>p.s. I consider murder committed for rational purposes and in cold blood to
>be marginally preferable to the "crime of passion" which is impelled by
>sentiment and unreasoning lust. If you're going to do awful things, you
>should do them for intelligent reasons.
Dom
I am entirely unsure how you distinguish morally between murder committed
for "rational purposes" and "in cold blood" and those committed in
"passion". (Have you read "Crime and Punishment"?) I met in my youth a
couple of murderers who killed people in cold blood, for completely
rational (if criminal) purposes, and there is in that capacity a strong
whiff of the evil you so fulminate against: a deadness of soul of which
each of us is capable and which is, as Arendt pointed out, utterly banal.
Both seem to me equally repugnant, but the crime of passion has at least
the quality that its irrationality is foregrounded and acknowledged.
The grim logic of "rational" murder has often been the arena of
governments; and not just the Nazis. "Rational" murder requires, first,
the dehumanisation of the one to be murdered. Even Herr Hitler was,
alas, a human being: to justify his murder on the grounds that he has
foreited his humanity creates for me too uncomfortable a mirror of Nazi
ideology. And there's the rub of justice: and also Camus' argument, if I
recall rightly, against capital punishment, which was that no state could
morally legislate against murder if it was a party to murder itself.
The mysterious thing about human beings has never been for me the
question of evil, which seems to me perfectly, if depressingly,
explicable. The mystery is that other unsettling human capacity for
largeness of soul, for love. I am not with those utilitarians or genetic
determinists who can only conceive this as selfishness; there is an
element beyond that construal which suggests a larger possibility of
being. Christianity at its best can express this: at its worst, it
encompasses all the crimes we are talking about, magnified and made Just
by a Jealous and Wrathful God.
(I don't know if anyone else finds the Pope's recent announcement that
the Catholic Church is the One True Church deeply disturbing. These
things still have huge impacts on our world.)
Best
Alison
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