I mean, the lynching of innocent people as part of an ongoing terror campaign against a racial minority was definitely a big problem with it. There’s a reason people don’t care as much about outlaws getting hung or shot in the old west with a bare bones trial.
Unlike in the old west, with their trials followed by a hanging, typically people who are lynched are not given a trial. That’s why it is called extrajudicial.
Being okay with extrajudicial murder as long as it happens to the right people is immoral.
It’s immoral when the KKK does it to minorities just like it is immoral when anyone decides that their enemies don’t deserve due process before being murdered.
The law is not an authority on morality. While slavery was legal it was still immoral. To use the law as your guide for what is right and what is wrong will have you doing/saying awful things. Things should be illegal because they’re bad, they shouldn’t be bad because they’re illegal. The moral problem with killing a Klansman (if there is one) is not that it’s done extra judicially.
“With or without [the law], good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes [the law].” - Steven Weinberg. He was talking about religion, but it’s really religious law that causes good people to do evil.
I’m pretty sure that the problem with lynching was that it was extrajudicial murder and not that the wrong people were getting lynched.
I mean, the lynching of innocent people as part of an ongoing terror campaign against a racial minority was definitely a big problem with it. There’s a reason people don’t care as much about outlaws getting hung or shot in the old west with a bare bones trial.
Unlike in the old west, with their trials followed by a hanging, typically people who are lynched are not given a trial. That’s why it is called extrajudicial.
Being okay with extrajudicial murder as long as it happens to the right people is immoral.
It’s immoral when the KKK does it to minorities just like it is immoral when anyone decides that their enemies don’t deserve due process before being murdered.
It’s not clear It’s a lynching and not the result of a guilty conscience. Evidently hangings in MS are more often suicide instead of murder /s
The law is not an authority on morality. While slavery was legal it was still immoral. To use the law as your guide for what is right and what is wrong will have you doing/saying awful things. Things should be illegal because they’re bad, they shouldn’t be bad because they’re illegal. The moral problem with killing a Klansman (if there is one) is not that it’s done extra judicially.
“With or without [the law], good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes [the law].” - Steven Weinberg. He was talking about religion, but it’s really religious law that causes good people to do evil.