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Over 50,000 Palestinian children require treatment for acute malnutrition, says UN agency
(www.middleeastmonitor.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
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The killing of children is widelly deemed the most immoral kind of murder, because there is no way it can be spinned as the killing of people guilty of anything or a self-defense: children are almost by definition innocent and incapable of defending themselves or overpower an adult, especially young ones - it takes a special kind of individual (namelly, sociopath or psychopath) to not only willingly take human life, but even that of those who are guaranteed innocent and totally incapable of defending themselves, much less attacking.
This actually is reflected in the numbers of murder victims, were children are killed in a far, far lower proportion of their numbers than adults, and ditto for war casualties: adults on both sides usually will go a lot further in protecting children, even not their own, than they will for adults.
It is surprising that in your moral framework you do not see the murder of children as an especially cold and calous kind of murder.
I dunno, to me that's a little arbitrary. Killing someone outside of self defense is just murder. So in your view is a school shooter worse than a mall shooter? Would you say murdering a handicapped stranger in a wheelchair who cannot defend themselves is worse than killing a healthy young adult stranger?
To me it's all just killing innocent people, their age or health is irrelevant. The law makes no difference as far as I'm aware, it's all murder. I don't see any point in differentiating murders based on the traits of the victims.
The vast majority of people in this World see the killing of other human beings as something that covers a moral range, with something like self-defense when in direct danger for one's life being at the more acceptable end of the scale and the killing of the young children at the more unacceptable end of the scale.
This moral scale within murder also applies to the murderers themselves, which is why - as I pointed out earlier - in murder statistics and deaths in wars, children form a far smaller proportion of the deaths in comparison to the total of children, than people of other ages for in proportion to the total of people of those ages.
So even if you yourself haven't a heightened sense of revulsion for some murderes versus others (which, by the way, is not normal), even people who kill other people generally find the killing of children harder or even unnacceptable.
In practice child murder is pretty well correlated with the highest levels of sociopathy and psychopathy, so a military which practices high levels of child murder has higher levels of psychopaths and sociopaths in their midst and leadership, and they have freer reign to act in psychopathic and sociopathic ways with no punishment - there are always some psychopaths and sociopaths in the military, but there being so many that child-murder is a generalized practice including specific targetting children - for example snipping children or bombing playgrounds - is incredibly rare.
We saw this with the SS and the Nazis, and we see this with the IDF and the Zionists.
This seems a bit made up. Again, the law makes no difference.
Regarding this moral scale, I disagree. I think the vast majority of the world sees it as binary. Murder bad. Self defense okay. Either/or, no sliding scale present. Do you have any sort of evidence?
This is not sound. There are many reasons children could die in wars less, with evacuation from conflict zones being a big one. Similarly with crime, where things like gang violence will never target them due to them not being gang members.
This is not sound. You point out leadership in the very next line, and leadership absolutely makes a big difference. One correlation is not enough to draw such a conclusion when there are other factors.
I'm academically inclined, personally, so I pay great attention to details and do not think with my feelings. So these details are important to me.
Every single Justice System in the World has a range of sentences for even the same kind of killing crime (for example for Murder) and even different crimes for the killing of another human being (such as Murder vs Manslaughter).
So even the various Justice Systems in the World recognize different levels of blame and deserved punishment for different situations where a human being kills another.
Justice Systems, even if containing plenty of unfair or ill-drafted laws, at the high-level encode what Society finds acceptable and unacceptable - you might have some countries with the Death Penalty and others without, and different minimum sentences for Murder across the World, but there isn't a single Justice Systems in the World with a single fixed sentence for Murder, which would be what matches your "Murder is Murder" position.
Meanwhile your argument on this is "the law makes no difference". Full, unadulterated, 100% personal opinion of the denialist kind.
Denialism is not Skepticism and it's the very opposite of "academically inclined" and putting forward and holding a theory entirelly on what you believe without in this entire thread even once putting forward even the most basic piece of supporting evidence that the rest of the World thinks like you (everything has literally been what you think and what you disagree with) is about as anti-academic as it gets.
Granted, for you it is as you say - Murder is Murder - (that's pretty well established by now).
For everybody else there are only two logical possibilities:
Occan's Razors is a pretty straighforward way to determine which of the two possibilities is the most likely.
Okay, so do murderers of children get worse sentences then, on average? With supporting data, preferably.
Murder and manslaughter are differentiated via intent, same with things like first or second degree murder. Afaik, the traits of the victims are not taken into account, that I've ever heard anyway.
The very first link in a Google search - several states have explicity sentences for the murder of children, either with higher maximums, higher minimums or transforming things which would otherwise be Manslaughter into the same as First Degree Murder. (Just search for "Child" in that page to find those).
Also check this paper. Even though it's about gender rather than age, you can find the point I made earlier about "vulnerability" for example at page 435 section B.1 as well as explicity references to children in the various Sentencing Aggravatory Scales under Apending I (from page 464) explicitly under scale I and IV and implicitly in other scales (i.e. Scale 3 - Heinousness) which whilst they don't prove that child killing explicitly is deemed more heinous than others, does prove my point that society has Heinousness criteria for Murder, disproving your "Murder is Murder" take.
Three results for ctrl+f child.
First somewhat supports your claim.
The second specifies it has to be someone under your care.
The third has the same sentence for both.
Then there are 47 other states that seem to make no distinction, supporting my opinion that traits of the victim do not really matter.
I'll check the other read later, it sounds like a deeper look.
First a note: The third entrance you found has a minimum sentence of 10 years in jail for child Manslaughter and no minimum sentence for adult Manslaughter, hence is nor the "same sentence" - per that law even if the Juri finds reasons for a sentence lower than 10 years in prison, the sentence cannot be less than 10 years in prison if the victim was a child.
The paper in the second link covers sentencing guidelines (which is formal guidance for prosecutors but not actual law, so they can disregard it) and how jurors actually decided (i.e. derived from de facto results), both of which as far as I can tell are much more common way sthan "by way of formal law" in shaping the sentences for killing of children are different than others.
Quite independently of all that, even just that first link (first result in the Google search) disproves that notion of yours that Murder is Murder.
Ah, I missed that minimum, thank you. Perhaps murder is murder was a bit exaggerated, but my primary point that the traits of the victims don't really matter, and shouldn't really matter, still stands.
I think what's happening, incidentally, is a cultural thing. You are part of a particular culture, and so you and ideas you spend a lot of time around have a certain view. I don't think it is as broad as you think, though, where the "vast majority" agrees with you.
Being interested in a technical understanding, I'm intentionally ignoring any cultural influences I was raised with (like, "women and children first!", stuff like that), because I am worried they are ultimately inaccurate, and may introduce bias into how I am thinking about it. This is why Occam's Razor does not matter to me, it is a guideline and nothing more. I want to be technically, precisely correct, as much as I can manage. A guideline is no good for that.
That said, I am curious if the more detailed paper changes my understanding any. The law is an interesting subject for me.
Oh, it's absolutelly cultural, probably derived from empathy (check the Vulnerability chapter in the paper in my second link), and it seems to be almost universal at least in the modern Western World.
And indeed, going back to the very beginning of our discussion, I was giving emphasis to the killing of children by the Zionists as an especially abhorrent crime because I do share that feeling as I am part of that culture just like I expect are the majority of those that would read my post. I don't write comments to convince the tiny subset of people who find it easy to have a very detached view on the purposeful killing of human beings, I write my comments to convince most people and I wasn't even being manipulative because the take I have on the morality of child killing is based on the feelings I have on which deaths are more abhorrent which seems to be the same as most people likely to read my comments.
That said, a purely logical and as objective as possible analysis would still yield that the murder of children is generally a worse act than the murder of adults, simply because children have in average a lot more years as a productive citizens ahead of them than adults: in pure, emotion aside, almost Accounting terms, targetting children in a war is targetting the Future of a nation by taking out their Future productive capability.
In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised if that's exactly the calculation that the Zionists made - if one has no empathy and hence no sense of added abhorrence when it comes to child murder and one has as a strategical objective to weaken now and forever an entire enemy ethnicity, it makes logical sense to target the children of the "enemy ethnicity" in order to further that strategical objective and the absence of empathy guarantees there are no pesky feelings like guilt getting in the way.
Taking it back to Gaza, a genocide is a genocide. It's an attempt at eradication of a whole group of people. Of course it's heinous, and it's difficult for me to think of any other way to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, which clearly is the goal as said by their own nationalists, without killing the people there. If there are kids there, they will be involved.
This is inherently heinous, by virtue of its scale and overarching goal. The fact that it necessitates killing children is simply obvious to me, and in no way changes how I see the whole thing. It's like pointing out a candle when the whole house is already on fire.
I suppose a core difference is I'm not really trying to convince anyone of anything regarding Gaza though. Lemmy is overwhelmingly against the genocide, which I think is good and correct. I'm more interested in personally understanding various things, and correcting misinformation when I run into it, particularly with regards to history or science. Which is why I originally jumped in to talk about the prevalence of genocides in the modern era.
Back to child murder, you're still applying an inherent value, this time on the good of the society, where children have more years ahead of them. This is still a cultural influence, a purely objective position would not apply additional value to anything like human health or happiness. Nobody has to care about the future, and I'd say recent times illustrate that a great many people even desire a future of human extinction. All these apocalypse-cheering types you run into online, the hardcore religious rapture folks, groups like that. I do not agree with these positions, but I cannot understand them unless I am capable of being coldly objective about these things.