Sorry for a late reply, it took me a while to read the article.
As far as I can tell from it he was a habitual abuser and his death is not a loss for society, quite the opposite.
One thing people struggle with is the idea that every life has infinite value. That is obviously nonsense. Then they say every life has a very high value and it's the same for every person. That is also nonsense - if you get attacked by two people, do you have the right to kill them both in self-defense? Yeah, because their 2 lives are less valuable than your 1 life.
Most importantly, value to whom? To the person whose life it is, it is indeed very high. Than there's the family, friends, acquaintances, state, society and humanity at large. And to each of those groups, the value is different. The key realization is that to some of those groups, the value can be negative, very negative in fact.
Every dictator is no doubt loved by his friends (especially those who get privileged positions from him) so his value to his friends is very high but to his society, the value is often negative.
This particular abuser is interesting because his life had a negative value to both his daughters and society/humanity. But he still has family members willing to protect him because his life had positive value to them. This is sad, if he was my family member, I would not protect him. But a lot of people put family before morality - they are genetically predisposed to do so, even if it's detrimental to humanity at large.
> Morality doesn’t flow downstream from legality, but the other way around: legality is downstream of morality.
No, that's how it should be. Sadly, legality is downstream of morality + practicality + provability.
Morality because if the law is too unjust, people revolt.
Practicality because it's practical for the people in power to make laws in their favor and because too much morality makes for a weaker state - too many people end up in prison instead of being economically productive.
And provability because even though morality operates on reality (it depends on the actual truth), legality requires proof to dispense punishment. This is one reason why the idea of an all knowing god is so tempting - you can cross provability off the board because the god will dispense punishment based on the actual truth.
> The fact that they faked injuries in order to present themselves as victims is especially concerning, but considering their father’s connections in the police department, I think they feared retaliation even after their abuser was killed.
Exactly. Lying and manipulation are not wrong on its own. They are multipliers. If the goal is good and you used them to achieve it, nothing wrong happened. However, I generally see them as massive red flags because although they are tools good people should absolutely use, they should be used as a last resort and people who reach for them too early generally do so out of habit which basically revels their true nature.
> The cycle of violence
I hate this term. WW2 axis was destroyed through overwhelming violence. There was no cycle because the good violence was so thoroughly the bad people were all either dead, soon to be executed or no longer had power to continue it (or decided to play innocent victim and keeping them alive was _practical_ in the case of the Japanese emperor).
> Hurt people hurt people.
There is some truth to this but I feel like this happens because we don't allow victims to fight back and perform the punishment themselves. People who were wronged want to hurt the aggressor but that person is usually untouchable by them (otherwise he wouldn't dare wrong them in the first place). So the anger ends bottled up inside them and ends up hurting others.
This is why I hate this celebration of victim hood and the idea that the victim has to be defenseless and ask others for help. We should not just let but encourage people to fight back.
I am on the side of justice, through the justice system, because I think that it is a social good to see injustice brought, well, to justice. In the moment, judgement calls are sometimes necessary, but this is not ideal, as it legitimizes self-help justice, which is fraught with issues of standing, proportionality, and reprisal. Once vigilantism begins, there may be no end to it. Just ask the Hatfields and the McCoys.
Justice is a social good, but not an unqualified good; there are failures to convict and miscarriages of justice. My heart goes out to those who have no escape from injustice or legal avenue to rectify illegal acts. But at the same time, these women are expected to just walk away from their abuser, the very same man who raised them, indoctrinated them, to be his subordinate and subservient playthings. They were set up to fail to protect their own best interests in favor of their father’s whims and fancies. That doesn’t excuse or justify their behavior, but it does situate it in a context of ongoing violence, trauma, and lawlessness under the same roof as their captor, so I can see why they were not able to seek justice through the proper channels. They had no way of conceiving of a future world free of their father’s will, and so all hopes rang hollow, a bell their father rang as surely as Pavlov himself.
Vigilantism is doubling down on bad behavior and hoping the house doesn’t win when the chips are down and we’re going for broke. It’s a flawed strategy for bettors to gain leverage over their supposed betters. I don’t find that self-help is a strategy for a stable society, because it engenders an unstable equilibrium that favors those already willing to dispense violence contrary to the interests of the community and the justice system. The girls are not hardened criminals, but their actions give cover to those who are, by pointing out the flaws in the legitimate monopoly on violence that the state holds. I am rather in favor of correcting the shortcomings and failure modes of the justice system itself so that victims need never take matters into their own hands in the first place, because that way lies madness and corruption.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and bad actors run roughshod over the little people as a matter of course. We ought to do better for each other, as that is what society is. I only hope that the girls are able to be freed, and that their actions are viewed in a light that accommodates the long shadow cast by the long arm of the law they lived under, the same arm that should have defended them from their own father, but did not.
Lately, I've come to hate this phrase. It's the legal system, not justice system.[0] One reason is that legality is limited by provability - the people working for the legal system, even if they intended to serve justice in full, are limited by uncertainty so they must only punish when proof is sufficient. Another reason is that they don't serve justice but the law which in turn is written by people who benefit greatly from leniency (especially for crimes which rich and powerful people tend to commit, such as property crimes and rape) and from generally making the system of laws a maze (so that rich people who can afford better layers, such as themselves, are more likely to get the results they want).
> issues of standing
This is related to how I earlier said only people who have sufficient standard of proof of what happened can morally punish the aggressor. But if a random stranger sees a rape, I have no issue with him killing the rapist, whether in the act or after. IT does not matter whether he was harmed himself or not.
In this particular example it also protects people genuinely defending themselves (killing aggressors during, not after, the act) from being too good at it and getting charged with murder because they kept defending themselves after the aggressor was no longer a threat. These cases make me angry because they reveal another double standard. Soldiers are trained by the state to confirm kills (which is a euphemism not for checking pulse but shooting even seemingly dead enemies in the head or chest from close range). But people are not legally allowed to confirm their kills in self-defense. Why? Because in war, it's the state's existence on the line. In self-defense, the state could not care less.
> proportionality
Valid, but as long as the victim chooses a proportional punishment, nothing wrong with that.
> reprisal
This is another argument I don't like. Basically the state says "we punish you for carrying out punishment yourself instead of leaving it to us to protect you (from the initial aggressor's friends)". IMO, anybody has the right to take the risk, it's not the state's business whether people harm themselves directly (suicide used to be illegal in the west and still is in some countries) or indirectly (through causing reprisal as you said).
> Once vigilantism begins, there may be no end to it. Just ask the Hatfields and the McCoys.
I think we should differentiate vigilantism and one-off cases. Nothing wrong with one off cases. Vigilantes OTOH are sometimes people who enjoy hurting others and are simply looking for someone who is socially acceptable to hurt: https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/21/i-am-thirty-eight-years-old/
BTW, reading the sequence of events, I couldn't help but feel like they were both groups of people who went out of their way to attack each other even if justice would have been served legally. Basically bad people taking each other out. I felt quite validated in that opinion when I got to the Genetic disease section.
> That doesn’t excuse or justify their behavior
I think it does exactly that. Even legally, it was clearly self-defense - he wouldn't have stopped if he wasn't killed. They couldn't even flee - he extorted his wife to return to him, he was likely to do the same to them.
And morally, it's even more clear cut. If at any point his aggression reached a level which justified death as proportional punishment (which it did), then he kept being deserving of that punishment until, well, punished.
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[0]: Well, _a_ legal system because there's plenty of them, different ones, and there's only one justice which does not depend on lines drawn on a map. So even if one legal system was the justice system, the others wouldn't.
> But if a random stranger sees a rape, I have no issue with him killing the rapist, whether in the act or after. IT does not matter whether he was harmed himself or not.
I take issue with this as an innocent bystander, because I don’t know what you know if the transgression happened previously to me happening upon you killing them. This is traumatic and would lead me to believe you are the aggressor, because you’re going off half cocked. You seem like a well meaning unstable person. I don’t feel safer by having you around. I don’t find your actions reasonable or predictable because you are acting as judge, jury, and executioner.
Victims deserve justice, not summary judgement administered on their behalf. It’s not your place to do this if you didn’t see it happening in front of you, and even if you did, you have no right to take a life when one is not at risk. Please don’t use my post to advocate for violence, which you have been doing all thread. If you harm me or mine in your reckless pursuit of misguided justice, I will hold you personally responsible and will prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law.
You’re not a good person in my moral estimation. Please consider that you can be honestly mistaken. You could even be a victim of a psyop, where folks posing as victims agitate others around you and themselves, just so that they can run to you and claim victimhood, knowing you would strike first and ask questions later or never. Your moral theory doesn’t account for bad actors posing as victims so that you will white knight on their behalf, essentially outsourcing their own violence to you under false auspices.
What’s more, you may hurt innocent bystanders physically, emotionally, or psychologically by dispensing violence in their presence, regardless of whether the violence is justified or not. That is on you. You’re not qualified to do so. You don’t have standing to intervene unless you have a reasonable likelihood of knowing the facts of the matter, and your words in this thread lead me to believe you aren’t a reasonable person to be around.
> And morally, it's even more clear cut. If at any point his aggression reached a level which justified death as proportional punishment (which it did), then he kept being deserving of that punishment until, well, punished.
You are right that they deserve punishment all the same, but once the moment has passed, the punishment is not the victim’s to dispense. In fact, it is a crime to act with intent to harm or kill unless you are defending yourself against clear and present danger. This disqualifies past acts of violence against the victim, as the danger is not precipitous, and so the response need not be either. If you killed someone in front of me and then said that you are justified because they killed your mom yesterday, I am going to remove myself from your life and report you to the authorities for premeditated murder.
You don’t know how any of this works, because you think two wrongs make a right.
This might seem harsh or personal, but I don’t mean to direct this entirely at you, or even a little bit, but at the collective you, at your argument, and the logical and illogical conclusions that believing as you do can lead you to arrive upon.
What I mean is this: self-help justice just doesn’t work. You will likely not be seen to be a good actor in the moment due to others not knowing what you know, nor can you count on them to share your opinion on proper interventions in exigent circumstances then or after the dust settles.
You can be right or wrong, but I care about you. I hope that comes across. I don’t want you to suffer injustice, nor do I want you to intervene in such a way that now we have two or more problems instead of one fewer or none at all.
I don’t want you to be dead wrong, or even dead right. I want you to live to fight another day, and I want you to need never raise arms against another, especially for cause. It’s not fair, but that’s life. Discretion is the better part of valor. Self-help justice is the tail wagging the dog.
I have been in a position to engage in the very actions you advise or advocate for, arguably for cause, and I had to actively engage in principled inaction instead, and I only narrowly avoided ruin despite my best efforts. I literally have done nothing wrong, and still been found fault with until others could properly adjudicate wrongdoing, and found me concomitantly lacking in culpability. I know whereof I speak.
If you find yourself in a position to decide whether you must engage in self-help justice, I will trust your judgement on the matter, but I may also stand in judgement of you all the same after the fact. I myself ought to have asked for help sooner than I did in an unforeseeable interpersonal emergency I was unable to set right despite my best efforts. I’ve been to the brink, came back, and got the tshirt.
I don't buy this. "Get help" is a well-known gaslighting tactic used by abusers to discredit their target. It does not make sense in a "generic" sense.
> You will likely not be seen to be a good actor in the moment due to others not knowing what you know, nor can you count on them to share your opinion on proper interventions in exigent circumstances then or after the dust settles.
Of course, because the others don't have the same standard of proof, until and unless I also provide it.
This is why I talk about provability vs reality.
All I am saying is if the state or anybody else gets involved it has to take previous actions into account.
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People seem to get uncomfortable when talking about killing so let's talk about stealing instead.
This is the same as the right to steal back. It's very common for police to not investigate theft. It's also common for people to put GPS trackers in their bikes or tracking SW in their electronics, exactly for this case. But sometimes when people steal their property back (again, assuming they have sufficient proof it's the same item, not just the same model), it happens that the original thief then tries using the police against them. This is wrong. The law should match morality, when something is mine, it's still mine even if it's currently in a thief's possession, and I have the right to use my property as I see fit.
And of course, it gets more complicated if the thief managed to resell it in the meanwhile and we can discuss how to maximize justice given uncertainly and lack of provability for all parties involved. But that requires not rejecting the idea in the first place based on "it's complicated".
> nor do I want you to intervene in such a way that now we have two or more problems
This reads as concern trolling. I am well-aware of the potential for confusion of aggressor and victim. it's the hardest part of true justice. Aggressors always have the same tools as victims.
That's why I am not saying people should go out and do the morally right thing now (as you say advocating violence), I am instead saying we should figure out better rules for how to resolve the situations given each party's imperfect information and the law should chance to align with morality.
> I don't buy this. "Get help" is a well-known gaslighting tactic used by abusers to discredit their target. It does not make sense in a "generic" sense.
Get help in your pursuit of justice, ideally with the help of law enforcement. If not, from a neutral third party. If not still, then from a trusted friend or family member.
You can't go it alone, as then it's just your word against theirs if the shit hits the fan, and if you can foresee issues beforehand, you ought to plan to not lose your freedom, which is a distinct possibility when engaging in self-help outside or even in accordance with the justice system. If you don't, and things go sideways, now you have 2+ problems.
I mean you as much as anyone who reads this, as my advice is applicable to whoever reads this, and it is not personal to you. However, I think you especially could benefit from taking it to heart.
> People seem to get uncomfortable when talking about killing so let's talk about stealing instead.
Let's not, because that's moving the goalposts.
I'm not uncomfortable talking about killing or death generally. I've seen people die, and I have rendered life-saving aid to avert certain death, both to folks who were innocent, and to folks who have done me harm in anger without cause or forewarning. Ironically, the person who did me no wrong died despite my best efforts, and the one who wronged me lived, perhaps only because I saved their life. I shared a drink with the blameless person, only for them to overindulge after I refused to drink further with them. They laid down in the recovery position in the next room, and were checked on multiple times, but not frequently enough to save them from themselves. They aspirated in their sleep, and even with CPR performed and paramedics arriving within moments, my roommate and I couldn't bring them out of it. The person who did me wrong struck me out of nowhere after drinking a pint of vodka. I shared a room with this person, and I told them to stop, they didn't, and then they tried to kick me out of my own room and started a ground and pound on top of me. I escaped and put them in a sleeper hold because they would not stop actively attacking me. They went limp, and I immediately stopped and checked their pulse, which was strong, and checked their breathing, which was not at all. I performed CPR and they came back around. I had already dialed 911 on my phone, and my finger was hovering over the call button. I was seconds away from getting help, because they did not deserve to die over their own demons. They had seen a different person die suddenly right in front of them in a freak gun discharge incident when being dumb with a gun that they thought wasn't loaded, and the person who attacked me developed alcohol abuse issues as a result. I may have been right to defend myself, but I would have missed out on all of the neutral and positive interactions I had with them afterwards, and I might have had legal issues if I had failed in my efforts to revive them after they stopped breathing, despite being well within my rights to do what I did.
I didn't want that. They were my friend, even when their wrong. That's what friends are for, to tell them they're wrong and to save them from themselves. It's not for you to say that I ought to want that for them or for me.
I'm true to my own sense of morality, and I expect you are too. I just find our moral sensibilities incompatible.
I don't think you know what you're talking about, because you don't speak as if you have been in a situation in which you have to make the kinds of decisions of which you speak. Maybe you have. Either way, it's fine to speak hypothetically, but I am not speaking hypothetically when I say that you don't want to be put in that situation for no (good) reason, and especially not for bad reasons.
Please don't take this personally. I am not personally sure why you care so much about this issue, but I think I have nothing more I can add to this exchange, so I wish you well in your endeavors.
Hate can't drive out hate, only love can do that. Let us beat swords into ploughshares.
Your argument boils down to state having the upper hand so you have to play by their rules. And that's the reality. That's why I described the difference between provability and reality.
You also seem to think that I am too quick to reach for violence when it's really the opposite. I hesitated or refused to act in situations I would be morally justified to hurt people in order to help others exactly because of being held hostage by the state.
You also kept making attempts to paint me as dangerous, despite not knowing me and despite everything I said pointing to the opposite direction. I don't start conflicts.
> Hate can't drive out hate, only love can do that.
There is a reason the first advice to people in abusive relationships is to get out instead of trying to change the abuser. People don't change when their toxic behavior is working for them. They change when they are forced to and sometimes not even then.
These slogans you keep posting are harmful.
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Finally, consider states have no higher "authority" above them and they are not constantly at war with each other. Most get along fine, with the leadership knowing that any aggression would be met with resistance, reprisal, retaliation and revenge. (Those that attack others overwhelmingly do so because they are controlled by people who are by their personal nature abusers and have too much control.)
I apologize if I have cast aspersions on you or your beliefs or actions. I don’t know you, but I know enough to respect you. I wish you well in all you do. I’m sorry if I have wasted your time, but for my part, I have enjoyed our conversation. God be with you.
Alright, so I read your story and I disagree with you even more now.
You had the system used against you and yet you still defend it. The system was specifically used against you by ignoring who initiated and escalated the conflict and by ignoring how other people have wronged you before you supposedly did anything you call wrong but not illegal.
See, you did nothing wrong.
You were wronged by the people in the house who initiated the conflict by cheating on you, by hiding a felon (assuming his offense was moral, not just legal), by attacking you physically and by refusing you access to your property (if you couldn't agree on temporary access to retrieve it, then a reasonable compromise would be to call the police to mediate the access, not to use against you).
You were wronged by the police by not letting you press charges.
And you were wronged by the state by setting up an inherently (due to imbalance of power) abusive system of plea deals.
And the reason none of them are concerned with harming you is because they know you have no way to fight back without overwhelming violence (the state) being used against you. It's the classic case of "might makes legal" (which I prefer to "might makes right" because the latter conflates legality and morality/justice.
The system needs to be changed so that:
1) You always have the right to fight back legally and punish people for harming you - e.g. police should absolutely be punished for doing their job poorly to this level of incompetence.
2) Failing that, you have the moral right to fight back against all three aggressors. Of course, as I said, overwhelming violence will be used against you. That's why people don't do it and that's I am not advising people to do it. I am saying they have the _moral_ right to and I wouldn't consider them doing anything wrong if they did (as we discussed earlier, assuming I had sufficient proof, not just taking their word for it).
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BTW by all 3, I literally mean all 3. People have the right to overthrow governments if those governments are sufficiently abusive. We could discuss where exactly the line lies. But nobody in the "free world" can defend a position that you always have to submit, especially given how many of today's democracies were created by overthrowing a previous (abusive) government.
Which is funny, many make it legal to celebrate events like the French revolution, the US war for independence, the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, etc. but at the same time make it illegal to call for their own overthrow or for assassinations of current politicians.
> I take issue with this as an innocent bystander, because I don’t know what you know if the transgression happened previously to me happening upon you killing them.
I cannot parse this sentence.
In any case, I say that when you have the right to use violence to stop an attack (you have sufficient proof and the violence is proportional), you should still have the right after the attack up to the point the attacker has been punished in some other way.
If you believe it matters who carries out a punishment (given the same standard of proof and proportionality), then you are the one who needs to justify yourself.
> Please don’t use my post to advocate for violence
The state is the single more prolific user of violence. By your advice, I would have to advocate against the existence of states.
> your reckless pursuit of misguided justice
You've been respectful up until this post but not anymore. You are just presuming things. How is anything reckless and misguided if I literally keep talking about needing (roughly) the same standard of proof as current courts?
> I will hold you personally responsible and will prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law
And now you are just threatening violence to me. Except you believe if you you a middleman it's somehow different.
> You’re not a good person in my moral estimation.
This is something that eventually comes up with religious people. I've been called wicked. "Moral estimation" surely _sounds_ more polite. You need to understand yourself - religious people, you included i believe, are fundamentally about submission. You seem to believe that somebody who has more power than you (state of god) also must know better than you. That is not the case.
> Please consider that you can be honestly mistaken.
I've been saying this the whole time.
> knowing you would strike first and ask questions later or never
Please re-read my previous posts. I literally said "only people who have sufficient standard of proof of what happened can morally punish the aggressor".
> Your moral theory doesn’t account for bad actors posing as victims
It does, this is exactly why I focus so much on the difference between reality and provability. States/courts have the same issue BTW.
> once the moment has passed, the punishment is not the victim’s to dispense
This is just a belief that you have been indoctrinated into.
These actions are generally supported by a large part of the public. (Though I don't know if majority.) This is because reciprocal justice is people's natural moral system before they are indoctrinated into submission to a "higher" "authority".
Interestingly the state punishes the good person in all of them with a sentence much smaller than it would otherwise be but it larger than symbolic. This reveals an issue with the legal system - it does not account for itself being wrong and people correcting the mistake because they simply couldn't tolerate the injustice.
> you think two wrongs make a right
No, I simply don't think a proportional sufficiently-justified response to a wrong is wrong.
As far as I can tell from it he was a habitual abuser and his death is not a loss for society, quite the opposite.
One thing people struggle with is the idea that every life has infinite value. That is obviously nonsense. Then they say every life has a very high value and it's the same for every person. That is also nonsense - if you get attacked by two people, do you have the right to kill them both in self-defense? Yeah, because their 2 lives are less valuable than your 1 life.
Most importantly, value to whom? To the person whose life it is, it is indeed very high. Than there's the family, friends, acquaintances, state, society and humanity at large. And to each of those groups, the value is different. The key realization is that to some of those groups, the value can be negative, very negative in fact.
Every dictator is no doubt loved by his friends (especially those who get privileged positions from him) so his value to his friends is very high but to his society, the value is often negative.
This particular abuser is interesting because his life had a negative value to both his daughters and society/humanity. But he still has family members willing to protect him because his life had positive value to them. This is sad, if he was my family member, I would not protect him. But a lot of people put family before morality - they are genetically predisposed to do so, even if it's detrimental to humanity at large.
> Morality doesn’t flow downstream from legality, but the other way around: legality is downstream of morality.
No, that's how it should be. Sadly, legality is downstream of morality + practicality + provability.
Morality because if the law is too unjust, people revolt.
Practicality because it's practical for the people in power to make laws in their favor and because too much morality makes for a weaker state - too many people end up in prison instead of being economically productive.
And provability because even though morality operates on reality (it depends on the actual truth), legality requires proof to dispense punishment. This is one reason why the idea of an all knowing god is so tempting - you can cross provability off the board because the god will dispense punishment based on the actual truth.
> The fact that they faked injuries in order to present themselves as victims is especially concerning, but considering their father’s connections in the police department, I think they feared retaliation even after their abuser was killed.
Exactly. Lying and manipulation are not wrong on its own. They are multipliers. If the goal is good and you used them to achieve it, nothing wrong happened. However, I generally see them as massive red flags because although they are tools good people should absolutely use, they should be used as a last resort and people who reach for them too early generally do so out of habit which basically revels their true nature.
> The cycle of violence
I hate this term. WW2 axis was destroyed through overwhelming violence. There was no cycle because the good violence was so thoroughly the bad people were all either dead, soon to be executed or no longer had power to continue it (or decided to play innocent victim and keeping them alive was _practical_ in the case of the Japanese emperor).
> Hurt people hurt people.
There is some truth to this but I feel like this happens because we don't allow victims to fight back and perform the punishment themselves. People who were wronged want to hurt the aggressor but that person is usually untouchable by them (otherwise he wouldn't dare wrong them in the first place). So the anger ends bottled up inside them and ends up hurting others.
This is why I hate this celebration of victim hood and the idea that the victim has to be defenseless and ask others for help. We should not just let but encourage people to fight back.