Sorting
I’m a little perturbed and repelled by this idea (expressed in comments on Difficult Daughters) that the murder of a girl is ‘worse’ than the murder of a woman. Actually, I think I’m more than a little perturbed and repelled by it. And no one but me has even taken issue with it yet, so perhaps that indicates it’s conventional wisdom, even a truism. But I think it’s all wrong, and not only wrong but sinister. I’m perturbed not only by the specifics of the ranking but by the idea that ranking of murder is a valid and sensible way of thinking about it. But why would it be? Why should it be? Why don’t we all have an egalitarian reaction which says that qualities and attributes are fundamentally and radically beside the point when it comes to murder, that there is no better or worse, that nobody wants to be murdered (masochists excepted) and that’s that. What is this impulse to say that murder of children is worse? It seems to me to border on saying that the murder of cute people is worse than the murder of uncute people, which borders on saying the murder of pretty people is worse than the murder of ugly people.
Now, mass media do in fact say exactly that, albeit implicitly. The weird obsessive coverage of Jon-Benet Ramsay is one glaring example, and there are plenty of others. But why do rational people want to follow their lead? Why does anyone want to try to argue that some murders are worse than others? I can see why in certain very extreme circumstances, so extreme as to be very rare in the rich world, people might be forced to try to decide how to rank the worth of various people for the sake of triage. If death is inevitable for some members of a group because the water and food are limited, then calculations are one way to decide who is saved – but it’s well known (isn’t it?) that they’re a damn horrible way, which is why people often decide to draw straws instead. Sophie’s choice was not a choice she wanted to make.
There seems to be an idea that it’s a natural and instinctive thought that the murder or death of a child is ‘worse’ (in what sense? I don’t quite know, but the meaning seems to be taken for granted) than the murder of an adult. But I don’t think it is. I think that’s basically a sentimental idea, which is probably a product of the 19th century, of Dickens and Stowe and their fans and epigones. Dickens at some point realized that the death of a child could be milked for emotional reactions, and milk he did. You don’t find that kind of sentimentalism about children before Dickens. Even the cult of sensibility was mostly a sensibility about other things – about adult griefs and sorrows, on the whole. But Dickens had a winning formula, and Hollywood carried on his work; Little Nell and Little Eva have been haunting us for a long time now. But tear-jerking tricks of popular novelists aren’t necessarily the best possible guides to moral reasoning.
And I don’t buy it. As I said in the comments, I can see that the death or murder of a child is more poignant than that of an adult, for obvious reasons (innocence, defencelessness, helplessness, trust etc) but poignant is not the same thing as worse. It is true that one variable can be easily quantified: age translates directly into amount of potential life taken away. Okay; so if you’re in the village in a famine with stocks dwindling fast and no relief on the way, or in the lifeboat with one bottle of water, then one way to decide who starves is to say it’s the people with the least time left to lose. But that doesn’t translate directly into saying that the murder of a child is worse than that of an adult. And there are other criteria that (if one wants to take such criteria into account, which I don’t) cut the other way. You could easily argue that the murder of an adult is much worse than the murder of a child because an adult has a far clearer idea of what’s at stake, and because an adult probably has goals and plans and dreams that she wants to try to fulfill, and because adults are much more likely to have adult friends who value them, and because adults have probably invested a lot of time and effort in training or education that is just wasted if they are murdered, and because adults may have dependents who need them, which children don’t.
But I don’t want to make that calculation, because I don’t want to claim that the murder of one kind of person is worse than the murder of another kind. Because I don’t think it is. I think claiming that amounts to saying that some lives are intrinsically (not circumstantially, in the sense of having dependents or making a contribution) worth more than others. And frankly I think there’s something deeply icky and regressive in the idea that children are, intrinsically, as children, worth more than adults. I think that’s sentimental and sinister – as if people deteriorate by growing up; as if innocence were necessarily better than experience; as if ignorance were better than learning and potential better than actuality. It depresses me to think that anyone believes Hina Saleem’s murder would actually be worse if she’d been twelve instead of twenty one – as if she’d done something corrupting and tainting and compromised by growing up.
I hadn’t thought of this until I started typing, but Hannah Arendt talks about this whole issue in Eichmann in Jerusalem. She is scathing about the way the Jewish councils helped the Nazis by (among other things) coming up with various privileged categories of people who should be saved, and she’s adamant that they shouldn’t have done it.
What was morally so disastrous in the acceptance of these privileged catagories was that everyone who demanded to have an ‘exception’ made in his case implicitly recognized the rule…Even after the end of the war, Kastner was proud of his success in saving ‘prominent Jews,’ a category officially introduced by the Nazis in 1942, as though in his view, too, it went without saying that a famous Jew had more right to stay alive than an ordinary one; to take upon himself such ‘responsibilities’ – to help the Nazis in their efforts to pick out ‘famous’ people from the anonymous mass, for this is what it amounted to – ‘required more courage than to face death.’
We just don’t need to do that. We don’t need to collaborate with murderers by saying that the murder of one kind of person is worse than the murder of some other kind. We’re under no obligation to sort people into the more and less murder-worthy; so let’s not.
Something that finished the other thread on this caught my attention, as follows.
” “As soon as we try to arrange things on a scale (best to worst), we need to come up with some criteria for doing so.”
But why do we have to or want to do that? Let’s not. That’s part of my point. Let’s not do that; let’s instead just say that all human lives are equally valuable, because to their owners, they are.”
But we already *do* quantify lives, or indeed murders by better and worse, that’s why courts give different sentences to different examples of the same crime. To give one example; is it better or worse for
a) a battered wife to deliberately kill her husband (not self defence by legal standards)
b) a husband to deliberately kill his battered wife (again, not in self defence)
If both cases went before the courts they’d receive very different sentences. But by your own argument you’d disagree with this. can I ask why?
Good point.
There are also of course degrees of murder. And you’re right, I didn’t take that into account.
I suppose the answer to your ‘why’ is that I’m thinking of it from the point of view of the murderee, not the murderer’s motivation or degree of premeditation. The latter does have to be taken into account (but, fortunately, by judges and juries, not by The People at large). But for the former it doesn’t.
Still…you’re right. I would say the murder of a woman by her batterer is worse than the murder of a batterer by his batteree.
It’s a fair cop.
Perhaps a part of it not so much the ‘value’ of the victim but the act itself, and what it says about the perpertrator.
On the one hand, societies have always valued the capacity for violence in men, when directed at socially approved targets (the ‘other’)and on the other hand we have taboos and cultural inhibitors against violence.
For a man to carry out an non-approved act of violence against a healthy adult male requires the breaking of relatively few, low-level inhibitors. Most men can at least imagine doing such a thing and don’t feel a particularly strong sense of outrage.
However, violence against other categories (women, children, the elderly, the disabled) require a much greater deviance from acceptable behaviour and people who do such things are seen as more deviant, more willing to disregard key social conventions, more dangerous to the group because a crucial part of their social conditioning is missing or has ‘burnt out’.
If I learned that a friend of mine had lost his temper and struck another man, even if the blow proved fatal, my first instict would be to ask why, hoping that there was a reason which would justify or at least explain his act. If I learned he had done the same thing to a six-year old or an eighty-six year old I wouldn’t ask that question. I think that is less because I value one life more highly and more because I couldn’t empathise and because of what it revealed about his capacity to transgess.
I oppose fox hunting for a variety of reasons and hold a dim view of fox botherers themselves, but not with the same loathing and profound suspicion with which I would regard, say, someone who killed cats for entertainment.
I don’t value the life of a cat higher than that of a fox, but I don’t think fox-hunting necessarily bars one from babysitting, whereas cat-killing does.
Yes…that all makes sense. But I think it’s a bit different from what Ian and Keith were saying. It’s to do with the strength differential. (If you learned that a male friend of yours shot an unarmed man in the back from a safe distance would your reaction match the one for the man hitting a man or the one for a man hitting a child or old person?) But that doesn’t really explain the child edge. Especially since all the accounts of this kind that I can think of involve several armed men murdering one unarmed woman – in other words a pretty huge differential in terms of ability to kill and escape injury oneself. And then, we’re talking about completed murders, so we can assume that the murderer had an advantage, or he wouldn’t have succeeded.
In other words I think Ian is claiming that most people think the murder of a child is worse than the murder of an adult because of something about children, rather than because of something about the methods of the murderers. That it’s about the value of the child rather than about the strength of the murderer.
Chris Brockley asked:
“To give one example; is it better or worse for
a) a battered wife to deliberately kill her husband (not self defence by legal standards)…”
In Canada the concept of self defence is, as it were, extended by what is called the Doctrine of Necessity, which mitigates, if not the charge, at least the sentence.
In cases where a woman has been battered in the past, and where she has a reasonable apprehension that this time his threat to kill her will be carried out (typically, just as soon as he can rouse himself from his drunken stupor), she may very well kill him, and appeal to the Doctrine of Necessity at her trial.
OB: “Still…you’re right. I would say the murder of a woman by her batterer is worse than the murder of a batterer by his batteree. It’s a fair cop.”
OB: “But I think it’s a bit different from what Ian and Keith were saying.”
I was simply making the point that there are rational and reasonable ways of making distinctions between murders. As Chris said, the courts do it all the time (self defence v accidental manslaughter v manslaughter v murder).
I also said “all other things being equal — which they will never be…”
I did NOT say that the murder of a girl would ALWAYS be worse than the murder of an older person.
OB: “We’re under no obligation to sort people into the more and less murder-worthy; so let’s not.”
But sometimes, mostly for legal reasons, we have to. In those cases, it is probably better to have some rational basis for doing so, rather than an emotional basis, which is one likely alternative (another being religious).
It seems to me (but I may be biased) that crimes against children are often regarded as more serious, and sentenced accordingly, than similar crimes against adults. The extent to which this reflects emotional, rather than rational, responses is an interesting one.
In other words I think Ian is claiming that most people think the murder of a child is worse than the murder of an adult because of something about children, rather than because of something about the methods of the murderers. That it’s about the value of the child rather than about the strength of the murderer.
At the risk of landing myself in more hot water, I think I was quite clear in my comments earlier that I did not claim to know the reasons (if any) that people may have for thinking that crimes are worse when committed against children than adults. Just that this is indeed what people think.
Incidentally, I also think that most people believe that it is worse to kill a woman than a man. Maybe it’s a power thing, maybe it’s men being possessive. There’s probably an element of condescension involved. Again, I’m just saying that’s what people think, not why.
It seems to me than Don’s comment above is on the right lines. For instance, there are two murderers, one of whom simply shoots people and leaves their bodies where they fall; the other shoots them, takes them home, chops them up then makes a nice stew out of them for his/her supper.
The second murderer has caused no more pain and suffering than the first, and yet most people would probably be much more appalled by his actions than the first murderers actions. It’s more horrific. That’s the response we feel. Logically, this makes no sense, I agree.
Looking at this from an evolutionary point of view, I guess that you could say that men are more expendable than women and children represent a large investment and are our genetic future.
Also, children, in particular, are usually quite unable to defend themselves against the attack of a much larger, stronger adult.
Until very recently, women were also percieved as “weaker”,and the same logic applied. The fact that the logic was based on false premises is irrelevant, because the whole of society was organised that way.
I suspect that the murder ofa “girl” is a hang-over form this attitude.
Similarly, that is what made the Moors murders, and those in GLoucester (Rose West etc.) so horrible….
Oh, that reminds me of a sick joke…
Gloucester childrens society memorial play: “Arsenic and Old Lace”.
I also think Don nails it pretty well and to hark back to my earlier comment on this topic Gita Sereny analyses this topic well in ‘Cries Unheard’. There, of course, she is dealing with the ‘ultimate’ horror the murder of a child by another child.
I just want to note as well, Ophelia, that I think most of us in the previous thread were discussing why the murder of a child is PERCEIVED as more horrible, not suggesting that it actually was.
OB
I suspect a part of it is about responsibility: children are/should be/can be seen as [delete as preferred] the wards of adult society – unlike adults, who have/should have/can as a legal fiction be assumed to have [ditto] responsibility for themselves. As such, the murder of a child involved both a failure to protect (on the part of society) and a breach of trust (on the part of the murderer).
Where we see the murder of an adult which involved a similar failure to protect and a similar abuse of power (say, in the abusive-husband-murders-battered-wife scenario referred to above) we similarly assign a special status to that killing. The primary difference is that children are unique in being assigned to the ‘wardship’ category by default (though old-fashioned men would grant women the same default status).
Bear in mind there is a flipside to this with children: while their automatic ‘wardship’ categorization guarantees them special status when murdered, it also gives them a special horror when they kill themselves. A similar horror used to be reserved for murderesses.
I don’t want to trivialise this debate, but I’ve dug out the copy of the Sindy the story came from, and the last line of the paragraph in question goes right to the end of the line. “Girl” is the last word of the line above, and, since “woman” is a longer word (only one more letter, I know, but wider letters) is it not possible that “woman” was shortened to “girl” simply to make the paragraph one line smaller?
I don’t know why it’s such a problem. Yes, all life is precious and all that… but we don’t think about lives as just ‘a life’, and rightfully so. This is tantamount to the claim that the loss of the life of a child is more tragic than the death of an old person. This makes sense to us because more life, more potential is lost. It’s worse to murder a ‘girl’ because we expect that she has more living to do and can contribute more to the world at large than someone who has already spent more years of thier life. It might be a cold way of weighing it out, but it’s not unreasonable.
You call yourself Metaphysicist but you don’t know why it’s such a problem. That’s interesting.
I’ve already said that yes, when it’s a forced choice, one way to choose between lives is to consider how much life would be taken away, but I also said that that is not the same thing as a general overall view that the murder of a child is worse than the murder of an adult or that the murder of a girl is worse than the murder of a woman. Here’s one reason that’s “such a problem”: say a female age 20 is a girl and a female age 21 is a woman: is it self-evident that the murder of the first is worse than the murder of the second? Not to me it isn’t.
“In those cases, it is probably better to have some rational basis for doing so, rather than an emotional basis”
Just so. That’s what I’m saying.
You’re not in hot water, Ian! We worked it out. “Again, I’m just saying that’s what people think, not why.” Maybe I misunderstood you then – but I did take you to be at least to an extent agreeing with the people who think that. Surely you were, weren’t you? Why else would you think it Spock-like to disagree? But maybe I misunderstood.
outeast’s point about wardship – sure, I see that; but again, that’s about the murderer, and what I’m questioning is the idea (if it is an idea) that the murder of a child is worse for the child than the murder of an adult is for an adult. That one particular age-category of murder is worse for the murderee than other age-categories. Maybe all these get confused – whether we’re talking about the agent or the object, whether we’re talking about law or morality, whether we’re talking about perception or reality, what people do think or what we all should think – but then that’s a good reason to disentangle them.
“Until very recently, women were also percieved as “weaker”,and the same logic applied. “
Physically, the mean stength of women is less than the mean strength of men. This is not merely perception. (You may as well say that until recently women were perceived as having less body hair than men). To say otherwise is to indulge in bio denial.
But perception is crucial here, because a lot of this really is illusion, or at least drastic oversimplification, if only because murder is not always simply a matter of stronger people battering weaker people to death. Weapons are used, numbers are used, surprise is used, deception and sneak attacks are used. So it is at least arguable that it is a perception that women are too ‘weak’ in some non-physical way even to resist or even to murder by stealth or surprise or a powerful weapon. That’s probably true in some cases and false in others. It’s also probably true that perception distorts thinking on the subject – that is, the perception/assumption that women ‘don’t’ commit murder creates this idea (if it is an idea) that the murder of a woman is worse than the murder of a man in the same way that the murder of a child is worse than the murder of an adult. In other words it may be a perception of women as not just physically weaker than men but as globally and pervasively more helpless, spineless, vulnerable, dependent, feeble. It’s not bio-denial to question that perception, it seems to me.
Or to put it much more succinctly, it may be a perception, that is an illusion, that women are like children that creates this idea. I think that perception is both false and worth resisting.
Couldn’t it be simply that we are biologically programmed to protect our offspring? (Or even creatures manifesting juvenile traits, see Stephen Jay Gould on Mickey) Stop me if I am wrong – I am no biologist – but isn’t the nervous system of most species of mammals “hardwired” that way? That’s an impulse we can rationalize (if that’s a word) afterward but not justify totally.
Usually the less fertile a species is and the more and longer its members take care of their young.
As for OB’s last comment, definitely yes. The attribution of childish qualities to women is an old strategy of subjugation. Dismissive first, oppressive second!
Or also, a lot of people find it far easier to feel empathy toward a child (caveat: or a person perceived to be “childish”) than one of their fellows adults. Innocence, simplicity, openness are qualities we tend to associate with children. Under such a reinforced empathy, their sufferings become ours more easily.
Finally: it’s summer, a lot of “proper” journalists are on leave. Expect the standard of writing and editing to drop a bit, although today’s editorial in the Independent (about the cricket again) was alright by me.
Sure. That’s what I’m saying. It’s a sentimental reaction, but not a rational one, and if one examines it, there doesn’t seem to be a lot to say for it on rational grounds. Myself, I think it’s both false, and unpleasant in its implications. (By the same token there is a sentimental reaction that it is especially unfortunate if someone young and aesthetically appealing is murdered; I seriously hope no one would argue that that’s rationally defensible. As some people tried to point out to no avail at the time, Jon-Benet Ramsay’s murder was no less but also no more unfortunate than that of any obscure plain child in a housing project.)
Arnaud: “Couldn’t it be simply that we are biologically programmed to protect our offspring? … Stop me if I am wrong – I am no biologist – but isn’t the nervous system of most species of mammals ‘hardwired’ that way?”
Most ANIMALS are not ‘hardwired’ to do this but some simple animals (eg scorpions are). Mammals, as a group, do provide their young with more care than most other mammals but in some mammals there appears to be a strong learned component. Female gorillas, for instance, usually need to learn how to be a mother by watching other females.
There are very strong taboos in societies about the killing of children. It’s as though adults have a duty of care to children. That makes killing of a child seem more horrible. There may be good reasons why this is so, but I won’t speculate without expert knowledge. I suspect the article used ‘girl’ rather than ‘woman’ to induce a frisson of horror in its readers.
Best wishes
” In other words it may be a perception of women as not just physically weaker than men but as globally and pervasively more helpless, spineless, vulnerable, dependent, feeble. It’s not bio-denial to question that perception, it seems to me.”
If that is what was meant, fair enough. However, it wasn’t clear whether “weaker” was being used figuratively or litterally.
True; it wasn’t. And we probably don’t always distinguish the two in our routine thinking. It seems likely that the reality of physical sexual dimorphism slops over into less physical kinds of weakness – that is, that we may tend to think that because women are physically weaker they are also morally weaker, cognitively weaker, etc. Which is a depressing thought, but its likelihood seems fairly obvious, especially since there are plenty of people around who still think ‘men are smarter than women’ i.e. all men are smarter than all women i.e. the stupidest man is smarter than the smartest women – which is obviously absurd, yet it’s a commonplace (though without the final clause spelled out).
The depressing thought, I hasten to add, spotting a lack of clarity there, is that we tend to think that, not that it’s true.
I’m too weak and feeble to make myself clear.