but you will see that while I am using my own views I am not imposing them on others but in fact am reacting to an outside force. That is the major difference.

Being reactive is not the same as being proactive. Proactive is the place where you have the problems, not the reactive.

So in the case of the murderer, the murderer already took it upon themselves to impose THIER views on the victim so, by hunting them down you are being reactive to thier crossing the line first. If they never killed in the first place then you would not be doing anything to them hence, you would not be imposing your views at all.

Murder is something that is very easy to determine in many cases as the victim simply did not deserve to die due to not doing anything to anyone. When the victim has actually done something is where the case could be made that the killer was reacting to the victim. But again, you must put it back to the test of who is being proactive and who is being reactive.

Did the "murderer" react to a threat or did they proactively kill to enforce thier own code of ethics?

Ethics is a political choice whereas Morals is a faith based one. A simple proof is Morals are more or less from within but Ethics come from without. Most children know it is not good to hurt another child but, taking thier toy on the other hand has to be taught to them.

Those aren't quite the standard definitions of ethics and morality - the standard definition would be more along the lines of "ethics are rules to live by, moraility is how well they are followed". Your definitions will work well enough for this discussion, however.

Originally posted by Simeron:

So, while the case can be made that by reacting to someone is "imposing" my views on them it still leaves the imputus on the other side as it is thier actions that trigger my actions to stop them. The proactive side is the one that starts the movement.

*shrug* the murderer is being reactive if he's, say, avenging an insult to his family's honor, or if the victim was was going to get a law passed that would make the murderer's current livelyhood illegal (to pull a situation out of history: whale hunting), or if the victim was tresspassing, and such. In such cases, the victim was forcing a small portion of his/her ethics on the murderer: In the case of the insult, from the victim's POV, that wasn't a deadly insult, it was a jape; such things should be limited to verbal sparring only - he should have just taken the insult or insulted right back. In the case of making whaling illeagal, the victim's ethics say courtroom battles should stay courtroom battles, while the murderer is responding to a threat to his livelyhood that he doesn't know how to fight in the originating arena (the field of law), and so brings the fight to an arena he knows (guns and brute force). In the case of the tresspassing, perhaps the victim believed that the ground doesn't belong to us, we belong to "mother earth", thus there are no property rights, and the victim believs he should be able to go where he pleases, regardless of the five foot chain-link fence with the "no tresspassing" signs. Sure, FOR US, none of those would be sufficient cause to kill someone - but those are our ethics, our morality - not necessarily the murderer's. For him (or her, I suppose, but most convicted murderers are male), the victim was forcing a portion of the victim's ethics onto the murderer, causing the victim to be a threat, and thus someone to take action against.

Remember also, however, in the case of accomplished murder, that the murderer is not forcing his ethics on those who hunt down the murderer (after all, the murderer has already applied all the force, and the person forced is no longer in a position to be reactive) - so those hunting down the murderer are being proactive, not reactive.

Few people kill others without some provocation (it happens a lot for many forms of money-related killings such as muggings, and it happens with certain kinds of insanity (sadisim, sociopaths, psychopaths, et cetera), but with most murders (most solved murders, anyway) there is some form of provocation, even if the only one who views the "provocation" as such is the murderer) - who is reactive and who is proactive is often (if not always) a matter of perspective. Whose perspective gets enforced? Who choses which perspective? Why that perspective? Why that person? Any possible answer to such questions is very likely to ultimately end up being a case of one person/group of people imposing a portion of their ethics onto others - which you stated you are against.

That, and there are other issues: what do you do about a factory owner whose factory is putting out waste products that are slowly poisoning the ground water that people's wells draw on? He isn't forcing his ethics on anyone - he's not forcing anyone else to pollute; he's not preventing anyone else from containing the waste products of their factories - and yet his actions are potentially fatal to many other people.

I just have the odd habit of finding bizzare angles to look at things from, usually for purposes of analyzing the self-consistancy of a viewpoint.