Yes, I was intending to go to sleep after that last post; my head hurts and all. However, I found myself turning over one of
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shelleybear 's
late posts in my mind, trying to understand how it could have happened.
The thought that keeps returning to my mind is that the jury has been dishonest in reaching their conclusion. At least, I am assuming events occurred as described in the linked article. Even though I was not there and have no access to any of the evidence I have no reason to believe otherwise (I try to be aware of the provisionality of my knowledge in all cases, usually not explicitly and with the optimistic thought that people realise this. This time I could be bothered.) so for now I think any dishonesty must lie in the verdict.
Have I rambled into a thicket? I think I have. I say dishonesty because how else can they, with video footage of the assault and the admission of the assaulter, still find these people* guilty?
( * ) There is a disconnect in me. I keep trying and failing to guess at the thought path that would lead people to conclude it is okay to reach the verdict they did. Is there something I am missing? A detail of the trial or law perhaps, if not in the minds of those involved? Perhaps the answer is as simple as 'the jurors were unethical and took advantage of an opportunity to have the legal system punish people they disliked'.
My mind wandered all the way into how people make decisions about right and wrong and the relatively easy target of Divine Command theory, rubbish idea that it is. The connection is forgotten for now, alas, but I did have a hypothetical debate with a hypothetical proponent of the theory (there are still real ones about) who maintained for the purposes of this train of thought that the killing of human beings is wrong because God says it is wrong.
Ve attempted to refuse my doubly hypothetical yet based in reality question 'what if God declared it a good act to kill humans of class X (where X is not a category of people who have committed a crime [although if you were to maintain that disobedience toward God were itself a capital crime I suppose they still would be {unless we stipulate also that they have not actually committed any disobedience and merely fall into an identifiable category <parentheticals, whee!>}])?' by claiming 'God would not do that'.
Of course, I pressed on the matter of, if God's will/decree is what defines right and wrong there is no reason why such a decree should not be made**. Ve claimed, then, that God is eternal, unchanging and necessarily as Ve is or else there could not be existence, therefore such hypothetical questions are invalid because there is no possibility in any reality - it is not a sensible question.
I consider this to be a concession of the argument since I think it requires some set of principles prior to God which dictate Vis nature and, by extension, what is moral. The
original purpose of writing this entire post was to ask if that were a valid objection to my hypothetical question but since in the writing I have concluded it is not I am now asking if I am in fact mistaken. I am sure I have made some unjustified/unjustifiable leap somewhere.
And of course, one of the dangers of conducting arguments where one takes both sides is a tendency to use weaker arguments for the side not favoured but since there is only one question at stake in this case I have hopefully not been too bad.
**Well, if a previous decree were that right and wrong could not be changed in future there would be, actually. I did not realise this at the time.
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