Crime and Punishment

Some Guy
4 min readJan 11, 2021

There is some debate today about the subjectivity of certain beliefs or convictions. “Moral relativity” and post-modernism are easy targets in certain circles, as there is a push to legitimate the upholding of certain traditions and values through philosophical and academic endeavors.

None of that is to say that I do not believe there is NOT a universal, objective standard for truth. There IS. Or, perhaps, more appropriately, there are.

Take, for instance, murder.

If you distill the basic concept down to its core essence, murder is the societally unsanctioned taking of INTRA-COMMUNITY life. That is, you shouldn’t kill people in your social group without a very, very good reason that your group’s leadership expressly condones.

In this sense, there’s not a place on the planet where murder is “good.” It clearly is not. Which means that it’s bad. Objectively wrong.

And there are many good possible explanations for this. Killing group members reduces the group’s numbers, which, in turn, can reduce its ability to defend itself from various threats, for instance.

Now, the legal idea of murder in many modern nation-states is not only tied to arbitrary and truly unknowable mental states or capacities but also, erroneously, to the idea of national homogeneity. That is, we’ve expanded the definition of murder to fit the relatively new idea of statehood and nationalism.

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Some Guy

I’m a guy who writes about politics, economics, parenting, social issues, and the outdoors, as well as whatever else is on my mind.