the problem with moral justification and sex offenders
the problem to explore for now is that we have sex offenders and other difficult people living among us, and the government provides a “target list” for some of them. mix in a little “my morality is better than your morality” and eventually, someone’s going to come along and justify some questionable behavior.
it’s not a new thing – we’ve had people try to justify killing doctors that perform abortions, and human society has a long history of banishing people that make trouble in one form or another.
in the category of “this had to happen sooner or later,” under law of unintended consquences, the tough-on-crime fear-panering legislatures that gave us sex-offender registries will have a good time with this one:
Man defends attacks on sex offenders [boston.com, december 5, 2004]“I don’t want people to steal the souls of little kids,” Trant, 57, said in an interview in prison last week. “I’m doing 30 years for something I think is morally justified.”
i guess part of the problem might be that we don’t have anywhere to banish these people anymore. if we kick them out of our village, they just end up in someone else’s village. we can’t ship them off to leper colonies or australia, so we’re going to have to find some way to live with them.
any suggestions?