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I interpreted the parent to that assume his hypothetical individual is advocating for the murder of some people for what they believes to be good reasons, since

I interpreted the parent to that assume his hypothetical individual is advocating for the murder of some people for what they believes to be good reasons, since nobody short of the mentally ill will actually ask for random people to be killed for literally no reason. I can list 10 people that the world would be better without — the likes of Kim Jong-un and Ayman al-Zawahiri. That's not too different from wishing for their death. Plausibly we can discuss whether it's a good idea for them to be assassinated, and whether the power vacuum would just cause another worse despot to replace them. So it seems quite conceivable to me that a discussion could be had about the reasons, feasibility, ethics or geopolitical implications, or about why they believe that someone does or does not deserve killing.

JohnBooty 6y ago
There could certainly be many scenarios where killing somebody might make ethical sense - self defense, the "Trolley problem", etc. I meant to describe a situation decidedly not of that nature. Imagine our friend wants to kill ten people for no remotely defensible reason. Perhaps our hypothetically murderous friend is high on hypothetical PCP and is clearly suffering some kind of psychotic breakdown.
- imperfect_blue 6y ago
  ...then it's great that at least they're talking about it on some forum, giving us a chance to persuade them otherwise and to call the police. If we didn't have such a forum, they might already have started their murder spree.