Edit: I intentionally put “bad people” in the title in order to provoke. 😊
If you don’t know what I’m talking about:
Black Mirror - Hated in the Nation
I’m not sure how to limit the scope of this discussion, since it touches upon so many areas of morale:
- the value of life
- the right to kill
- vengeance/revenge
- crime
- good and evil
So I encourage you to be articulate and to follow some structure: “what(thesis) - why(evidence) - what (thesis)”. Other easy to follow variations, such as “why(background + evidence) - what(thesis)” or “what - why - what - by the way(discussion)” or just a simple “what” are of course good too. I’m not trying exclude comments, and I won’t, just encouraging an easy to read discussion. As for me:
I would not kill using a Death Note, unless for some utterly personal vendetta. I would also not kill those that did, if we were talking about some sort of society wide phenomenon. I believe that taking action against human life on the macro scale, such as a nation state against another or such as one confined justice system against one of its subjects (state versus an individual, for instance) or in the fictive case of the above mentioned media, is wrong. This is because I don’t believe it right to through politics or legislation qualify or quantify the value of a human life, such as is done in jurisdictions that allow capital punishment. While I’m against such “marco actions” on human life, I for some reason have less of a problem empathizing with the individual victims involved, which is to say, I don’t think I’d rage against, say, a grieving mother avenging her murdered child by killing the murderer. But then again, not all individuals have the ability or the capacity to exact revenge and maybe they have to rely on their nation state for some kind of restitution? My opinion is probably logical mess, full of contradictions, but there it is. Feel free to poke holes, in a kind manner!
No, finding a death note would mean that there is an afterlife, and there’s no point in spending eternity suffering, because even if you killed all the bad people alive right now, more would come along.
Death Note spoilers
The ending explicitly states that there is no afterlife. All humans become nothingness when they die.
I’d say more would come along if you don’t use the death note to effect long term change.
Bad people become bad people usually through lack of sufficient medical care, systemic pathways that give corrupting levels of power to individuals, or poverty.
Effect enough change that puts the world on the right track to solve these problems, and the amount of bad people down the line will decrease.
It would definitely be a self sacrifice with the whole purgatory thing.
No, you’re conflating criminals with bad people. Not all criminals are bad, and not all bad people are criminals. A lot of those conditions you listed are actually caused by a small number of evil rich fucks leeching off everyone else.
That’s what I was saying…
Evil rich fucks => systemic pathways that give corrupting levels of power to individuals