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Paladin just committed murder - what should happen next?
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7817539" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>I didn't say that, nor imply it.</p><p></p><p>But there's no account of the morality of warfare that I'm familiar with that requires soldiers to make pointless sacrifices to try and rescue their comrades. Likewise in parallel situations (eg mountain climbing).</p><p></p><p>A parallel criminal law example: If A and B are climbing together, roped together, and the rope breaks and B falls, A is not guility of homicide for faiing to rescue B. If A and B are climbing together, and both will die and only A can save him-/herself by cutting the rope and sacrificing B, then A will be guilty of homicide. (The availability of <em>necessity </em>as a defence to murder/manslaughter is highly controversial.)</p><p></p><p>Of course if B cuts the rope and sacrifices him-/herself, the situation is completely different.</p><p></p><p>Bucky's situation might be hopeless, or no (that word doesn't appear in the quote you posted). But Bucky is a competent adult and was not in Cap's care. (A doctor who lets a patient die on the table, or a parent who fails to rescue a child in certain circumstances, may well be guilty of manslaughter. But those are exceptions to the general proposition that there is no duty to rescue.)</p><p></p><p>You don't have to agree. But the analysis isn't hard to understand. In (more-or-less) contemporary moral philosophy, look at (say) GEM Anscombe, or Philippa Foot and all the ensuing literature on the trolley problem. Or a lot of mainstream Kantians. In law, look at the laws of armed conflict and assoicated ideas in just war theory; or the criminal law examples I've just provided in response to Maxperson (I'm drawing on Anglo-Australian criminal law, but I don't think US criminal law differs wildly on these issues. I don't know Japanese criminal law.) In literature, look at the attitudes displayed in JRRT's work, or in mediaeval and early modern Arthurian stories.</p><p></p><p>The view that <em>dying is the cowared's way out</em> is essentially modernist (eg it seems to take atheism as a functional if not intellectual premise - so you could locate it in some Hellenistic ideas also like Epicrueanism, but they're the prototypes for modernist thought). It's no surprise that modernism has no room for the paladin archetype! I mean, you can do it at the table if you want to - after all, Gygaxi did, by bringing a class called "paladin" into a game whose ethics model that of Advanced Squald Leader - but it's plain as day that the resulting fiction will make no more sense from the paladin perspective than Mark Twain's <em>Connecticut Yankee</em> - ie at best it will be an ironic commentary on the paladin as "lawful stupid" or similar. At worst it will just be an incoherent jumble.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7817539, member: 42582"] I didn't say that, nor imply it. But there's no account of the morality of warfare that I'm familiar with that requires soldiers to make pointless sacrifices to try and rescue their comrades. Likewise in parallel situations (eg mountain climbing). A parallel criminal law example: If A and B are climbing together, roped together, and the rope breaks and B falls, A is not guility of homicide for faiing to rescue B. If A and B are climbing together, and both will die and only A can save him-/herself by cutting the rope and sacrificing B, then A will be guilty of homicide. (The availability of [I]necessity [/I]as a defence to murder/manslaughter is highly controversial.) Of course if B cuts the rope and sacrifices him-/herself, the situation is completely different. Bucky's situation might be hopeless, or no (that word doesn't appear in the quote you posted). But Bucky is a competent adult and was not in Cap's care. (A doctor who lets a patient die on the table, or a parent who fails to rescue a child in certain circumstances, may well be guilty of manslaughter. But those are exceptions to the general proposition that there is no duty to rescue.) You don't have to agree. But the analysis isn't hard to understand. In (more-or-less) contemporary moral philosophy, look at (say) GEM Anscombe, or Philippa Foot and all the ensuing literature on the trolley problem. Or a lot of mainstream Kantians. In law, look at the laws of armed conflict and assoicated ideas in just war theory; or the criminal law examples I've just provided in response to Maxperson (I'm drawing on Anglo-Australian criminal law, but I don't think US criminal law differs wildly on these issues. I don't know Japanese criminal law.) In literature, look at the attitudes displayed in JRRT's work, or in mediaeval and early modern Arthurian stories. The view that [I]dying is the cowared's way out[/I] is essentially modernist (eg it seems to take atheism as a functional if not intellectual premise - so you could locate it in some Hellenistic ideas also like Epicrueanism, but they're the prototypes for modernist thought). It's no surprise that modernism has no room for the paladin archetype! I mean, you can do it at the table if you want to - after all, Gygaxi did, by bringing a class called "paladin" into a game whose ethics model that of Advanced Squald Leader - but it's plain as day that the resulting fiction will make no more sense from the paladin perspective than Mark Twain's [I]Connecticut Yankee[/I] - ie at best it will be an ironic commentary on the paladin as "lawful stupid" or similar. At worst it will just be an incoherent jumble. [/QUOTE]
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Paladin just committed murder - what should happen next?
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