Edit: I intentionally put "bad people" in the title in order to provoke. ๐
If you don't know what I'm talking about:
Black Mirror - Hated in the Nation
I'm not sure how to limit the scope of this discussion, since it touches upon so many areas of morale:
- the value of life
- the right to kill
- vengeance/revenge
- crime
- good and evil
So I encourage you to be articulate and to follow some structure: "what(thesis) - why(evidence) - what (thesis)". Other easy to follow variations, such as "why(background + evidence) - what(thesis)" or "what - why - what - by the way(discussion)" or just a simple "what" are of course good too. I'm not trying exclude comments, and I won't, just encouraging an easy to read discussion. As for me:
I would not kill using a Death Note, unless for some utterly personal vendetta. I would also not kill those that did, if we were talking about some sort of society wide phenomenon. I believe that taking action against human life on the macro scale, such as a nation state against another or such as one confined justice system against one of its subjects (state versus an individual, for instance) or in the fictive case of the above mentioned media, is wrong. This is because I don't believe it right to through politics or legislation qualify or quantify the value of a human life, such as is done in jurisdictions that allow capital punishment. While I'm against such "marco actions" on human life, I for some reason have less of a problem empathizing with the individual victims involved, which is to say, I don't think I'd rage against, say, a grieving mother avenging her murdered child by killing the murderer. But then again, not all individuals have the ability or the capacity to exact revenge and maybe they have to rely on their nation state for some kind of restitution? My opinion is probably logical mess, full of contradictions, but there it is. Feel free to poke holes, in a kind manner!
I'm saying in the scenario where I don't have the death note but live in a world where the corrupt powerful keep dropping dead when their corruption is publicized, that a person with good intentions can be tricked into doing bad things.
There are reasonable philosophies that would say something like, "Even a court shouldn't decide who should die because of the gravity of making a mistake." Then that's compounded for an individual, added to the problem that they weren't accountable to anyone else in the society on where the line is in the first place.
That said, it's a hell of an opportunity to pass up, and I thunk it might be more evil to pass on the chance than to fuck up along the way. That said, I'd decide the set I needed to write in advance, then the last name would be my own with instructions to deliver a public confession and apology, because that's just the kind of gravity we're dealing with and the only way to accept accountability.
Hell... I'd have to very seriously consider just writing the name of EVERY legacy economic or political powerhouse everywhere, wipe whole bloodlines off the map so the money doesn't have anywhere to go but back into the nation, and see if society can heal with the reset. That seems well into obvious supervillain territory, and I don't think my life would be nearly enough to atone for it, but it'd be cathartic as fuck.