Death is not unilateral. It's not something that one person experiences the same way as others. When someone dies, they're dead—death isn't important to the person who died. It's only important to the people who are still alive. This might seem obvious, but I think we need to be way more careful about how we talk about death and what it means.
Here's what I think people are missing: there's a huge difference between murder (the deliberate action of taking someone's life) and death (the social consequences and reality that exists in the world after someone has died). These are two completely separate things, and you can have different moral positions on each.
Murder is simple—it's an action taken in a moment. Death is complex—it's this sprawling web of consequences, memories, conversations, and social changes that unfold over time.
I believe murder is always morally wrong. Taking someone's life means depriving them of basic fundamental human rights—their agency in the world, their ability to act, to grow, to potentially become better. I think all life has capacity for good, even lives that have been used for bad. People deserve second chances.
Should we be able to remove dangerous people from society? Absolutely. Should we silence voices that spread hate and misinformation? Yes. But through imprisonment, through removing platforms, through legal consequences—not through killing.
When you kill someone, you take on that moral responsibility. Once a combatant is down, once they can't hurt anyone, they're still people. They still deserve to communicate with loved ones, to practice their religion, to eat, to exist—even if they've forfeited their right to a public platform.
Here's where it gets complicated, and where I think people lose the thread: you can condemn the act of murder while acknowledging that someone's death had positive impacts on the world.
You can be against the murder but recognize that the death had positive consequences. These are separate evaluations.
People are morally lazy. They want simple answers because complexity is hard to communicate and harder to hold in your head. But when you reduce this complexity—when you roll murder and death together into one moral judgment—you accidentally corrupt your own ethical framework.
Either people say "death and murder are always bad" or "death and murder can be justified," but you can actually have nuanced positions: murder is bad, but some deaths can have positive social consequences that we should capitalize on.
When someone influential who spreads hate dies, you're dealing with multiple layers:
1. The moral evaluation of the killing: Was this action justified? (My answer: no)
2. The consequences of their death: What does their absence mean for the world? (Could be positive)
3. How to respond to those consequences: How do we capitalize on this moment for good?
You can feel bad about the moral action while being celebratory that harmful ideas are no longer being spread. You can condemn the method while working with the reality you're left with.
Whether you agree with how it happened or not, death is powerful. It affects people, starts conversations, changes landscapes. When someone dies—especially someone influential—it creates a moment that demands response.
If you believe the death creates positive change, you need to capitalize on that. If you believe it creates negative consequences, you need to address those. But pretending deaths don't have social consequences, or refusing to engage with those consequences because you disagree with the method, is a waste of that person's life and the moment their death created.
You can be pro-death and anti-killing. You can celebrate that someone's harmful influence is gone while condemning how it ended. You can work with the positive consequences of a death while maintaining that murder was the wrong approach.
But you have to be clear about which thing you're talking about. Are you discussing the moral justifiability of taking someone's life? Or are you discussing how to respond to the reality that someone is now dead and the world has changed?
These conversations require different frameworks, different considerations, and different responses. Mixing them up doesn't make you morally pure—it makes you morally unclear, and that helps nobody.
Published: September 12, 2025