Antibubba ~
About Andrea Yates, here's a post I wrote at the time:
http://www.thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?p=660188#post660188
You ask:
Does she deserve to be punished in the same way as Susan Smith, who drowned her kids because she thought they stood in the way of her getting a new guy? Same crime, same results, but very different motivators.
Having a hard time articulating this one. Bear with me as I stumble through!
I posit that
the act itself has a value, negative or positive.
I further posit that
the value of the act (negative or positive) is only tangentally related to the
motivation behind the act.
To put it more plainly: the murders of those children was an act of negative value.
No matter how positive the
motivation behind the murders, the fact remains that the children are dead and that she herself killed them. Their lives had a positive value. The loss of those lives was a negative value. And the act of murder had a negative value of its own.
To place the
motivation for the act ahead of the
value of the act itself is to claim that actions have no real meaning. It doesn't therefore
matter whether you murder one baby, five babies, or a whole
generation of babies -- all that matters is whether you
meant well when you did it.
That way lies madness. Indeed, in Andrea Yates' case, that way
was madness.
In a greater sense, that way lies the ugly and bloodstained road of justifying even the most heinous acts, large and small, and excusing all of them as long as the explanation for them sounds plausible enough. That way lies the destruction of society and the end of culture. No matter who is hurt, no matter who is killed, no matter what atrocity is committed, a human being can
always find some justification in his own mind for whatever evil (or good) he might commit.
Thought-stopper though it may be, no mass murder in history -- not even the very worst of them -- was committed for the sheer bloodyminded joy of killing people.
Every single one of them was committed with some greater end in view, some positive good that its perpetrators meant to bring about. Whether we're talking about murderous acts on a small scale, like Andrea Yates' five dead babies, or acts on a mass scale, like the widespread genocides in Africa in recent decades, in
every case the perpetrators had some "good" they intended to bring about by their acts.
Does that make the
acts themselves somehow less meaningful? I somehow doubt the murdered souls would say so.
There's a fellow on this board who works in a pediatric intensive care ward. Every day, he saves children's lives -- lives that would be lost if he didn't do what he does. When he posted a story about one of his patients, several people lauded him for what he does. He responded that he wasn't worth their accolades, because he does the job only because he's an adrenalin junkie.
So what?
I bet if you asked the parents of the children whose lives he's saved, they'd tell you that his reasons for doing the job are completely irrelevant. The lives saved are
worth something quite apart from his motivation for saving them.
No one in the world has motives that are completely pure when they do an act of goodness. Why should we expect that evil will be uncomplicated in a way that good is not?
When it gets right down to it, I wouldn't care if the fellow pulling me out of the burning car is doing it only because my screams hurt his ears, or because he is a complete altruist with no thought for himself. In either case,
my life has value and his act in saving my life has value.
Nor would I care for the motives of a man who sought to rape, torture, mutilate, and finally kill me. He might be doing it because he wanted to drive the demons out of me so that I could ultimately go to heaven and live happily forever. Or he might be doing it because he simply enjoys watching people suffer and then die at his hands.
Would
my life become less valuable, less worth avenging, just because my attacker has less of a grasp on "reality" (whatever
that is!) than others do?
I'd like to think it does not.
pax
Of course, the Marxian definition of value is ridiculous. All the work one cares to add willl not turn a mud pie into an apple tart; it remains a mud pie, value zero. By corollary, unskillful work can easily subtract value; an untalented cook can turn wholesome dough and fresh green apples, valuable already, into an inedible mess, value zero. Conversely, a great chef can fashion of those same materials a confection of greater value than a commonplace apple tart, with no more effort than an ordinary cook uses to prepare an ordinary sweet. These kitchen illustrations demolish the Marxian theory of value - the fallacy from which the entire magnificent fraud of communism derives - and to illustrate the truth of the common-sense defintion as measured in terms of use. -- Robert Heinlein