Arindam Chakrabarti asks, in an Op-Ed in the Telegraph newspaper. if anyone deserves to die. If life is a conditional gift and it is taken back by its giver, we may well ask whether the dead person did something which made him undeserving of retaining that gift. The Christian view is that through Adam's sin, death came into the world. We are descended from Adam. We ought to construct a time-machine and catch hold of Adam before he was tempted to eat the fruit of knowledge.
If, however, life on earth arose through Darwinian evolution, the question of whether a particular person deserved to die is medical or legal or political. Thus if we see a fit young person who leads a healthy life-style suddenly drop dead in the street, we may be interested to discover from the autopsy report whether she had done something to precipitate this outcome or whether Society as a whole could have taken some action to prevent it. Suppose, the lady had been taking a health supplement approved and promoted by the State licensing board. We discover that there was act of negligence or corruption on their part. We feel the girl didn't 'deserve' to die. Her blood is on the hands of the powers that be. On the other hand, if it is discovered she was secretly part of a terrorist cell planning to detonate a nuclear bomb, we might feel she deserved her fate. Perhaps she was poisoned by a secret agent of ours. Give the fellow a medal!
Arindam takes a different view.
The question is doubly impenetrable.
No. We all understand the notion of 'desert' as well as what death entails. 'Deserved to die' means that some supervenient consideration obtained such that death was 'just deserts'.
It involves death, the most tantalizingly imponderable topic that human mortals must but can never figure out.
Why should we 'figure out' death? We may wish to find ways to prolong our lives because that is useful or pleasurable to us. Equally we may want to know what happens after death. I suppose, there are medical reasons to investigate death itself- when does it actually occur? can it be reversed? If so for how long? But these are not questions philosophers have the required skills or knowledge to 'figure out'.
Thinking about death is one task which clearly makes a mockery of the Kantian dictum: “Ought implies can.”
Nonsense! Suppose you don't want your good and dutiful servant to die. You order him to present himself at such and such a place a thousand years in the future. You may say 'he now ought to live for at least a thousand years'. But people will laugh at you. His duty may be to obey you but death releases him from that duty. There is nothing he can do to avert it. You have misused the word 'ought' because no one can have an obligation to perform an impossible task- e.g. living for a thousand years.
From Nachiketa, through Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein to Ramchandra Gandhi, every thinker-without-borders found it obligatory as well as impossible to think clearly about death.
Nonsense! Nachiketa gained knowledge of the after-life. Schopenhauer may certainly have felt he had avoided the Christian Hell. What is certain is that he and Witlesstein understood very clearly that they wouldn't be able to keep publishing books after they died. Ramchandra Gandhi was not in their league. But, even he understood that much.
Wittgenstein’s remark that death is not an event in life, though meant to be a strictly analytically true statement, nevertheless strikes me as plainly false.
Everything the fellow said was stupid. Still, we may say, sudden unexpected death is not a knowledge-event (i.e. an instantiation of predictive knowledge) in a particular person's life, unless, actually it was something she had thought about and made provision for. A baby, which may not know that biological beings die, who suffers cot-death, could be said to have known some of the sweetness of life and a mother's love without that knowledge ever having been blighted by the realization that Mummies die. It may be some consolation for those that grieve that their little angel did not know death on earth and now, in Abraham's bosom, sees that, it is but the door through which one is re-united with Mummy.
It is analogous to the over-smart counter-comment that my birth is not an event in my life because my life starts after it.
Right to lifers, would say it started some time after conception but before birth
How can Socrates’s or Gandhi’s life story be complete if we do not describe their deaths?
Very true. Did Gandhi shit himself a bit when he was shot? I would. Actually, I'd have been shitting myself so constantly after the first assassination attempt that Godse couldn't have got near me through the rampart of turds I'd erected. On the other hand, people who are beforehand in shitting themselves tend not to be worth assassinating.
Still, it must be said we don't understand Socrates if we don't see why his own stupidity led to his having to swallow hemlock. True, he may have thought he was the 'scapegoat' needed to purify his City, but he was wrong. As for Gandhi, we have to ask why Congress didn't think it worthwhile to protect the old coot. How come, some American bloke caught Nathuram? Where were the plains-clothes cops? Why did Morarji Desai refuse to heed the warning of the plot given to him by an Indian Sociology professor? Why did Morarji threaten to arrest the Professor instead?
But the other concept that this question introduces, the concept of deserving, is no less impenetrable.
No. It is pellucid. Professors should try to give only deserving students good grades.
The idea of deserving has close ties with the idea of justice: If X deserves P (a certain prize or punishment), then it would be unjust if X does not get P. But the two notions: justice and desert, instead of making each other clearer, seem to make each other obscurer by a vicious mutual dependence.
Both are 'Tarskian primitives' in themselves. They are undefined. Desert exists even if there is no Law or system of Justice. But the Law may mention desert and vice versa. We may say 'this is Just but undeserved' or 'this is deserved though not justiciable'.
I wonder how Ramchandra Gandhi would have sorted out this question “Who deserves to die?”
He would have said nobody deserves to die. All are worthy of mercy and a chance to redeem themselves.
or “For whom will it be unjust to stay alive?”
One who considers an order to give up life, to be just and worthy of compliance. Thus if soldiers are ordered to fight to the death, and they consider the order to be just, that is what they will seek to do. We can imagine a soldier who survives because a bullet knocked him unconscious and thus the enemy mistook him for a corpse. This soldier may feel Fate played a dirty trick on him. Through no fault of his own, he was unable to die as justice, as represented by military law, required.
Right now, the parents and the community of the brutally raped and murdered 12- and 14-year-old Dalit girls in Badaun, Uttar Pradesh are demanding that the rapists and the policemen who connived at that grisly rape and murder should be executed.
The girls were of the Maurya caste- which is OBC like the Yadavs whom they accuse. However, the family did get 500,000 from the BSP which it used to bribe a couple of witnesses. Thus there was definitely a political angle to this. Since the BJP went on to win the State, the case lost salience. It appears one girl was romantically involved with the accused. Was this an 'honor killing'? Nobody cares anymore because the CM is Rajput. Indeed, voters have become skeptical or apathetic about such cases.
The outraged community thinks with a certitude only extreme grief can bring, that these rapist-murderers deserve to die.
Mauryas might well want Yadavs to disappear from the face of the earth and vice versa. This is because India is extremely overpopulated. If the BJP can create jobs and the region starts to prosper, there will be fewer crimes of this sort. More importantly such crimes will be more expeditiously investigated and no 'community' will have a vested interest in politicizing the matter.
It may appear that to disagree with them at this grim hour is to condone the current countrywide epidemic of such crimes, especially against Dalit and tribal women.
the girls were not Dalit. They were OBC just like the accused. But it may have been an 'honor' killing because the elder was romantically involved with a Yadav boy. There could be a political and reputational benefit for the victim's family in being seen to have mercilessly killed a couple of their own wayward girls.
A Madhya Pradesh minister,
Babulal Gaur a former CM of that State
The Times of India reported, set an all time record of imbecility by making three comments on this general asurik trend of the Indian male: first, that not all rapes are wrong (logically, which means that some are right, giving us a new political meaning of “right”)Gaur said- “It is a social crime which depends on the man and the woman. It is sometimes right and sometimes wrong,” What did he mean by it? Well, in India, a woman who has had a consensual sexual relationship with a man may say she has been raped because he promised to marry her but did not do so. The court may impose a criminal sentence for rape if the man refuses to marry the woman. On the other hand, if he has not taken her virginity and she has means of her own, they may dismiss the charge. Sex was consensual. In the West, this couldn't be rape. But, in some parts of India, it could be.
, second, that women should learn judo and karate to protect themselves (this minister would have been sorely missed in Dhritarashtra’s court, when Draupadi who never learned karate, was being disrobed),
Gaur was pointing out that rape is a violent crime. The Government can't be everywhere at once. Women should learn self-defense. It is a different matter, if a woman is dragged into the Governor's mansion and police officers and judges seek to disrobe her. In this case, her knowing karate would be of no avail. The State has much greater powers of physical coercion. Arindam is a cretin. He should not mention Draupadi who was a victim of State violence not criminal molestation by some private individual or group of individuals.
and third, crowning all, that unless a woman wants to be molested no one can molest her.
only if she has learned martial arts or knows how to use a knife. Babulal is saying that women have the right to self-defense though, to make this effective, they need to enhance their threat potential. The fact is, if you can kill even one or two of a gang who wants to rob or rape you, they will seek easier prey even though, as a group they will prevail. This is because each member of the group fears that it is he who will be killed or maimed.
One has to resist the violent rhetorical response that if anyone ever richly deserved an unceremonious death it is this moral moron who could think such thoughts and then could be shameless enough to publicize them.
He was an intelligent man, albeit an elderly one. He knew his voters better than Arindam. A little later he said 'drinking is a fundamental right- and a status symbol too'. In other words, he was showing an awareness of the mores of the new urban middle-classes and their better off cousins in the villages. Only foreign educated morons believed atrocity stories about Dalits being raped and killed in rural backwaters.
No, no one deserves to die for stupidity though one can die of stupidity.
Nonsense! A soldier may know that the orders he has been given are as stupid as fuck. Yet it is his duty to obey them and gain that sweetest and most decorous of Deaths which is to die for your country. His deserts may be in Heaven or in the collective memory of his Regiment or, simply, in his own heart and soul as he valiantly makes his last stand.
Surely, our asking the question “Does anyone, even those confessed rapist-murderers, deserve to die?” cannot be taken to have anything to do with such ministerial cretinousness.
The Minister wasn't a cretin which is why he, not Arindam, had been put in a position of authority by voters. On the other hand, Arindam's question is foolish. If no one deserves to die, then it must be the case that some Agency was derelict in duty or else there was something wholly unexpected and novel about the death- so much so that it appears 'an act of God' or effect without any cause.
Perhaps, we should start by granting that if anyone deserves to die, those rapacious molester-murderers of Badaun do.
But it now looks as though this was a honor-killing. There was murder. There may have been no molestation. Arindam may be from India, but he seems to understand little of how India works. He believes anything he reads in the English language press.
But the question — and it is not to be reduced to the important but hackneyed question of justification of capital punishment — remains: what is it to deserve death?
I have given a good enough answer. Arindam isn't interested in any such things. He just wants to repeat himself ad nauseam.
In a paper published in Philosophy East and West in 1981, Ramchandra Gandhi delves into this question. The paper is called “On meriting death” (and it is accessible online via JStor).
It is stupid shit. It starts thus- 'In thinking murder through we encounter at its heart the idea of the innocence of the victim of murder,
No. Murder is a pre-meditated act, for which no Hohfeldian immunity or defense in law exists, which aims at the death of a person who may or may not be pure and innocent. If there is a Hohfeldian immunity- e.g. being employed as an executioner by the state or acting in self defense in a reasonable or proportionate manner- there is no murder even if the victim is shown to be wholly innocent of the crime imputed to him or of having intended to pose so serious a threat that killing him in self-defense was justified.
The grey area relates to things like abortion and euthanasia.
a human being killed without meriting death at the hands of his killer.
this may be man-slaughter or it may be justifiable homicide. It is foolish to say that murder always means the killing of an innocent person who deserved better from her killer.
The idea of innocence points beyond itself to the sanctity of human life,
No. Human life retains sanctity even if, like Ramachandra Gandhi, we lose our innocence and, defying the Mahatma, have sex with our wives.
and the idea of the sanctity of human life has an insistence which makes the difficulty of saying precisely what it comes to less embarrassing philosophically than it might be otherwise.
So if a thing is insistent- like your bride's vagina- it becomes less embarrassing philosophically to defy your grandaddy and stick your dick in it.
This article is based on the conviction that the idea of the sanctity of human life is nourishment without which the idea of the human right to life perishes.
Cockroaches gain nourishment. Why should their lives not have sanctity? The plain fact is that the notion of 'sanctity of human life' arises from the notion that God created Man after his own image. True, we can avoid mention of God and invoke some other transcendental entity in this connection. But that has nothing to do with 'nourishment' unless you are some sort of caricature of an idol-worshipper who believes that God only sanctifies human life if humans give God 'burnt offerings'.
Does any human being ever have the right to kill any other human being?
No. However, you may have an immunity in this respect. I suppose we can imagine a civilization where sadists were permitted to purchase slaves purely to have the pleasure of inflicting a horrible death on them. A similar point may be made about Societies which practiced human sacrifice. But, even in those cases, what obtained was an immunity not an entitlement. To see why, suppose I buy a slave for the purpose of sacrificing him to Hecate. That slave attacks you. You slay him in self defense. Have you violated my right to kill the slave? No. You had an immunity to do what you did which overrode my right to be the guy who slaughtered the fellow.
Of course so, one might want to say, giving the following representative example. Suppose a human being, X, was trying or intended to kill another human being, Y, such that the only way Y could prevent X from killing him was by killing X.
Y has an immunity, not a right. The ignorance of our Philosophy Professors is startling. I should mention Y's immunity is not absolute. If he himself did something which caused him to appear a threat so severe as to justify extreme violence, he may be considered to have forfeited the right to self-defense. Thus suppose a gangster gets drunk and breaks into the house of an elderly woman and talks of raping and decapitating her and the elderly woman grabs a gun and tries to shoot him at which point he kills her, it is likely that he can't assert 'right to self defense'.
If in this situation it were also the case that neither Y nor Z merited death at the hands of X, some would want to say that Y had the right to kill X.
Only if they were stupid and ignorant. Y had an immunity in that respect.
Or let us suppose that X was trying or intended to kill not Y but some other human being, Z, such that X could be prevented from killing Z only if Y killed X
This could be a defense in law more particularly if Z had a duty of care to Y or was employed as a policeman or other properly trained and experienced law enforcement operative. However, there may still be a tort liability.
Indeed, even if it were the case that only Z, and not also Y, did not merit death at the hands of X, some would still want to say that Y had the right to kill X.
Not if they were educated. They would say 'he may have a defense in law'. No doubt, we may speak 'ad captum vulgi' to get the general point across that there is a legal dimension to this whose details, however, don't concern ordinary people.
If Y does not merit death at the hands of X, this means at least that X does not have the right to kill Y
No. Suppose a brave soldier gets drunk and runs amok. In self defense, a cowardly draft-dodger strikes down the old warrior. We may say 'the soldier didn't deserve to fall to the hand of a coward' but we would agree that the coward had an immunity in this respect. He has to be acquitted by the court. But this did not mean he had a right to kill. He merely had an immunity from a murder charge if he exercised a right to self-defense in a proportionate and reasonable manner.
Can a human being ever lose his self-defensive right to kill?
This cretin doesn't get that there is no such right- save in jurisdictions where you can buy slaves for the purpose of ritual slaughter.
Let us for a moment bring back the human being Z from our earliest description of the situation, and suppose that although X has the right to kill Y,
there may be a duty to kill- e.g. X is a soldier under orders- but that is not a right which vests in X. We say that if X, the soldier, kills he may have an immunity. We don't say he has a legal right to kill. It is not the case that if a soldier is commanded to go kill the enemy, that instead of putting on his uniform, he should put on a suit and go to the Court and say to the Judge- 'I have a right to kill the enemy. Sadly, I am not able to enforce that right because the enemy has guns and I don't want to get shot. Kindly, supply the remedy to the rights-violation I am currently suffering. Send some officers of the court to go catch the enemy and bring them to me so I can slit their throats. I will pay reasonable court costs.'
and is exercising this right, he has no right to kill Z, although in act he is trying or intends to kill Z. Would not we want to say that in this situation Y has the right to kill X, if the only way X can be prevented from killing Z is by Y killing X?
No. X may be a soldier under orders to kill terrorists. Terrorists can't rely on a self-defense immunity because some previous act of their own caused them to lose relevant rights in this respect.
And let us not forget that X has the right to kill Y and both X and Y know this!
No. They know he has an immunity for killing them. Perhaps, he will also receive a reward. They may conspire to kill him before he kills them. But this would be a criminal act if his actions were legal and theirs were not.
The idea of a self-defensive right to kill
does not exist. There may be a legal immunity to a charge of murder but there is no right linked to a remedy by a bond of law. I may report to the police that a dangerous lunatic is stalking me and seeking to murder me. I may even say that, in accordance with 'stand your ground' laws in the jurisdiction, I have equipped myself with a guy and plan to shoot the fellow before he gets a chance to kill me. The police may caution me that I must use only proportionate and reasonable force. But, they may promise to investigate the matter and detain the lunatic and see if they can incarcerate him for 'threatening behavior'. What I can't do is say 'I have a right to kill the lunatic. Since I can't do so I want you to kill him for me thus providing the remedy which I am too weak and feeble to provide for myself.' This is because there is no such thing as a right to kill. If there were it could be sold on the market or be performed by an agent.
stems from considerations which have to do with the absolute integrity of a living body-
cockroaches have a living body
in the present case a living human body-
which, nowhere in the world, at this present time has a 'right to kill'. All they have is an immunity under certain limited circumstances.
and there is nothing about this idea which suggests that the absolute integrity of a living human body can become undermined by the right that some other human being may have to destroy it.
because this is not an idea. It is shit. Cockroaches have the absolute integrity of a living body. How can this be undermined by the right that an exterminator has to kill them?
If this is sound, and if, in our example, one can say that Y retains his self-defensive right to kill X despite the fact that X has the right to kill Y, the situation yields strange consequences. In order to see this, let us suppose that X is an executioner duly authorized to kill Y who, let us suppose, is a murderer condemned by due process of law to death, and let us further suppose that X has commenced the exercise of his right to kill Y. Then, if the preceding reasoning regarding self- defensive killing is sound, Y, the condemned man, would have the right self- defensively to kill X, the executioner, if that is the only way he can prevent X from killing him. Of course Y is unlikely to have the resources to do this, but we are examining not the likelihood of such a thing happening but the theory, the moral theory of self-defense, whether the "self" happens to be a murderer or a saint. And why should moral or legal theorists wish to deny that a condemned murderer has the self-defensive right to kill his executioner at the point where this is the only possible self-defense? Would not it be more correct to say that all that morality and law and social policy require, if they require this, is that the condemned man ought not to succeed in this enterprise?
No. The executioner has an immunity. If through his own negligence, the condemned man kills him, he has only himself to blame. Sadly, the convict has no immunity for killing the executioner.
Gandhi does seem to grasp that a duty is not a right. But, because he doesn't understand that it may create an immunity, he- like his grandaddy- talks bollocks about the Gita.
Do these examples make more plausible the claim that even if it is or could be our duty sometimes to kill a human being, it need not ever be our right?
It can only be a right if we could sell it. Thus, in Saudi Arabia, a person whose family member was killed by someone else might agree to accept blood-money in return for giving up the right to kill the fellow which the State exercises on his behalf. But, in this case, we would say that the duty of lex talionis vengeance was defeasible. The family of the victim showed mercy and were properly recompensed for it.
Let us note that a too eager acceptance of human killing as being even sometimes a right could be disastrous;
So this dude thinks the Saudis will come to disaster. Why does he not tell them so?
an acceptance of it as being sometimes both a right and a duty can only result in insufferable self-righteousness where fear and a sense of the tragic limitations of the human condition are called for;
But the Saudis firmly believe that God will lift up the pious Muslim to Paradise, far above any such tragic limitations
a recognition of it as being sometimes a duty although never a right seems most likely to me to encourage the balance between courage and ahimsa that Gandhiji talked about.
In which case, the Brits had provided it already. Gandhi qualified as a barrister in London. English law has never had a 'right to kill'. There are immunities for certain types of killing. That is all. Incidentally, Brits showed courage in two world wars and provided India with a long Pax Britannica. Gandhi's stupidity precipitated the bloodletting of Partition.
(In the Gita, Arjuna can be seen as claiming that he has no right to kill the enemy,
No. He foresees some of the disastrous consequences of the War. He loses his will to fight.
and Sri Krsna can be seen as conceding this point
No. Arjuna has a duty to kill- though, in fact, it is not he who kills but God himself.
but drawing Arjuna's attention to the fact that it is under specific circumstances that his duty is to kill).
Arjuna was aware that he wasn't supposed to kill humans anywhere save on the battlefield or else in a duel fought under prevailing rules of combat.
I am not suggesting that the idea of human killing being sometimes a duty (a terrible and painful duty) is by itself likely to be corrective of human overeagerness to kill.
Gandhi's pals are constantly slavering at the mouth and displaying eagerness to kill and eat fellow faculty members.
It can be so only in conjunction with the idea that human beings never have any right to kill one another.
The Sovereign does. Also in some countries, there may be a right to vendetta unless blood-money is paid. The Saudis, very sensibly, ensured this right was delegated to the State.
But I am arguing for the truth of a certain thesis,
that thesis was taught to his grandfather. In Anglo-Saxon law there is no duty to kill. There are immunities related to lawful killing.
not its efficaciousness, although I am convinced that in the sphere of the spirit truth is the most efficacious policy.
The truth is that blathershite Gandhis only exist because they ignored the Mahatma's command not to have sex.
I think the thesis I am proposing will be better understood if we reflect not upon the wrongness of murder, important though it is to do so, but on the badness of all human killing, whether or not wrongness attaches to it.
Why not reflect on the smelliness of farts? Surely, that will decrease flatulence?
For even where it is a duty to kill a human being, the killing stares us in the face as a profound disvalue.
Ramchandra kept killing people. Those killings would stare him in the face reproachfully. Thankfully, the cunt kicked the bucket at the age of 70. Arindram hasn't got over the shock- perhaps because he himself poisoned his pal's beer at the India International Center back in 2007.
“Meriting”, like “earning”, has a prima facie positive association. Thus, when my mother died with only 15 minutes’ extreme suffering, at the age of 71, with no serious ailment, some neighbours commented that she earned such a death by her merit (punya). I did not understand that notion of earning then, and I do not understand it now when it is used in the negative way — when harsh retributive punishment is referred to as “pain earned by wrong-doing”.
Theists consider chastisement at the Lord's hand to itself be a mark of grace. I earned plenty of slaps from Mummy. That's why I was confident she loved me and would protect me from vaginas so I could remain faithful to the Mahatma's commandments. True, Mummy only slapped me when I insisted that she come and lie in my bed and tell me nice bed-time stories. But that was because, had she failed to do so, my wife might have done much worse to me. As things were, my wife was happy enough to return to her parents and get a divorce on the grounds of non-consummation.
Of course, even if we take “meriting” to be synonymous with “deserving”, this question was not discussed exactly in this bald form in that paper. Ramchandra Gandhi’s concern was, “When can Y be said to merit or not merit death at the hands of X?” And we can imagine other ways of filling out the question of meriting or not meriting death. “Did Vivekananda deserve to die of diabetes at the age of 39?”
Yes, if he ate and drank too much.
— which takes us to a very different zone of moral-metaphysical imagination, than the question, “Did MKG deserve to die by the gunshot of N.R. Godse?”
To be frank, Godse did Congress a favor which they didn't deserve.
Well, Ramchandra Gandhi’s paper turns out to be on the right to kill, though he starts by stating, intriguingly, that X may have the right to kill Y and still Y may not merit death at the hands of X.
As we have seen, Ramchandra wasn't saying anything intriguing. He was saying something idiotic.
When I heard of Ramchandra Gandhi’s death, I could not help asking, “Did he deserve the death that befell him?”
He should have died in an Ashram not a watering-hole for the elite like IIC.
Of course, we did not deserve to lose him so soon. But that is beside the point here. It is not about us who are deservingly or undeservingly still living. It is about whether or not Ramchandra Gandhi merited the death he underwent. No one killed Ramchandra Gandhi, not even in the metaphorical sense in which cancer killed Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharshi. But every death, including Ramchandra Gandhi’s death, happens in a certain manner. And when I am urging us to inquire whether anyone deserves to die, I am not asking the cosmic or Christian question whether human beings have done anything to be susceptible to death at all. I am asking: “Does a particular person ever deserve to die in the manner in which he or she dies?”
In some cases, that would be a perfectly proper judgment to make. A person warned not to keep smoking, who keeps smoking and dies prematurely deserved his fate.
A simple naturalistic response could be that deaths —especially natural deaths — are events like a flood or an outbreak of allergy, about which to ask the question of deserving or justice makes no sense.
It is useful to do so in some cases. If a thing was avoidable and proper steps were not taken, then there is a question of negligence or desert.
If we raise the question of deserving to die, we have to be ready to raise the question of deserving to be born or deserving to live. And such a question can have disturbing and diabolical ramifications for the familiar applied ethics debates.
Nope. Anyway, such debates are utter shit. They can't get any worse.
The typical Gandhian/Hindu/karma theoretic attitude would be that, if someone dies in a certain manner, then he or she must have deserved to die in that manner, because the law of karma or ishvara, the overseer of the law of karma, never permits an unmerited death to happen. But if that was to be taken flatly universally to be true, then all killings would be justified because the deaths they would cause would be well-deserved.
No. Hindus think that the souls of those who are good get something better in the next life. If they die a ghastly death, this burns up any karmic residue from misdeeds in a past life. This is an optimistic view of the world more particularly because God can avert 'prarabdha karma' by the arrow of his Grace.
Perhaps it has been a bit inauspicious to raise the question if Ramchandra Gandhi (or Vivekananda or M.K. Gandhi) deserved the death that befell him in the context of asking whether the rapists have earned their death (to which one could say, “No, because they need to suffer much longer which they cannot if they are swiftly, if punitively, eliminated”).
It appears they were innocent.
But I wanted to take two clear examples where common ethical intuition would say that someone deserves to die, and that someone does not deserve to die, with the same dearth of grounding reason.
Arindam very stupidly took a case where we now know the accused were innocent
I could never understand
anything at all. That's why the guy teaches shite.
how the question of “deserving to die or suffer” can even be raised by atheists and disbelievers in the law of karma. But the feeling that a passionate, kind, brilliant, creative philosopher-human being like Ramchandra Gandhi, who could help so many people live a better life of the mind, did not deserve to die at the time and in the manner in which he died is at least as natural as the feeling that a bunch of perverts who raped and murdered two innocent 12- and 14-year-old girls and a powerful minister who condoned that crime deserve to die.
Ramchandra Gandhi died of natural causes. The girls were probably killed by their family because the older was seeing a boy from another caste.
But most probably both the feelings are, when examined, irrational.
Stupid. They were rational enough in the sense that these guys got paid to virtue signal
One needs Ramchandra Gandhi himself to tell us if in spite of its irrationality these feelings of who does or does not merit death in which manner have any moral or metaphysical value.
Morality is concerned with what people deserve. The wiser course is to reward those who deserve well of you if only for reputational purposes. Merit can be the basis of 'public signals' which improve Aumann 'correlated equilibria'.
Instead of invoking the glibly over-quoted Gita chapter II passage to the effect that death did not befall Ramchandra Gandhi’s soul, which went for a costume change, what, I imagine, he would have done if I asked him, “Did you, Ramuda, merit death when you died?” is to quip: “Only if you, Arindam, merited death at the same time, because I am thou.” And I would have died of epistemological embarrassment.
Both were already brain-dead. I am tempted to put the blame on Peter Strawson under whom both did their PhDs. Perhaps, if Frank Ramsey hadn't died young Anal-tickle stupidity would have died out in England by the mid-Thirties. It really is true that sometimes we are deprived of very deserving people. But perhaps this is because we deserve no better.
Ramchandra Gandhi ended his silly paper thus 'I find liberation in the thought that human beings do not merit death at the hands of one another,
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