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Originally Posted by RichardCoulter
Very good points.
If a 17 year old lad has sex with his 15 year old girlfriend in the UK he's (incorrectly) labelled a paedophile.
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No he isn't, he's labeled a sex offender, if his 'crime' is investigated at all
---------- Post added at 23:57 ---------- Previous post was at 23:49 ----------
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Originally Posted by Chris
Fun fact: only one of the three principal charges (“crimes against peace”) levelled against senior members of the Nazi Party after the war had any basis in pre-existing international treaties. The other two, namely “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” were in effect presented as self-evidently unacceptable behaviour. The ethical basis for this was Natural Law, a system developed by a medieval theologian called Thomas Aquinas.
At the conclusion of the Nuremberg Trials, 12 people were convicted of, and executed for, these crimes, and the concept of “war crimes” remains potent to this present day, regardless of whether or not there is a governing treaty in operation. Appealing to Natural Law might have been an expedient way of dealing with those who had set Europe alight but their legacy has been to elevate the concept of virtue ethics, particularly in international law. Thomas drew a primary precept from his ethical system, which is that good must be pursued and done and evil must be avoided. He believed that the system could work because humans are rational beings. In effect, there will always be enough rational people available to judge whether good or evil is being done in a particular situation.
In a virtue-ethics system the question of “who is more evil?” becomes a secondary concern. The system is very much focused on whether behaviour is virtuous or not, as rationally judged by those who govern the system, not on whether the perpetrator of an act believed their actions to be good or evil. To bring it back round to the Nazis (and therefore also prematurely to fulfil Godwin’s Law); Hitler and his closest circle undoubtedly believed that they had right on their side and that they were correcting historic injustices against their people. Yet they are arguably the best example of pure evil in recent human history. To argue whether they were less evil than someone who believed they were in the wrong but went ahead anyway seems to be missing the point somewhat.
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Nuremberg was tainted for me by the deals done, it should have been above side deals for super powers considering the enormity of what happened. Interesting about Thomas Aquinas though, a name I'd not heard for decades