Thought Experiment: Pseudo-Death-Note and the Nature of Justice

The Death Note is perhaps the most intriguing hypothetical magical item since the Ring of Gyges in terms of stimulating moral consideration and argument, but in its original treatment it became so bogged down with rules and extraneous considerations that the powerful concept was obscured. So here is a "new" scenario for us to mull over, argue about, and all else. Scenario Concept A magical artifact granting the power to kill people efficiently and without leaving obvious traces has come into your possession. It is an otherwise unremarkable ivory ring which is activated when the wearer holds a person's face in mind and says, "I set the doom of death upon [name]." At the wearer's discretion, they may continue with, "May it come as I declare: [description of the death]." Circumstances and Origin The ring has come into your possession as if by chance, and nothing definitively suggests that it was meant for you in particular. For an explanation you have only strange, murky dreams in which it is intimated to you that "powers beyond," long-gridlocked in debate over moral philosophy, have finally decided to bestow this "gift" on a human decision maker and observe the outcome. You sense that if you share, give away, or attempt to destroy the ring it will not offend the Bestowers. You sense that this is the only ring now in existence. The dreams tell you nothing about souls, the afterlife, or whether people come to any sort of judgement on death; you cannot even ascertain whether the Bestowers know the answers to these questions. Apart from this and the rules below, you find you can glean nothing from the dreams or the Bestowers. Rules and Clarifications - The doom of death is irrevocable once pronounced. The human whose name is spoken shall die within a month's time at most or sooner if the user describes it so. - In practice, the ring seems to "plug the holes" in the ordinary ways that people avoid death on a daily basis so as to make death 100% likely but without offering any preserving effect, even in the short term. So, for example, if the user were to pronounce death upon themselves in 30 days, they would be no less likely to die in a car accident before that time than they were previously, and if they started driving more recklessly their odds of a car accident death would increase in the ordinary way. The ring shortens and caps expected lifespans; it neither extends nor safeguards them. - An older pronouncement can be overwritten by a newer pronouncement only if the newer death should come sooner than the older one; otherwise, the wearer's voice will falter and they will be unable to complete the description. - The power of the ring is in bringing death, not in determining details. The description the user provides is a suggestion at best, and the more precise and full of unlikely incidents it is, the more the user should expect that the final outcome won't look exactly how they described or imagined it. If they describe a traffic accident in which the victim's motorcycle blows up and their body does 7 flips in the air before landing, it may well be that they actually just kind of tumble over the handlebars; critically, the user can't know the exact resemblance to the description before the death occurs. The vaguer the description, the more reliably it will come to pass. - Controlling human behavior is especially unreliable, and the result conforms to the limits of knowledge, character, motivations, and social norms. Even if the user describes that a victim falls into insanity, their behavior does not become highly predictable. Some Questions to Stimulate Discussion - Would you make use of the ring? If so, how? - Would you share it with anyone? Why or why not? Would you involve anyone else for the sake of oversight? - How would your use or non-use of the ring reflect your ideas about the nature of Justice? Do you think you could remain true to your convictions with time? - How would you handle the issue of succession? After all, everyone dies eventually...

>>45851 I'd try to create a global culture superstitiously attenuated to my vision. practicals But, I'd only kill outspoken public figures for their beliefs. Why? Because if I killed people by some proxy like "was arrested for murder" then I've outsourced part of my morality to a mechanism that I don't control. It could manipulate me to kill people who don't deserve it. It's imperative that I don't give them the idea to even think about it being anything other than a natural omniscient curse. If the powers that be figure out that there is some news-watcher with deniable god-tier assassination powers, they're going to move all the evil into the shadows and I'll be stuck killing goofball Emma Watson because she was namedropped in the panama pandora papers or whatever. I'd kill politicians that I don't like because blah blah blah ideals blah principles, but I'd do it slowly enough that people have time to notice but it floats on the edge of perception. Mostly it just fuels conspiracy theorists, so there's a chart that shows this type of politician started dying faster and faster in 2025 and it flattened out in 2028. The mainstream theory becomes that somehow people of one political persuasion developed psychic powers and are accidentally killing politicians who make them angry. Also, I only kill the true believers that are actually smart. Psychopaths and retards get a pass, because I want my enemies to be represented by fools and scandals-in-waiting. (and there are too many of these in the organizations that agree with me, it would just be way too obvious to cull all of them) Then I see a meme on the internet and I change my opinion on something I've killed thousands of people for so I send them all for a loop and have to kill the other politicians until they adapt. Sorrrrry..! what I want I think the clearest way to arrive at an interesting world where I don't want to kill everyone because its so boring and painful all the time is to enable the creation of new sovereign states and promote the elaborate synthesis of new experimental cultures as ethical. I want to see city states that are deliberately isolated from the outside world, because the mere presence of the vast real world would fragment their culture. I want to see the birth of cultures from a primitive form. I want for us to spy on them with cheap cameras hidden in foreign wares and drones hidden in the sky. I want to see an entire culture of made of only women who don't even know that men exist, and they think they're the only intelligent beings on the planet after a generation ship crash landed. I'd really like to have a foreign girlfriend who is very surprised and confused when I explain what I have in my pants hehehe. A smart phone, wow isn't it shiny? Uh, and I'd like to see what kinds of alphabets and languages people generate naturally. What the first generation of myths look like. Currently, there aren't that many people who would support this kind of thing. But, I can apply whatever slow pressure I have across the entire world, and I have my entire lifetime to let it cook. How could I make secession feasible? I guess kill the rivals of whatever politicians can be a little secessionist around the world. Maybe Texas and Cali can't secede for economic reasons, but get re-categorized as a sort of semi-privileged non-state territory. They are part of USA trade deals and stuff, but the federal government has no jurisdiction in their territory without direct permission. No voting rights if you reside there, but there are citizenship treaties of a sort. I don't know if there is any semi-feasible but boring secession being pioneered anywhere else in the world. Quebec? The thing is it needs to be desired but uncontroversial. Deeply desired, hotly contested stuff like Catalonia or Kurdistan won't prove anything new. It needs to be shown that a smaller partition of sovereignty doesn't have to cause total economic chaos. Maybe it could be stimulus make-work for the lawyers and office workers to patch up all the issues if the economy is kicking dead whales down the beach anyway. I'm not sure how to advance from enabling microstates to enabling experimental cultures, which I think are probably classed as crimes against humanity or something. successor I have no clue how to make friends but I guess it will be more important now. Once I'm dead I won't benefit from making the world more interesting, but it would be a little shame if my bro successor screwed up the trajectory just because he starting selling his assassination power on darknet prediction markets so he could afford to hire models as live-in maids on 9 month retainer, not that I would blame him from the grave.

I'd use the death note on my opps. ngl this feels like a repost of the death penalty thread posted last month. u have my respect for making an effortful post (unless this is copypasta) about it but like why do u want to kill ppl so badly bro can't you play a shooting game or something. also the death note is fine for a thought experiment, you don't need to make a new version with the exact same rules thats just a ring instead, especially when announcing its a death note, whatever cultural ideas people built up about it will still be transferred if its just like the death note and you announce its a new version anyway.

>>45853 I confess that I wasn't aware of the death penalty thread. Still, I think people react differently when considering the case of great power being given to them personally without oversight. And yeah, the rule modifications seem pointless on the face of it, but I've seen many takes on the Death Note debate and they tend to cluster between thoughtless posters and thoughtful posters who get stuck on a number of precise points from the original work that kind of get in the way of the "it's a thing that kills people" concept, not the least of which is the mind control function being arguably more powerful than the killing function. This is my (imperfect, I'm sure) attempt at patching those issues. That said, I hope not to have to fend off further criticisms of the OP. Culture is drowning in criticisms, Lain, to the detriment of the spontaneous; play the game by the rules that are set and we'll have a chance at fun. The form of my OP is "like a finger pointing to the moon...focus on the finger, and you'll miss out on all that heavenly glory."

>>45853 >ngl this feels like a repost of the death penalty thread posted last month nah this one is very different, emphasis is on implementation of a practical program for moral reform (or lack thereof), not on the morality of state-killings >why do u want to kill ppl so badly bro can't you play a shooting game or something op says "here have this toy kill people or don't" you read "i wanna shoot up a mall" something something projecting i like this thread OP, i hope it gets more posts.

My first instinct would be self-doubt "ahahah silly old me is being superstitious" so I would probably use it just to confirm that it DOESN'T work. Then I would panic when it did in fact work. At that point there is a 50% chance I would immediately destroy it in my panic. If I didn't then I would probably hide it away for a long time to give myself time to make up my mind about if and how to use it. I might actually come to see it as my duty to use it and use it well and decide to pursue a philosophy degree to make sure I do things right.

>>45856 >>45854 yeah youre right, its much better than the death penalty thread, imo its the thread we should have had instead. the rule modifications make sense too when u put it that way, i think the original death note was like that for the >intrigue of the show originally

I see we're getting off to a slow start. Here's a little more food for thought, a striking example of rhetoric pertaining to a highly-controversial topic, that being the use of the guillotine in the French Revolution. While I don't know whether he actually uttered anything like these exact words, Saint-Just can easily be considered the historical prototype of Yagami Light, an extremely...idealistic young man who rose quickly to extreme power, put many to death for his ideals, and then abruptly died by the same instrument. The Speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i45Y4Hf_so8

I think maybe when you're a kid seeing Death Note for the first time there's something liberating about the "kill anybody and get away with it" fantasy, so it's interesting to think about. But now that I'm older I feel the weight of it more and find myself agreeing with Soichiro that receiving a power like that would be akin to a curse.