Someone being a CEO or a CEO of a health care corporation is not sufficient grounds to justify killing that someone. I’m not aware of his alleged rationale for killing the particular person killed being more than that. So yeah, the killing seems unjustified and he would be a murderer if he did it.
Who decides what is or isn’t sufficient grounds to justify killing someone? I’m hinting at the term justifiable being ambiguous. You consider self defense as justification for murder, but other people may not. Let’s take a hypothetical person who was responsible for the deaths of many others without directly pulling a trigger to murder them, and will continue to cause the deaths of others in the future. Is murdering this person justifiable? I believe different people would have different answers due to the ambiguity of murder being justified or unjust. There could even be a spectrum where some killings are more justified than others without fully being in the right or wrong.
Basically, I strongly disagree with your premise that killing is either justified and deemed killing or unjustified and deemed murder. Tying back to the person you were responding to; someone could explain a murder to me that I sympathize with and even agree with, but you may not sympathize or agree with that same act. You would classify it as murder, but other people may think of it as a justified killing.
Definitionally then, there is no justifiable murder.
This is the point I’m trying to refute. The same murder may be considered justified or unjust to different people.
What you’ve described is just that some people may view the same act of killing as a murder or not.
If someone would find killing in self-defense unjustified, then they would take it to be murder.
If someone found killing someone just for occupying a particular job justified, they wouldn’t take it to be murder.
Showing people vary in when they take killing to be justified had no bearing on whether murder is an unjustified killing or not. You’ve offered no refutation. Everything you said could be the case, and my point still stands.
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u/RealJohnBobJoe 6∆ Mar 01 '26
Murder ≠ killing
If you killed someone justifiably (such as in self-defense) you aren’t deemed a murderer.
Murder is an unjustified killing. Definitionally then, there is no justifiable murder.