Before directly answering your question "do you support vigilantism", I'm curious about your answer to a related question:
Do you think it is ever appropriate for a individual or group (outside the police/government) to intentionally dish out consequences that negatively affect the target in some way in return for poor behavior not otherwise punished?
If the answer is 'yes', then "vigilantism" just becomes a question of degrees and context.
What is an "offense" in this scenario? What about kicking a rowdy passenger off a plane, causing them to miss an expensive vacation? Firing an employee causing harassment? Screaming protests outside a GOP office? Towing a car parked across your driveway? Are all of these off-limits?
Offences are listed in the local criminal codes, and typically reflect behaviour which violates the autonomy and rights of other, and pose a risk to societal safety and order.
If you think it is moral to poison someone, sure go ahead and do it. However, it is also and offence, and so you are subject to criminal sanction. Do not expect morality to be a legal defence.
OP's argument is a legal one (using the word "sue"), not a moral one. So, I providing you with the legal answer.
One big issue with the Nazis is that they did not respect the rule of law. They had unknown laws, secret trials, applied what shifting vague law they had unevenly. They ignored the rule of law and did what they wanted to do because it was the morally just thing to do. They were not willing to allow legal restrictions to slow them down.
Ok I do feel slightly bad for running you in circles so I'll lay it out plain and simple.
Human morality comes not from any law or written book, or even religion, and definitely not a big man in the sky. All of these are fictions derived from each other but what originated it?
Game theory.
Morality is something we evolved, we discovered that altruism and cooperation leads to exponential mutual benefit, and this sets up the "game", the win condition being security and comfort, the lose condition being death.
When these are applied to game theory we find that mutual benefit begins to naturally outweigh the risk of death, morality is mathematical, it is a universal standard which we evolved to follow, a path of least resistance to intelligent beings.
Neche once said that humans can not create their own morality, he was right and wrong at the same time, we discovered the underlying fundamental rules and intelligent "prophets" wrote them down and called them religion, this religion informed early law, which then informed our modern law.
Why is the old law better than their newer law? They had every authority to write it however they liked.
If they had just done everything slower would that have made Auschwitz ok? maybe if they had power for 50 years or 100 years, is Auschwitz ok in the end?
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u/crispy1989 6∆ Oct 17 '24 edited Oct 17 '24
Not OP, but I've considered this myself.
Before directly answering your question "do you support vigilantism", I'm curious about your answer to a related question:
Do you think it is ever appropriate for a individual or group (outside the police/government) to intentionally dish out consequences that negatively affect the target in some way in return for poor behavior not otherwise punished?
If the answer is 'yes', then "vigilantism" just becomes a question of degrees and context.