He Did It Out of Love; We Shouldn't Punish Him for That

I just got done reading a short story. It was engaging and I did enjoy it. But one of the plot points is leaving me a little cold.

Setting aside all the detail, it goes like this:

1. Two men grow to love each other passionately and become, effectively, mates.

2. One man eventually moves on to other pursuits, and seems to not love the other as he once did.

3. The other man can't stand the thought of this, and so kills his former lover.

4. An agent of vengeance discovers what happened, and decides that the appropriate punishment is death for the murderer. He carries out this sentence. (The story works on two levels at once: In one level, this punishment is divinely inspired and 100% the appropriate and just sentence. In the other level, it's an injustice.)

5. An onlooker sees this act as an injustice, and it changes his entire worldview, with world-shaking consequences.

Pertinent quotes:

"It was justice. He killed another. He was killed in his turn."

"But... he loved. He should have been forgiven. There were... mitigating circumstances. He should not have been destroyed like that. That was wrong."

So...

Let's set aside whether death is an appropriate punishment for murder. (The story seems to indicate that the problem isn't the punishment, it's the motivation - if the murder had been committed for other reasons, the sentence would've been completely just.)

My question is this: Am I the only one who sees that line of reasoning as complete and utter bullcrap?

If you claim to love someone, and use that emotional attachment to deny them their free will, to the point of killing them, to what degree, if any, are you free to claim (or is anyone free to claim on your behalf) that you ought to be punished less because you were acting out of "love"?

Isn't this something like the Self-Made Orphan? "Yes, I just killed my parents, but please, go easy on me; I'm an orphan now."

I was watching a movie the other day, and got discomforted by this man, otherwise a pretty cool character, holding the hand of his love more tightly when she tried to pull free. (This was at the courtship stage, and she was just mildly interested in him, but he was being very outgoing about his attraction.) As I said to my friend, denying the woman's freedom to withdraw her touch isn't romantic, it's "the opposite of romance!" And that's just about whether or not you're free to not touch the guy!

How much worse is it when the person who claims to love you denies you the freedom to leave him? The freedom to go do something that doesn't involve him? The freedom to enjoy a pursuit he can't also enjoy?

How much worse when he tells you the only choice you have is to abide by his will - or suffer death for choosing otherwise?

P.S. Please don't derail this topic into a discussion of religion. There's a distinction that could be made between the two situations (man vs. man and man vs. creator), and I don't mean to open that can of worms. Let's stick to the mortal side of things.

edited 18th Oct '11 3:36:33 AM by Kilyle

Only the curious have, if they live, a tale worth telling at all.

I believe I know the short story you're talking about.

And yes, I agree with you. If you love someone so much you'd rather kill them or otherwise harm them than let them go... then that's a selfish, destructive kind of love that isn't actually about them at all.

Be not afraid...

Ditto.

If anything, love carries an obligation to care about the loved one's well-being.

Assuming that the killer really did it out of love, this aggravates his guilt, much in the same way (albeit, perhaps, to a lesser degree) in which killing a sibling or a son is more culpable than killing a random passerby.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

My suspicion is that, at the root, the killer was motivated not out of love, but out of obsession. (Not to say that love and obsession are mutually exclusive, as they do often seem to coincide.)

This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...

So I'm not crazy :)

It does make the plot point come off very weird. I think the author's trying to make the thing he's writing about seem much more understandable, kind of switching around the good guys and the bad guys like with Wicked, but all he's done for me is make the bad guy a little less evil and a little more... pitifully misguided.

Oh, and on the "obligation to care for the loved one's well-being," here's a quote from just before the other two quotes:

"His welfare mattered more to me than my own. I existed for him... only for him."

So yeah, it's pretty clearly obsession. It's the kind of obsession that can turn sentiments like these to their exact opposite, once the loved one doesn't return them to the same degree.

edited 18th Oct '11 4:19:04 AM by Kilyle

Only the curious have, if they live, a tale worth telling at all.

Just out of curiosity, what's the title of this short story?

This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...

Well, he shouldn't have been excueted, but, yes, he should still be punished.

If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.

Also agreed that you pretty much don't deserve any slack because you committed a crime out of love (or obsession). Many stalkers, rapists and abusive partners use the same excuse. Killing out of love might stop someone from becoming a Complete Monster in the eyes of the viewer but it's still deeply creepy and wrong, not least because it happens in real life and is regular newspaper fodder.

It's a bit like Self-Made Orphan, and very much like Love Makes You Evil and Love Makes You Crazy.

I see one exception where it might be justification: if the loved one was suffering horribly from a terminal disease, though that shifts it to a Euthenasia issue.

As for the movie about the guy who kept a hold on his lady friend as she was trying to pull away - I think it happens a lot in old movies (accompanied by a deep, passionate and eventually reciprocated kiss). It's a very macho, high stakes gambit that looks good on the screen - she either falls for his confident move or she screams for help and he's lost her for good. When it goes wrong it gets creepy. I saw a great version of this in Ratatouille - with the lady nearly pepper spraying the kisser!

edited 18th Oct '11 5:39:42 AM by betaalpha

To me, If I Can't Have You… means you don't actually love the victim, you're just telling yourself you do.

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."

I can't see how the love is even a mildly sympathetic circumstance. If anything, it makes the murder seem more monstrous. It's pretty clear to me that acting out of love isn't an excuse for anything.

I know this story, and I think one of the points is that the murderer and his victim were manipulated into that position, and were basically intended to get executed and murdered, respectively. Since all the characters were angels, they were completely pure and had no PRECEDENT for anything like that, so the murderer had literally no way to to cope with the concept of rejection. Since that was the first time in creation something like that had ever happened, all of the emotions involved were indiluted and extremely powerful.

Also, even if he did deserve to die as punishment, which I lean toward, the witness had just witnessed, well, his very first tragedy and was in shock, trying to grasp at straws. Before then, he'd been absolutely innocent, but after witnessing the aftermath of the first crime of passion, a little bit of him got tainted by proxy. It's one of those stories where the setting and circumstance really does matter.

edited 18th Oct '11 7:26:21 AM by Katrika

"You fail to grasp the basic principles of mad science. Common sense would be cheating." - Narbonic

Heh, I say that about Spike's attempted rape of Buffy, too. There's a whole world of surrounding circumstances that make Spike's position unique and, for me, reduce his culpability immensely, to a degree no human will ever be capable of claiming. And that's not even counting the arguments about comparative acts (Buffy toward Spike, Willow toward Tara) and how the more disturbing acts end up treated much more lightly than his.

But back on topic:

Well, now that we're down to specifics, let's give it its full due:

Neil Gaiman's "Murder Mysteries." Oddly, just a single tale; the mysteries come from the many aspects of the tale. And possibly the fact that nobody understood murder before this one act.

The narrator, the angel of vengeance, gets put to use for the first time to find out how another angel died. After interviewing some angels who assume it was self-inflicted (possibly to study Death from the inside, as the creation of "death" was the angel's duty at the time), the narrator asserts that it cannot possibly be self-inflicted, because otherwise he would not have been summoned.

The tale turns out to be that of two angels who, while working on the development of "love," became lovers. (The angels are charged with creating all the various details of the universe, as they work on it like an art project, inside Heaven.)

It pretty much enfolds as I stated up front, with the added detail that the man who changed his worldview was Lucifer, and predictably this is indicated to be the thing that drove him toward the fall. It's also indicated that God is pulling all the strings to ensure that the angels, like everything else he's created, turn out exactly in accordance with his plan, even if that means ensuring that an angel is put into circumstances that overwhelm his innocent nature and that he responds to, ultimately, by murdering and then getting destroyed. (Although technically, the angels are not portrayed as innocent, but as having human foibles and such; one, for example, claims credit for the creation of others, and bribes them for their silence about it.)

The story stays on the side of destiny 100%, free will 0%. Also, it stands with the idea that God created the darkness and everything in it, rather than, say, the darkness being a distortion or absence of the proper creation.

So I suppose the next question would be, are these details sufficient to excuse Lucifer's reasoning? Or is the reasoning still unsound, but the larger story knows that and is making use of it nonetheless? Or is it still a bit of a plot hole?

Only the curious have, if they live, a tale worth telling at all.

Ther is a glaring flaw in the reasoning of "He did it out of love, he should be forgiven". Forgiveness only has meaning when you regret your bad acts and apologize for them. The outline of the story doesn't seem to suggest that the murderer regretted murdering his victim. How can you offer forgiveness to somebody who doesn't acknowledge that what he did was wrong? But even if you do forgive somebody, it's just foolish to let them get away with it. Sometimes justice needs to be served, and if you honestly regret your crimes, then shouldn't you also admit that you should be punished for them?

Besides, it wasn't the angel who was wronged, it was the murder victim, his friends and family. You can't offer forgiveness to somebody if you weren't wronged. It's like saying, "You stole $100 from your neighbor. I forgive you." No, only the one who was wronged can offer forgiveness.

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.

True. I don't think Lucifer's conclusion was right at all. It was still a touching scene.

"You fail to grasp the basic principles of mad science. Common sense would be cheating." - Narbonic

Actually, nothing can be more intimate than allowing your lover to kill you for his/her own pleasure. That's the ultimate expression of "love" - to put your life in their hands, completely and utterly.

Allowing your lover to kill you is one thing. Your lover killing you is another. Most couples at some point allow the other to kill them, but the other doesn't because why would they?

Except that allowing one's lover to become a murderer means allowing them to debase themselves, to become less worthy than they were before. That's not love, it's just another form of obsession.

Love recognizes and aims to nurture the best aspects of the loved one, to make the loved one closer to what they could and should be. This is the opposite.

edited 18th Oct '11 2:15:21 PM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Full of Stars; that sounds a lot more like Stockholm or Battered Spouse Syndrome that intimacy. It is not mentally healthy to be in the state of mind of "It's okay for this one to kill me." Plus, if the character was more interested in things other than his lover, then he clearly wasn't in a mental place to let someone debase him like that.

Love, hate, self defense, whatever. There's nothing inherently better about one motivation for murder than another. You're 100% free to claim that your particular motivation is mitigating, though. People can claim whatever they want about this sort of thing.

Proof or it's just an opinion.

edited 18th Oct '11 3:25:05 PM by Tongpu

I personally agree with this statement, both for the purposes of this thread and for justice for the murdered in general.

~shrug~

I am now known as Flyboy.

To be fair, the thing the victim was obsessed with was Death...that is, dying. Considering his reputation for throwing himself in his projects, it's likely that if he hadn't been murdered he'd have killed himself just to feel what it was like.

"You fail to grasp the basic principles of mad science. Common sense would be cheating." - Narbonic

...Is it bad that I read the title and thought of 'I Would Do Anything For Love (But Not That)'?

"Hipsters: the most dangerous gang in the US." - Pacific Mackerel

I think the primary flaw here is that killing your lost lover "because you love them so much" doesn't make even a scrap of sense. I could understand if it was revenge for betrayal (which is not really "out of love" if you think of the old saying about letting someone go), but the other end of the scale is an "I can't live without that person!" thing, which would mean suicide. The only feasible reason that the result of intense positive emotion might be murder of the object of that emotion would be if the murder was mentally ill. In which case, the can of worms is "we should get him psychiatric help, not punish him", and that's entirely different matter.

Agreed. If someone said they killed their lover because they loved him so much and couldn't bear to be without him, what I think they really mean is they couldn't bear someone else having him, which is more like jealousy and envy than love. Or it's something particularly demented like if the lover cannot have the loved one alive, keeping his corpse will also do.

Alternatively, the lover may threaten the loved one with murder in order to keep them.

edited 19th Oct '11 5:20:05 AM by betaalpha

What's crazy is this isn't just fiction. The case of Abe Sada popped in my head instantly. Even some serial killers said it was for love.

I'm sorry. I love my girlfriend to death. But I would never kill her to "keep her". She is a person. Not a possession.

So many people have already marked that this is not healthy love. This is obsession and mental.

"Oh wait. She doesn't have a... Forget what I said, don't catch the preggo. Just wear her hat." - Question Marc