There was recently a court case regarding a situation in a public place near where I live. A (drunk) man threatened a security guard saying he'd kill him. He then returned later that night with a...
Indeed, for many centuries, English common law recognised the category of the ‘deodand’, or an object that was implicated in a human death, such as a cart, a boat, a stone or a tree. The deodand had to be forfeited to the authorities, and its value would then equal the compensation awarded by the courts to the victims’ families. But this practice was abolished in the 1840s, when railway companies lobbied hard to stop their expensive steam trains being used to set the value of awards in the growing number of train-fatality cases. Although this particular compensation mechanism is no longer legal practice, the basic idea of the deodand still makes sense to us.
There was recently a court case regarding a situation in a public place near where I live. A (drunk) man threatened a security guard saying he'd kill him. He then returned later that night with a 10-inch kitchen knife and literally ran at that security guard yelling he was going to kill the same guard.
When the ruling came down, part of what the prosecution requested as part of the settlement was the confiscation of the kitchen knife, which doesn't satisfy the definition of a deodand because no-one was killed, but it has a corollary role.
The article uses the term "luck" to describe these sorts of objects. They're randomly selected, coincidental and inanimate objects. But they become special when they gain a unique history. That home run-baseball does have value beyond the one made right before it on the assembly line.
One of the most complicated parts of life, that I at least find easiest to forget, is context. Context, continuity in a chain of events and history. (A current event, politics, history, interpretation/understanding of how things relate to one-another, prediction of cause and consequence, and much more)
Context is often what lets us make sense of cause and effect, reason and consequence.
I think we all recognize that symbolic actions have a real purpose for getting closure individually, and sorting out events as societies. As people we aren't rational beings, we're animals. There's a reason we mourn the dead and have ceremonies for their remains. Rituals fulfill very real needs.
A knife used in a traumatic incident is connected irrevocably with that event. If you view that knife out of context, sure it's just a knife.
It isn't a question of consequentialism or deontology or ethics. But through looking at that knife, we can learn something about how our culture and how th ehuman mind functions.
A similar, and probably more relatable situation, might be “murder houses.” One of my friend’s actually lives in a fairly famous murder house. He didn’t realize until after he moved in, and it...
Exemplary
A similar, and probably more relatable situation, might be “murder houses.” One of my friend’s actually lives in a fairly famous murder house. He didn’t realize until after he moved in, and it turns out the bank that owned the deed after the last murder had successfully managed to get the address changed to an adjacent street so the listing wouldn’t correlate to articles about the three(!) homicides that had occurred there under the ownership of the three previous owners. I’m not going to go into detail about them because of trauma-triggers, but they were all quite grisly and one of them involved sexual violence.
I asked him how he felt about it and he told me it was great. He got an amazing deal and the only thing he needs to do to raise the value of the property is to make sure nobody dies in it.
I have another couple of friends who live in a condo building that is such a good deal that nobody ever seems to move out. All the units are occupied by people in their 70s and the only way anyone new moves in is if a previous owner dies. My wife and I have been in a grisly game of having our friends track if any of their neighbors are about to kick the bucket so we can swoop in for the estate sale. Their own unit had the previous owner die in the shower so they redid the whole bathroom.
Another converse example would be that one asshole who shot Trayvon Martin selling the murder weapon at auction. In this case it’s like a reverse deodand, a murder weapon whose value grows because of a societal desire to co-sign for the white supremacist ideology it represents.
We’ve also got the phenomenon of people holding surrendered paraphernalia from Nazi officers. In this case they may have started as “trophies” from conquered villains, but over time they seem to have lost their power. My friend has a sword surrendered to his grandfather by a Japanese general. He speaks of it more as a cool sword with a cool history than the sword of a war criminal.
I don't think it's a matter of luck, and I don't think it's a matter of ethics, so much as it is a function of strength of the association and the ease of replacement. I wouldn't use a knife used...
I don't think it's a matter of luck, and I don't think it's a matter of ethics, so much as it is a function of strength of the association and the ease of replacement.
I wouldn't use a knife used in a murder, but that's mostly because I have immediate access to any one of a million other knives. That holds true for the majority of murder weapons. If someone killed someone with a car, however, it would probably depend on a bunch of things like 'did I see it happen', 'did I personally know anyone involved', etc - governing the strength of the association. There's probably an influence there too of 'would anybody else know'. I don't have any issues at all walking into the Lindt Cafe here in Sydney for example.
To be honest, I don't think the knife is a good example. If we were to take this hypothetical to the extreme and assume that the knife could be 100% sanitized then sure, but there are many things...
To be honest, I don't think the knife is a good example. If we were to take this hypothetical to the extreme and assume that the knife could be 100% sanitized then sure, but there are many things which are theoretically, incredibly hard to clean. Like for example, what if the knife had been tainted with prions?
This sort of thing can help rationalize why we avoid things that are associated with negative events. It's a form of risk-aversion, as the article mentions. Similarly, it helps explain the context of the situation. We're not avoiding just the knife, but the situation that the knife is in currently. If someone is using a knife that was used for murder and knows that it was used for murder, it calls into question the context of the situation and has us ask why someone would use that specific knife in question.
A big part of why we treat objects as tainted is because we know they can affect how others judge us. When a creator I liked came out as vocally racist, I enjoyed their content less and cut it out...
A big part of why we treat objects as tainted is because we know they can affect how others judge us.
When a creator I liked came out as vocally racist, I enjoyed their content less and cut it out of my life. I knew that a lot of alt-righters started becoming vocal fans of the creator, and a lot of non-racists stopped associating with the creator. If I told someone I was a fan of the creator, many people would now reasonably assign a higher chance that I was an alt-righter. Also, part of the enjoyment of content comes from the possibility that I might meet other interesting fans of the content through it. Knowing that if I met a random fan now, it would be more likely to be an alt-righter I had even less in common with was a big turn-off.
If a knife of mine had been used in a murder, I wouldn't want to keep the knife around. If a friend I invited over to my place somehow discovered the history of the knife, they would assume I had some unusual fetishization of the murder. They might think I kept it specifically as a talking piece so I can bring up the murder, and that I kept it approvingly as a souvenir. They might not-unreasonably worry that I went out of my way to acquire or keep the knife, and it would be ridiculous for me to try to defend my ownership of the knife as merely convenient. Convenience would be me disassociating from the knife so I don't ever have to bother trying to explain away such a thing, so that's what I'd actually do in the first place.
The best thing to do would be to just donate it as long as its clean. With these things they have no meaning or effect unless you know about it so by giving it away, someone else can use it...
The best thing to do would be to just donate it as long as its clean. With these things they have no meaning or effect unless you know about it so by giving it away, someone else can use it without any issues.
If you enjoy this kind of questions, you should try Michael Sandel's Harvard lectures: http://justiceharvard.org/justicecourse/ When you start to think about it, ethics is anything but trivial....
When you start to think about it, ethics is anything but trivial. Sometimes it can be very hard to justify or even understand why we feel in a certain way.
There was recently a court case regarding a situation in a public place near where I live. A (drunk) man threatened a security guard saying he'd kill him. He then returned later that night with a 10-inch kitchen knife and literally ran at that security guard yelling he was going to kill the same guard.
When the ruling came down, part of what the prosecution requested as part of the settlement was the confiscation of the kitchen knife, which doesn't satisfy the definition of a deodand because no-one was killed, but it has a corollary role.
The article uses the term "luck" to describe these sorts of objects. They're randomly selected, coincidental and inanimate objects. But they become special when they gain a unique history. That home run-baseball does have value beyond the one made right before it on the assembly line.
One of the most complicated parts of life, that I at least find easiest to forget, is context. Context, continuity in a chain of events and history. (A current event, politics, history, interpretation/understanding of how things relate to one-another, prediction of cause and consequence, and much more)
Context is often what lets us make sense of cause and effect, reason and consequence.
I think we all recognize that symbolic actions have a real purpose for getting closure individually, and sorting out events as societies. As people we aren't rational beings, we're animals. There's a reason we mourn the dead and have ceremonies for their remains. Rituals fulfill very real needs.
A knife used in a traumatic incident is connected irrevocably with that event. If you view that knife out of context, sure it's just a knife.
It isn't a question of consequentialism or deontology or ethics. But through looking at that knife, we can learn something about how our culture and how th ehuman mind functions.
A similar, and probably more relatable situation, might be “murder houses.” One of my friend’s actually lives in a fairly famous murder house. He didn’t realize until after he moved in, and it turns out the bank that owned the deed after the last murder had successfully managed to get the address changed to an adjacent street so the listing wouldn’t correlate to articles about the three(!) homicides that had occurred there under the ownership of the three previous owners. I’m not going to go into detail about them because of trauma-triggers, but they were all quite grisly and one of them involved sexual violence.
I asked him how he felt about it and he told me it was great. He got an amazing deal and the only thing he needs to do to raise the value of the property is to make sure nobody dies in it.
I have another couple of friends who live in a condo building that is such a good deal that nobody ever seems to move out. All the units are occupied by people in their 70s and the only way anyone new moves in is if a previous owner dies. My wife and I have been in a grisly game of having our friends track if any of their neighbors are about to kick the bucket so we can swoop in for the estate sale. Their own unit had the previous owner die in the shower so they redid the whole bathroom.
Another converse example would be that one asshole who shot Trayvon Martin selling the murder weapon at auction. In this case it’s like a reverse deodand, a murder weapon whose value grows because of a societal desire to co-sign for the white supremacist ideology it represents.
We’ve also got the phenomenon of people holding surrendered paraphernalia from Nazi officers. In this case they may have started as “trophies” from conquered villains, but over time they seem to have lost their power. My friend has a sword surrendered to his grandfather by a Japanese general. He speaks of it more as a cool sword with a cool history than the sword of a war criminal.
I don't think it's a matter of luck, and I don't think it's a matter of ethics, so much as it is a function of strength of the association and the ease of replacement.
I wouldn't use a knife used in a murder, but that's mostly because I have immediate access to any one of a million other knives. That holds true for the majority of murder weapons. If someone killed someone with a car, however, it would probably depend on a bunch of things like 'did I see it happen', 'did I personally know anyone involved', etc - governing the strength of the association. There's probably an influence there too of 'would anybody else know'. I don't have any issues at all walking into the Lindt Cafe here in Sydney for example.
To be honest, I don't think the knife is a good example. If we were to take this hypothetical to the extreme and assume that the knife could be 100% sanitized then sure, but there are many things which are theoretically, incredibly hard to clean. Like for example, what if the knife had been tainted with prions?
This sort of thing can help rationalize why we avoid things that are associated with negative events. It's a form of risk-aversion, as the article mentions. Similarly, it helps explain the context of the situation. We're not avoiding just the knife, but the situation that the knife is in currently. If someone is using a knife that was used for murder and knows that it was used for murder, it calls into question the context of the situation and has us ask why someone would use that specific knife in question.
A big part of why we treat objects as tainted is because we know they can affect how others judge us.
When a creator I liked came out as vocally racist, I enjoyed their content less and cut it out of my life. I knew that a lot of alt-righters started becoming vocal fans of the creator, and a lot of non-racists stopped associating with the creator. If I told someone I was a fan of the creator, many people would now reasonably assign a higher chance that I was an alt-righter. Also, part of the enjoyment of content comes from the possibility that I might meet other interesting fans of the content through it. Knowing that if I met a random fan now, it would be more likely to be an alt-righter I had even less in common with was a big turn-off.
If a knife of mine had been used in a murder, I wouldn't want to keep the knife around. If a friend I invited over to my place somehow discovered the history of the knife, they would assume I had some unusual fetishization of the murder. They might think I kept it specifically as a talking piece so I can bring up the murder, and that I kept it approvingly as a souvenir. They might not-unreasonably worry that I went out of my way to acquire or keep the knife, and it would be ridiculous for me to try to defend my ownership of the knife as merely convenient. Convenience would be me disassociating from the knife so I don't ever have to bother trying to explain away such a thing, so that's what I'd actually do in the first place.
The best thing to do would be to just donate it as long as its clean. With these things they have no meaning or effect unless you know about it so by giving it away, someone else can use it without any issues.
If you enjoy this kind of questions, you should try Michael Sandel's Harvard lectures: http://justiceharvard.org/justicecourse/
When you start to think about it, ethics is anything but trivial. Sometimes it can be very hard to justify or even understand why we feel in a certain way.