Cythraul
Active Member
- Dec 10, 2003
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Intent and motive are extremely important. You cannot only consider the end result of a crime, example: a robber has murdered his victim in three separate scenario's.
S1: Motive: "I wanted his money, he was loaded and at an atm - yeah I took that chance. If he didn't fight back I prob wouldn't have accidentally fired my weapon..."
S2: "Those Jews always have money, so it was no surprise he had a fat stack of cash leaving that atm; and let's face it, one less Jew in the world isn't a bad thing."
S3: "He just wanted a hug... so I gave him one! And he gave me flowers! He told me to have them... and then he left me... told me to run away..."
Yeah, in the end someone was robbed. On top of that they lost their life. The difference here between the scenario's though is the entire intent and motive. Why is this important? Because you do not charge every single case the same way, it is a case by case basis. The whole point of participating in a society that is bound by a social contract is that you stand by it and act in accordance with the rules and bylaws that have been set. You wouldn't say any of the crimes above are the same because they are not. S1 was only a robbery, the death was accidental. S2 was not only a motivated murder, it was hateful in its nature; the intent shows exactly where a person stands in regards to other humans and to society by and large. S3 is a fucking insane person who committed a tragic crime (but because said person is mentally unstable, and thought something else was occurring, cannot be tried as a normal sapient human being - accountability must be suspended for the time being until further evidence comes into play). Cases cannot be treated the same just because in the end the same outcome occurred.
Your examples do not support the claim that some kind of racially-biased ideological motivation is relevant to how we categorize what are, on the face of it, basically the same crime. All that your examples show is that a person's mental state is relevant to determining the degree of moral responsibility we'd want to attribute to them. But there is clearly something else going on when we're talking about hate crimes. A better set of examples would be ones in which, in the various cases, the perpetrator's level of moral responsibility is already determined and the same in all cases, yet the motivation for committing the crime is different. Your cases address a completely different issue. They do not specifically speak to the issue of hate crimes.
Der Morgenstern said:No, but guy stood more of a chance of surviving the robbery than if the the guy committing the crime also hated him based on his race. Chances are if you're going to rob someone based on the desire for cash than the fact that the person you're robbing is of a race you dislike, you're going to be less prone to turn to violence in the first instance than in the second.
Irrelevant. The issue is about how we're supposed to deal with crimes after the fact. Why does it matter that in one case it was more likely that violence would have occurred? Presumably in both cases the perpetrator bears moral responsibility for what occurred. Are we going to say 'We ought to treat this case of violence differently because prior to the occurrence of this act of violence it was more likely for it to occur than if the crime weren't racially motivated'? That seems silly.
Disclaimer: I am drunk.